ALBERT

Description: This paper is intended to help librarians and archivists who are involved in digitization work choose optical character recognition (OCR) software. The paper provides an introduction to OCR software for digitization projects, and shares the method we developed for easily evaluating the effectiveness of OCR software on resources we are digitizing. We tested three major OCR programs (Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, Tesseract) for accuracy on three different digitized texts from our archives and special collections at the University of Western Ontario. Our test was divided into two parts: a word accuracy test (to determine how searchable the final documents were), and a test with a screen reader (to determine how accessible the final documents were). We share our findings from the tests and make recommendations for OCR work on digitized documents from archives and special collections.

Description: Some musings on the difficulty of wanting to know our users' secrets and simultaneously wanting to not know them.

Description: PA Digital is a Pennsylvania network that serves as the state’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The group developed a homegrown aggregation system in 2014, used to harvest digital collection records from contributing institutions, validate and transform their metadata, and deliver aggregated records to the DPLA. Since our initial launch, PA Digital has expanded significantly, harvesting from an increasing number of contributors with a variety of repository systems. With each new system, our highly customized aggregator software became more complex and difficult to maintain. By 2018, PA Digital staff had determined that a new solution was needed. From 2019 to 2021, a cross-functional team implemented a more flexible and scalable approach to metadata aggregation for PA Digital, using Apache Airflow for workflow management and Solr/Blacklight for internal metadata review. In this article, we will outline how we use this group of applications and the new workflows adopted, which afford our metadata specialists more autonomy to contribute directly to the ongoing development of the aggregator. We will discuss how this work fits into our broader sustainability planning as a network and how the team leveraged shared expertise to build a more stable approach to maintenance.

Description: Digital libraries at research universities make use of a wide range of unique tools to enable the sharing of eclectic sets of texts, images, audio, video, and other digital objects. Presenting these assorted local treasures to the world can be a challenge, since text is often siloed with text, images with images, and so on, such that per type, there may be separate user experiences in a variety of unique discovery interfaces. One common tool that has been developed in recent years to potentially unite them all is the Apache Solr index. Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries has harnessed Solr for internal indexing for repositories like DSpace, Fedora, and Avalon. Impressed by frameworks like Blacklight at peer institutions, TAMU Libraries wrote an analogous set of tools in Java, and thus was born SAGE, the Solr AGgregation Engine, with two primary functions: 1) aggregating Solr indices or “cores,” from various local sources, and 2) presenting search facility to the user in a discovery interface.

Description: DC Public Library has long held digital copies of the full run of local alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, but had no official status as a rights grantor to enable use. That recently changed due to a full agreement being reached with the publisher. One condition of that agreement, however, was that issues become available with usable descriptive metadata and subject access in time to celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of the publication, which at that time was in six months. One of the most time intensive tasks our metadata specialists work on is assigning description to digital objects. This paper details how we applied Python’s Natural Language Toolkit and OpenRefine’s reconciliation functions to the collection’s OCR text to simplify subject selection for staff with no background in programming.

Description: This paper reviews the main theoretical principles underlying the nascent field of decentralized justice and the early empirical experience in real life use cases. Part of the Blockchain & Procedural Law seminars (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law).〈div class="enclosure"〉〈/div〉

Description: At the end of 2019, the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) completed its fifth year as a campus-wide service. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the RDS in meeting the needs of Illinois researchers, RDS staff developed a five-year review consisting of a survey and a series of in-depth focus group interviews. As a result, our institutional data repository developed in-house by University Library IT staff, Illinois Data Bank, was recognized as the most useful service offering by our unit. When launched in 2016, storage resources and web servers for Illinois Data Bank and supporting systems were hosted on-premises at UIUC. As anticipated, researchers increasingly need to share large, and complex datasets. In a responsive effort to leverage the potentially more reliable, highly available, cost-effective, and scalable storage accessible to computation resources, we migrated our item bitstreams and web services to the cloud. Our efforts have met with success, but also with painful bumps along the way. This article describes how we supported data curation workflows through transitioning from on-premises to cloud resource hosting. It details our approaches to ingesting, curating, and offering access to dataset files up to 2TB in size--which may be archive type files (e.g., .zip or .tar) containing complex directory structures.

Description: We would like to announce that the latest issue of the Acta Geologica Slovaca Journal (Volume 13, Issue 2) has already been released at 19th December 2021.

Description: The presented comparative study evaluates the sensitivity of selected computational procedures to chosen parameters of solute transport and source geometry in homogeneous conditions. The computation procedures include three numerical schemes with FDI (finite difference implicit), MOC (method of characteristics), and a TVD (total variation diminishing) advection solver, while the other terms of the governing equation are computed by the FDI method. Furthermore, two analytical solutions were used: the exact solution of Newille (2005) and the approximate solution of Domenico (1987). Finally, a simplified, so-called Step-method, which is still being used in the practice, was used. The sensitivities of the individual procedures to selected physical-chemical parameters and to the geometric characteristics of the solute source were evaluated and compared. The obtained results show considerable differences between the particular procedures used. In most test cases, the numerical procedures with a TVD and MOC advection solver produced higher concentrations and were more sensitive to the transport parameters in comparison with the other methods used. Applied variations of individual parameter values caused a change of the calculated solute concentrations up to 7.1 %, whereas the substitution of calculation methods caused up to 7.7 % of C0 (the concentration in solute source). The simultaneous changes of all the examined parameter values with a synergistic effect caused the maximal change of calculated concentration up to 15.3 % of C0. A significant effect of the solute source geometry on the match between the results obtained by the selected numerical and analytical methods was also found (difference up to 57.9 % of C0). The achieved results indicate a need to solve the solute transport in homogeneous conditions using both types of calculation methods, the numerical and analytical, in order to cover possible variability of resulting concentrations. The simplified Step-method predominantly yields the lowest concentrations. At the same time, it is the least sensitive procedure to the selected parameters and can be used only for a reference point situated on the plume centerline. From a cautious point of view, it is the least suitable method for solute transport modelling among the compared methods.

Description: Presented research investigate the phenomenom of karstic area remarkable with specific karst landform, so-called covered karst. So far, not much attention has been paid to this particular type of karst in Slovakia, so the aim of the research is to bring new informations about it, especially about dolines formation and their origin. Study was focused on 50 dolines following the distinctive NE–SW line in the study area - the Cajla Karst located in the Malé Karpaty Mts., Slovakia. To understand the process of the formation of dolines in the covered karst and to distinguish the dolines from the pits resulted from anthropogenic processing via mining, several geophysical methods were adopted to prove the doline origin (soil radon emanometry, electric resistivity tomography and seismic refraction tomography). For identification of dolines and subsequent processing, the lidar data were used. The formation of studied dolines was controlled by lithological-tectonic properties of the bedrock, especially along the contact zone of karstic (Triassic carbonates) and non-karstic rocks composed of quartzite and crystalline basement. The resulting shape was also influenced by infiltration of surface water into the underground.