This paper describes several scenarios for the management of digital media, focusing on electronic publishing from mobile environments. The solution proposed in those scenarios is based on MIPAMS (Multimedia Information Protection And Management System), a service-oriented Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform, which enables the creation, registration and distribution of multimedia content in a secure way, respecting intellectual property rights. The particularity of the mobile scenario with respect to others is the limited capability of mobile devices. A specific use case has been identified for the mobile environment and a new system, based on MIPAMS, has been designed for the electronic publishing environment.

The paper investigates the use of mobile tools by museums in order to provide mobile access to their permanent collections and special exhibitions. In fact, it deals with the wider topic of how museums tackle the complex issue of communicating with their present and potential audience using modern (i.e., mobile in this case) technologies. The paper presents and discusses the results of a survey that was proposed to Dutch and Flemish museums mainly dealing with modern and contemporary art or with science and technology. We tried to derive some trends and best practices in order to identify a good way to provide an engaging (mobile) experience to museum visitors. These results, although not always stirring in terms of answer percentages and of what most museums seem to be doing with new media, do show a clear interest towards mobile technologies and openness to innovation in the Dutch cultural sector.

The first experience of remote education in Iran was started in 1970 by the Open University of Iran. In 1991, an e-learning site in Tehran University provided nine courses for students for the first time. Currently, the majority of Iran’s universities offer these courses. To benefit more from modern facilities and technology, recently some universities have attempted to use Mobile Learning (M-Learning) based education. One of the most important challenges which these universities encounter is the lack of digital information resources and the difficulty of preparing digital content in the Persian language. In this research, services related to M-Learning are considered along with technical impediments in the development of these services in Iran.

This study analyzes ACRLog (the ACRL Blog) by its content. Using the stratified random sampling technique, 277 posts were selected from a total of 991 posts sent to ACRLog from September 2005 to November 2010. These 277 posts are grouped by subject and by author’s status (academic, librarian). Differences in subjects by years and by authors are examined. In addition, word frequencies in the posts were calculated and the most used words and noun phrases determined. Differences in the use of these words and noun phrases by years and by authors are also analyzed.

With the rapid development of the mobile technology, the use of multifarious mobile devices, such as tablet PCs, eReader devices and mobile phones for electronic reading, has become an important part of everyday life. In December 2010, Google launched its Google eBookstore with more than 3 million e-books. The most significant feature of the new Google application is that it stores the book content in the cloud, which enables the reader to access the book content at any time on any mobile device in a seamless manner. A cloud-based eBook infrastructure has the characteristics of providing a vast amount of publication information, storing and processing the data in the cloud and displaying the results on demand on diverse desktops or mobile services. Taking into account the characteristics of a cloud-based eBook infrastructure, the paper examines the current eBook distribution lifecycle consisting of eBook publishing, cloud computing and mobile reading technologies. Potential features necessary for a cloud-based academic eBook infrastructure which will better support publishing, searching and reading on the web, as well as promote communication in the scientific community, are outlined.

It is important to collect and analyze the usage data of electronic databases and periodicals in order to make policies regarding the composition, improvement and more extensive utilization of electronic resources of libraries. The aim of this study is to investigate how efficiently the full text accessible electronic resources of Hacettepe University Libraries are used. For this purpose the usage data obtained from COUNTER Software regarding the electronic databases to which Hacettepe University Libraries subscribed in 2007 were examined. Full-text access to 13,270 journals within 13 electronic databases was found to be 585.843 in 2007. ScienceDirect is the most frequently used database, accounting for 56.1% of all accesses. Some 1,575 journals appear in more than one database and 2,912 journals were never used. A great part of the core journals identified by the Bradford Law are included in the ScienceDirect database.

Libraries have a unique role as a bridge between users and information containers. Currently, information containers usually consist of books, journals and electronic files. While the format of information containers changes over the years, the library’s role stays the same. As digital libraries proliferate, the classical library has a new role as information producer. In this paper, we discuss the EPUB format, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) as an open standard for e-books, and its use as a new information container format in libraries and digital libraries. Several different formats (e.g., .doc, .odf, .txt, .html, .DjVu) are used in digital libraries, but the EPUB format stands out as it has open file structure and is easy to produce and use. Because of its ease of use, mobile devices and e-book readers such as Kindle immediately started to support it. As EPUB is an open and free format, it enables publishers and digital libraries to publish license-free e-books. We review the EPUB format in this paper and show how to produce an EPUB file along with its use with digital library applications such as DSpace, EPrints and Greenstone.

From the teenager browsing the web in an Internet cafe in Istanbul, to the student in New York seeking inspiration for a dissertation, the Google Art Project aspires to connect more people to art. Initially developed by a group of Google employees as a side project, the project aims to make art more accessible to the masses through state of the art technology, and to remove physical barriers between the individual and the artwork. Far from preventing people from visiting the museums in person, this unrivalled access to art will encourage the Internet generation to interact with art in new ways and ultimately inspire them to visit the ‘real thing’. Starting with 17 museums, the Google Art Project aspires in the near future to create a variety of digital spaces where the new generation art lovers and art institutions will be brought together seamlessly.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Hiperkitap, the first and only Turkish e-book database in Turkey. The paper starts with a brief overview of the developmental stages of the e-book database under the local market conditions in Turkey. This developmental period includes the establishment of relationships with publishers, authors, the publishers’ association of Turkey, computer companies, information designers and librarians. Content provision under Turkish and E.U. copyright laws is a much debated issue in Turkey. Some 7500 books in Turkish from 220 Turkish publishing houses make this database attractive for local customers and also for foreign competitors. Rich content and up-to-date technology are long term strategic targets for this database. Mobile applications, mostly smart telephone applications, are determining the development policy of Hiperkitap today. This paper aims to be useful for understanding the social history of digital publishing and the e-book market in Turkey.

According to conventional wisdom we frequently hear that “new media” and new technologies are revolutionising the world we live in. By investigating these presumptions in this article, I am going to try to review different critical perspectives interpreting new media and question the distinction between new and old media through Bergson’s philosophical method in order to identify “false problems” and “false divisions” as well as different concepts that we encounter in the world of new media today. I will also investigate what’s new about new media by considering their contiguity with old media as well as re-evaluating the political connotations of terms such as “convergence” and “interactivity” which are regarded by many commentators as false problems within new media. In this article I shall explain why we should use the following terms: “remediation” and “intra-activity” as opposed to “convergence” and “interactivity”, respectively.

Public access to the World Wide Web became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and today documents are frequently published on the Internet. Open access (OA) to the scientific literature has been found to be increasing as more and more producers and publishers of scientific literature make their publications available free of charge on the Internet. The paper puts forward that it may be argued that only scholarly Internet documents that are retrievable through the search engine Google Scholar (GS) can be said to exist. The degree of coverage of GS is thus an important issue. The paper reports the results of a study of 159 journals in the field of Library and Information Science and their degree of coverage in GS. Journals publishing many issues a year are not found to be more retrievable than journals with fewer issues. Non-English and OA journals tend to have a lower degree of retrievability. The tendency is found to be even stronger for journals that are both OA and non-English. OA and non-English journals are very heterogeneous groups and the variation in their degree of retrievability is found to be much higher than in the case of traditional, toll-access journals, which resemble each other more in relation to retrievability.

People are ever busier, and increasingly want useful information in easily digested bite size pieces, delivered to them as efficiently as possible. The use of mobile devices combined with current and future information access and retrieval technologies can rejuvenate the publishers’ existing offerings as well as suggesting new ones. However, publishers cannot simply cut and paste content to fit the display constraints of a small device, and the opportunities of the mobile environment extend beyond the use of location. Individuals use mobiles in many aspects of their lives including work and leisure, and publishers need to be aware of the different orientations of users depending on their context of use. Mobile search has a distinctive nature which is different from traditional desktop-based searching. The success of digital publishing in the mobile environment will depend not only on the design and presentation of the underlying content, but also on nature and effectiveness of the mobile search facilities. Furthermore, in this more dynamic environment, there are many more circumstances of use and shifts in context, driven by links to the physical world and triggers within it.Information is a key part of our lives. However, the amount of available digital information continues to grow at a tremendous rate along with increasingly diverse forms of media and communication channels. To mitigate the effects of information overload, we need to create paths through the information space for users to navigate and manage their needs. The key enabler for this is to use context information. Context information provides an important basis for identifying and understanding people’s information needs. A key challenge is making more information accessible whilst also ensuring it is relevant and useful for users’ information needs. Context includes aspects of the situation, such as location, but can also include the user’s task, their environment, the device that they are using for accessing information, their personal interests, and their social interactions. Additional reasons for the importance of context include: timely delivery, better matching of user expectations and experience, and better potential for linking with advertising. This was evident in early work on personalization of web search and is increasingly clear for the mobile information environment. User studies are essential for designing and evaluating new products and methodologies that meet the needs of real users. It is important to test developed applications in naturalistic contexts and not to make only theoretical assumptions about users’ needs and activities. This presentation will argue that user studies should be conducted in a realistic way and will provide example applications from travel and tourism.The future of electronic media depends on refining our understanding of what constitutes the step-change in mobile usage and developing innovative applications to satisfy emerging needs.

The research described in this paper provides insights into tools and methods which are used by professional information workers to keep and to manage their personal information. A literature study was carried out on 23 scholarly papers and articles, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). The research questions were: How do information workers keep and manage their information sources? What aims do they have when building personal information collections? What problems do they experience with the use and management of their personal collections?The main conclusion from the literature is that professional information workers use different tools and approaches for personal information management, depending on their personal style, the types of information in their collections and the devices which they use for retrieval. The main problem that they experience is that of information fragmentation over different collections and different devices. These findings can provide input for improvement of information literacy curricula in Higher Education.It has been remarked that scholarly research and literature on Personal Information Management do not pay a lot of attention to the keeping and management of (bibliographic) data from external documentation. How people process the information from those sources and how this stimulates their personal learning, is completely overlooked.

This paper will describe the development of Institutional Repositories (IRs) in Irish third level institutions – starting with the development of stand-alone repositories in the mid 2000’s and the move later in that decade towards collaboration and resources sharing through the development of National Research Portals and also Learning Resource Portals. We will briefly look at the various institutional repositories in existence in Ireland and also National Portals such as RIAN which are helping to make Irish research more visible and accessible. Some important European Union initiatives will also be dealt with and finally we will look briefly at the NDLR – Ireland’s National Digital Learning Repository.

Thanks to the features of the mobile devices which have been constantly evolving, there has been a diversity of mobile applications. It is highly possible to find a mobile application to carry out any transaction in an application store. Users, whose expectations have been increasing, hope that libraries will be accessible and controllable. Hence, libraries should move towards mobile platforms so that users can easily get access to them. In this study, we first review the criteria that should be paid attention when designing mobile applications for iPhone and then describe the iPhone mobile application that we developed for Hacettepe University Libraries.

In this paper we describe a pipeline for publishing interactive multimedia content. The Portable Document Format (PDF) offers the possibility to include 3D visualizations, textual representation and interactivity (via scripting technology) in one multimedia container, which will be the upcoming standard for multimedia long-term archiving. Our system demonstrates its potential for surplus value eBooks. By the example of chess we developed a publishing pipeline to create interactive books. Usually, chess games and positions are recorded using the algebraic chess notation, which is mainly an annotated list of moves. In combination with a time-dependent 3D visualization, each move corresponds to a specific game position. This correspondence is encoded in hyperlinks from the textual representation to the 3D visualization. This linkage improves readability and usability of chess notations significantly. Furthermore, using an established file format our eBooks can be opened by any compliant PDF viewer.

The age of information retrieval (IR) system research is almost the same as that of digital computers. In 1945, a hypothetical hypertext-based personalized IR machine called Memex was described by Vannevar Bush in his famous Atlantic Monthly article. The Memex, a microfilm-based theoretical device, was designed to store and search all books, communications, and records a person had accumulated. During their long lives, IR systems have achieved great progress; they are much more surprising than the Memex. This progress comes from advances in computer science and engineering (CSE), information technologies (ITs), and innovations that happen by synergistic interaction of these fields. Discoveries in IR have not been as significant as those of the natural sciences. But on the other hand, IR studies, the efforts of many people, together with the advances in CSE and IT have drastically changed our lives. Change has occurred especially in the last two decades with the development of Web search engines, browsers, and related applications. IR systems were first based on mainframe computers and only accessible by a few number of specialists. After the invention of multi-user operating systems and terminal technology, they became accessible by many professional people at the same time. Then came inexpensive mass storage technologies, powerful PCs, the Internet and Web technologies; now ordinary people at any age can access almost any information (and perhaps too much information) from anywhere with a great speed. Now people feel the pressure of information glut and still cheerfully access information from their mobile devices. In other words, information that people need and don’t need is now as mobile as people themselves. Mobile IR systems bring many great opportunities to its users and even greater challenges to its researchers. Mobile IR research area overlaps with various research areas in CSE and ITs. Among others, these include augmented reality applications, computer networks, human-computer interfaces, information filtering, location-based services, machine translation, novelty detection, personal information management, and recommendation systems. Too much information, and the possibility of accessing one’s own knowledge base from anywhere at any time, bring the capabilities of current mobile information systems beyond the imagination of its builders. In this talk, I will consider the changes in IR systems by considering the questions of how, when, and why those changes occur? Emphasis will be given to mobile IR.

The rapid growth and proliferation of digital devices combined with cultural and technological changes suggests that in the near future we will see a deeply changed scenario in the publishing industry. Mobile technologies in the hands of a networked society should cause those players who wish to maintain a crucial role in the content industry, such as publishers and editors, to reconsider the way in which content is created, distributed, shared and consumed nowadays.

Organized by the Department of Information Management of Hacettepe University and hosted by Kadir Has University, the "15th International Conference on Electronic Publishing" (ELPUB2011) took place in _stanbul, Turkey, from 22-24 June 2011. The theme of the conference was “Digital Publishing and Mobile Technologies”. This was a most timely theme: the Horizon Report 2011 identified both electronic books (e-books) and mobiles as technologies to watch as they will likely shape our ways of working, learning, studying and entertainment in the immediate future (i.e., within the next 12 months) (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2011.pdf). Mobile devices (cell phones, iPads, and tablet PCs, among others) and e-books will also have a tremendous impact on how we communicate and collaborate with people, and access, share and generate information. Some 30 papers were submitted to ELPUB2011. All papers were subjected to a double-blind reviewing process and 20 full papers, and 4 workshop proposals were selected to be included in this proceedings book. Accepted papers come from 14 different countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, England, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, and USA) and address a number of issues dealing with, mobile access to digital cultural heritage, intelligent digital publishing software, mobile learning, institutional repositories, digital publishing tools, open access, and personal information management.

The paper presents some aspects of an ongoing project aimed at the development of technologies for digitization of Bulgarian folk music and building a heterogeneous digital library with Bulgarian folk songs presented with their music, notes and text. This digital library will provide both digital preservation of the sound recordings, lyrics and notations of Bulgarian folk songs and a possibility for new interpretations of the archaic Bulgarian folklore heritage. Some facilities of the search engine under development to implement various types of search and access to the library resources are analyzed in the paper. The emphasis of the discussion falls on the tool provided for semantic search in the lyrics of songs.

For an e-book to reach its maximum audience, it needs to be accessible on all modern reading devices in a consistent way. This work compares existing technology choices for publishing e-books for iPad and Android tablets. The research has been conducted in the context of Sophie, software for reading, writing, annotating and sharing networked books, with attention to the ongoing evolution of the software necessary to keep it relevant in a swiftly changing technology landscape. In particular, the article charts the development of the ability to create Sophie projects specifically for a new generation of mobile devices and tablets in support of a generation of students, scholars and publishers who expect easy collaboration, participation and interaction, and tools that allow for media-rich, mobile experiences.

Electronic journals are a new scenario for the Malaysian scholarly community. Thus, this paper presents the positive and negative impacts of the scenario. Currently, Malaysian universities are competing with each other to be in the list of top ranked world universities. To achieve the target, academicians are under pressure to become visible by publishing their works in journals indexed by various international databases. Hence, publishing research findings in e-journals has become compulsory among the Malaysian academics. The aim of this study is to identify the impact of electronic journals on the Malaysian scholarly community. Policies implemented by Malaysian universities pertaining to the rules for publishing works in electronic journals were studied. In addition, this study focuses on the impact of electronic journals on the academician career path, promotional exercise and rewards received by Malaysian scholars. The study includes input and responses by leaders of the Academician Association and directors and editors of university presses.

The study explores the research impact of ‘Open Access research articles’ across the globe with a view to test the hypothesis that “OA research contributions emanating from developing countries receive equal citations (subsequently resultant research impact) as those from the developed world”. The study covers 5639 research articles from 50 Open Access DOAJ based Medical Sciences journals covering the period from 2005 to 2006. The research impact of OA research publications measured by the citation counts varies from journal to journal and from country to country. Statistically significant difference is noted between the research impact of the developed and the developing world for OA research articles. The research articles from the developed countries receive higher number of citations (subsequently resultant research impact) compared to those of the developing world. The study may help and pave way for framing policies and strategies to increase the impact of research in the developing world.