Richard Furuta

Hamed Alhoori, Mohammed Samaka, Richard Furuta et al.

As more scholarly content is born digital or converted to a digital format, digital libraries are becoming increasingly vital to researchers seeking to leverage scholarly big data for scientific discovery. Although scholarly products are available in abundance-especially in environments created by the advent of social networking services-little is known about international scholarly information needs, information-seeking behavior, or information use. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps via an in-depth analysis of the information needs and information-seeking behavior of researchers, both students and faculty, at two universities, one in the U.S. and the other in Qatar. Based on this analysis, the study identifies and describes new behavior patterns on the part of researchers as they engage in the information-seeking process. The analysis reveals that the use of academic social networks has notable effects on various scholarly activities. Further, this study identifies differences between students and faculty members in regard to their use of academic social networks, and it identifies differences between researchers according to discipline. Although the researchers who participated in the present study represent a range of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, the study reports a number of similarities in terms of the researchers' scholarly activities.

Anshul Gupta, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, Matthew Christy et al.

Identifying the type of font (e.g., Roman, Blackletter) used in historical documents can help optical character recognition (OCR) systems produce more accurate text transcriptions. Towards this end, we present an active-learning strategy that can significantly reduce the number of labeled samples needed to train a font classifier. Our approach extracts image-based features that exploit geometric differences between fonts at the word level, and combines them into a bag-of-word representation for each page in a document. We evaluate six sampling strategies based on uncertainty, dissimilarity and diversity criteria, and test them on a database containing over 3,000 historical documents with Blackletter, Roman and Mixed fonts. Our results show that a combination of uncertainty and diversity achieves the highest predictive accuracy (89% of test cases correctly classified) while requiring only a small fraction of the data (17%) to be labeled. We discuss the implications of this result for mass digitization projects of historical documents.