This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

The exponential growth of digital libraries and the proliferation of scholarly content in electronic formats have made data mining and information retrieval essential tools for effectively managing, organizing, and disseminating knowledge. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the advancements and challenges in these fields, with a…

Here we demonstrate how more highly interoperable computable knowledge enables systems to generate large quantities of evidence-based advice for health. We first provide a thorough analysis of advice. Then, because advice derives from knowledge, we turn our focus to computable, i.e., machine-interpretable, forms for knowledge. We consider how…

Retrieving files from one's computer is done daily and is an essential part of completing most tasks at work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the ways that people structure and organize their files. Management of personal digital information is a challenging task that users approach idiosyncratically. Large individual differences…

Millions of books from public libraries and private collections have been scanned by various organizations in the last decade. The motivation is to preserve the written human heritage in electronic format for durable storage and efficient access. The information buried in these large book collections has always been of major interest for scholars…

Identifying topics of a textual document is useful for many purposes. We can organize the documents by topics in digital libraries. Then, we could browse and search for the documents with specific topics. By examining the topics of a document, we can quickly understand what the document is about. To augment the traditional manual way of topic…

Soon after the university movement started in the late 1800s, academic libraries became the dominant providers of the tools and services required to locate and access scholarly information. However, with the advent of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with open access scholarly content, researchers now have the…

We have developed statistical techniques to improve the performance of document image search systems where the intermediate step of OCR based transcription is not used. Previous research in this area has largely focused on challenges pertaining to generation of small lexicons for processing handwritten documents and enhancement of poor quality…

In response to the rapid development of digital libraries over the past decade, researchers have focused on the use of metadata as an effective means to support resource discovery within online repositories. With the increasing involvement of libraries in digitization projects and the growing number of institutional repositories, it is anticipated…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

A basic and classical assumption in the machine learning research area is "randomness assumption" (also known as i.i.d assumption), which states that data are assumed to be independent and identically generated by some known or unknown distribution. This assumption, which is the foundation of most existing approaches in the literature, simplifies…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

The amount of online information has grown exponentially over the past few decades, and users become more and more dependent on ranking and recommendation systems to address their information seeking needs. The advance in information technologies has enabled users to provide feedback on the utilities of the underlying ranking and recommendation…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…