The Source: news about digital libraries and library innovations from around the web

Introducing The Source

The Future of Electronic Paper

From the Future of Things website

Thirty-five years in the making, electronic paper is now closer than ever to changing the way we read, write, and study — a revolution so profound that some see it as second only to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Made of flexible material, requiring ultra-low power consumption, cheap to manufacture, and—most important—easy and convenient to read, e-papers of the future are just around the corner, with the promise to hold libraries on a chip and replace most printed newspapers before the end of the next decade. This article will cover the history, technology, and future of what will be the second paper revolution.


Take the “Did You Know?” Quiz About Digital Preservation

From the Library of Congress website

Did you know that digital materials can be more difficult to preserve than physical ones? Take this quiz to test your digital preservation know-how. Each result offers links to learn more about various digital preservation topics.


Tagging over Time: Real-world Image Annotation by Lightweight Meta-learning (Note: PDF)

From Stanford University InfoLab

Automatic image annotation has been a hot-pursuit among multimedia researchers of late. Modest performance guarantees and limited adaptability often restrict its applicability to real-world settings. We propose tagging over time (T/T) to push the technology toward real-world applicability. The T/T framework consists of a principled probabilistic approach to meta-learning, which acts as a go-between for a black-box annotation system and the users. Inspired by inductive transfer, the approach attempts to harness available information, including the black-box models performance, the image representations, and the WordNet ontology.


Image Retrieval: Ideas, Influences, and Trends of the New Age (Note: PDF)
Addendum Information (study on publication trends and impact on different fields) (Note: PDF)

From Stanford University InfoLab

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this paper, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and discuss the spawning of related sub-fields in the process.