Preben Hansen

Purpose – Many of today’s information and technology systems and environments facilitate inquiry, learning, consciousness-raising and knowledge-building. Such platforms include e-learning systems which have learning, education and/or training as explicit goals or objectives. They also include search engines, social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and knowledge sharing environments deployed for work, leisure, inquiry, and personal and professional productivity. The new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, aims to advance our understanding of human inquiry, learning and knowledge-building across such information, e-learning, and socio-technical system contexts.
Design/methodology/approach – This article introduces the journal at its launch under new editorship in January, 2019. The article, authored by the journal co-editors and all associate editors, explores the lineage of scholarly undertakings that have contributed to the journal's new scope and mission, which includes past and ongoing scholarship in the following arenas: Digital Youth, Constructionism, Mutually Constitutive Ties in Information and Learning Sciences, and Searching-as-Learning.
Findings – The article offers examples of ways in which the two fields stand to enrich each other towards a greater holistic advancement of scholarship. The article also summarizes the inaugural special issue contents from the following contributors: Caroline Haythornthwaite; Krista Glazewski and Cindy Hmelo-Silver; Stephanie Teasley; Gary Marchionini; Caroline R. Pitt; Adam Bell, Rose Strickman and Katie Davis; Denise Agosto; Nicole Cooke; and Victor Lee.
Originality/value – The article, this special issue, and the journal in full, are among the first formal and ongoing publication outlets to deliberately draw together and facilitate cross-disciplinary scholarship at this integral nexus. We enthusiastically and warmly invite continued engagement along these lines in the journal’s pages, and also welcome related, and wholly contrary points of view, and points of departure that may build upon or debate some of the themes we raise in the introduction and special issue contents.

The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the ...

Abstract It is only during the last few years that attention has started to shift from pure textbased retrieval towards other media. Information retrieval from spoken documents is analogous to text-based retrieval; however, accessing audio documents causes some extra problems, in particular with respect to document segmentation, choice of indexing features, and robustness. In addition, retrieval of documents in Swedish, like most non-English languages, adds the extra dimension of morphology; also, when analysing spoken ...

Evaluation of digital libraries (DLs) is essential for further development in this area. Whereas previous approaches were restricted to certain facets of the problem, we argue that evaluation of DLs should be based on a broad view of the subject area. For this purpose, we develop a new description scheme using four major dimensions: data/collection, system/technology, users, and usage. For each of these dimensions, we describe the major attributes. Using this scheme, existing DL test beds can be characterised. For this purpose, we have performed a survey by means of a questionnaire, which is now continued by setting up a DL meta-library.

Evaluation of digital libraries assesses their effectiveness, quality and overall impact. To facilitate the comparison of different evaluations and to support the re-use of evaluation data, we are proposing a new logging schema. This schema will allow for logging and sharing of a wide array of data about users, systems and their interactions. We discuss the multi-level logging framework presented in [19] and describe how the community can add to and gain from using the framework. The main focus of this paper is the logging of events within digital libraries on a generalised, conceptual level, as well as the services based on it. These services will allow diverse digital libraries to store their log data in a common repository using a common format. In addition they provide means for analysis and comparison of search history data.

This paper focuses on developing lightweight tools for knowledge sharing and collaboration by communities of practice operating in the field of information retrieval. The paper contributes a motivating scenario, a characterization of these communities, a list of requirements for collaboration, and then a system design proposed as a proof-of-concept implementation that is being evaluated.