Social information access is defined as a stream of research that explores methods for organizing the past interactions of users in a community in order to provide future users with better access to information. Social information access covers a wide range of different technologies and strategies that operate on a different scale, which can range from a small closed corpus site to the whole Web. The 16 chapters included in this book provide a broad overview of modern research on social information access. In order to provide a balanced coverage, these chapters are organized by the main types of information access (i.e., social search, social navigation, and recommendation) and main sources of social information.

"This book deals with the improvement of user modeling in the context of Collaborative and Social Information Access and Retrieval (CSIRA) techniques"--Provided by publisher.

This volume contains the invited and the contributed papers selected for p- th sentation at SOFSEM 2008, the 34 Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, which was held January 19-25, 2008, in the Atrium Hotel, Novy þ Smokovec, High Tatras in Slovakia. SOFSEM (originally SOFtware SEMinar), as an annual international c- ference devoted to the theory and practice of computer science, aims to foster cooperationamongprofessionalsfromacademiaandindustryworkinginallareas in this?eld. Developing over the years from a local event to a fully international and well-established conference, contemporary SOFSEM continues to maintain the best of its original Winter School aspects, such as a high number of invited talks and in-depth coverage of novel research results in selected areas within computer science. SOFSEM 2008 was organized around the following tracks: - Foundations of Computer Science (Chair: Juhani Karhum· aki) - Computing by Nature (Chair: Alberto Bertoni) - Networks, Security, and Cryptography (Chair: Bart Preneel) - Web Technologies (Chair: Pavol Nþ avrat) The SOFSEM 2008 Program Committee consisted of 75 international - perts, representing active areas of the SOFSEM 2008 tracks with outstanding expertise and an eye for current developments, evaluating the submissions with the help of 169 additional reviewers. An integral part of SOFSEM 2008 was the traditional Student Research - rum (chaired by Ma þria Bielikovþ a), organized with the aim of presenting student projectsinthetheoryandpracticeofcomputerscienceandtogivestudentsfe- back on both originality of their scienti?c results and on their work in progress.

An authoritative and truly global exploration of current research in digital libraries. Internationally-renowned academics discuss what has been achieved with digital libraries and what we can expect in the future through the prism of research. The increasing number of digital libraries in all sectors and the pressure of ever demanding and diverse user needs has encouraged development of user-centred interfaces, intelligent search and retrieval capabilities, effective metadata description and contents organization. In addition to the two editors who are renowned for their works in digital library research, this collection brings together established international names in the field to analyse these developments in relation to users and information access and the future trends and challenges that practitioners will face. Readership: LIS students, academics and researchers interested in digital libraries and access and those developing, managing or just starting out with digital libraries

The advent of computers in libraries made library automation a hot topic in the 1980s and 1990s, but this focus has dropped off over time, leaving much library automation research outdated. Library Automation and OPAC 2.0: Information Access and Services in the 2.0 Landscape brings library automation back to the forefront of cutting-edge research. In today's age of Web 2.0 and social networking, libraries are entering the new Library 2.0 era, and this reference will present current and future librarians with the necessary new library automation research they will need to keep their institutions up-to-date in today's constantly changing technological environment.

Despite having advanced social protection systems, OECD countries still face challenges in identifying, enrolling, and providing benefits and services to all those in need. Even when programmes are well-designed and adequately funded, cumbersome enrolment processes and challenges in service and benefit delivery can be an obstacle to the full take-up of social programmes. Advances in digital technologies and data can go a long way towards making social protection more accessible and effective. This report presents a stocktaking of OECD governments’ strategies to identify individuals and groups in need, collect and link (potential) beneficiary data across administrative and survey sources, and apply data analytics and new technologies to improve programme enrolment and the benefit/service delivery experience – all with the objective of reaching people in need of support in OECD countries.

Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit.

Libraries, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Enabling Access and Promoting Inclusion examines the interrelationships between digital literacy, digital inclusion, and public policy, emphasizing the impacts of these policy decisions on the ability of individuals and communities to successfully participate in the information society. It is the first large-scale consideration of digital literacy and digital inclusion as policy problems and provides policy recommendations to promote digital literacy and digital inclusion. This book is intended to help librarians better understand and articulate their roles in promoting human rights and social justice, as well as to educate policymakers, government officials, professionals in other fields, and researchers in other disciplines about the contributions of libraries to human rights and social justice. It explores the intersections of information, human rights, and social justice from a range of perspectives and addresses the differing roles of library institutions (public, school, academic, and special libraries), library professionals, professional organizations, governments, and library patrons. Discussion focuses on the practical side of human rights and avoids most of the philosophical discussions of the term. Similarly, this book emphasizes the practical nature of social justice and the social and societal structures that foster equality. Related issues of digital literacy and digital inclusion are considered as essential to providing information in human rights and social justice contexts. Digital literacy, the ability to use the Internet to meet information, combines with access to the Internet in order to successfully apply the skills of digital literacy is discussed under the topic of digital inclusion. These topics are discussed through legal, policy, social, cultural, and economic lenses. Issues are examined both in terms of efforts to support equity in communities as a whole and the efforts intended to promote equity in specific disadvantaged or marginalized populations, such as the homeless, immigrants, people with disabilities, and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Many examples of the issues discussed are drawn from the original research that the authors have conducted. The ideas and suggestions in this book should help members of the library community understand where their roles related to human rights and social justice originate, how they fit within the broader policy context, how to improve their related services and practices, and how to advocate for better support of these roles. The authors of this book have been involved in this research for many years and this breadth allows the book to offer comprehensive policy recommendations, solutions, and best practices for an area that is currently extremely fragmented. The writing is at a level to make it useful to undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and policy makers.

This volume summarizes the author’s work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2009, held in Roskilde, Denmark, in October 2009. The 57 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. They are structured in topical sections on database management, information retrieval, extraction and mining, ontologies and semantic web, intelligent information extraction from texts, advances in fuzzy querying, personalization, preferences, context and recommendation, and Web as a stream.