Publication on topics: Library Networks, Digital Publishing, Software development, Content Management, IT middleware platforms, meta-data modelling and search techniques, Conservation Documentation, Computer Networks, Telecommunication Systems.
As universities advance towards a new data-informed, intra-institutional collaboration paradigm, new roles and services are continuously added to academic library routines. This changing context that exerts considerable stress upon library organizations to prove their value and contributions to student progress is leading the community to start questioning the utility, scope and prospects of patron data collection practices. The study sought library science postgraduate students’ viewpoints about the adequacy and utility of current library use data collection practices in Greek academic libraries. It also aimed to investigate the value, relevance and priority of the integration of library usage data with the rest of university information systems (e.g. learning analytics) along with associated practical and ethical considerations, and advocacy aspects.
Library and information science undergraduate programs’ adequacy to prepare newinformation professionals has become the topic of an ongoing debate, with opposing arguments about curricular structure and focus. Within this context, this study, forming part of ongoing doctoral research, analyzes students’ opinions on how to enhance library school curricula to effectively respond to academic librarians’ new roles and functions. By repositioning the lens on the practical and experience-driven student perspective, away from standard educational practices, the researchers pilot-tested a library science student survey. The mix-methods, student co-developed, survey instrument was tested with a small self-selection sample of future information professionals in Spain and Greece. The study’s goal was to contribute to the limited body of research concerning students ́ perceptions and awareness about library science education. Survey participants were provided the opportunity to critically evaluate their library school undergraduate programs’ responsiveness to the changing academic librarianship landscape. Responses, analyzed by using descriptive statistical and inductive thematic techniques, revealed a limited academic librarianship related content in library and information science curricula. Furthermore, results highlighted a reserved optimism with respect to the library’s prospects of upgrading its role in the university, an ambivalence towards librarian’s future roles, and a diffuse skepticism around the system’s potential to grasp the opportunities that the new information and communication technologies offer. The merit of the study resides in both the diversity of participants’ insightful comments and the use of a student validated survey instrument making them active contributors to the library school program’s assessment process. Dissimilar to stereotypical research projects, this initiative opens a different perspective to program evaluation and its subsequent alignment with academic library stakeholders’ needs.
Library and information science experts around the globe are currently exploring ways of capitalizing student workflow data within library walls. Within this realm, the researchers designed and pilot-tested a user-driven lightweight application that envisions library as a crucial contributor of co-curricular data to learner profiles’ contextual integrity. The prototype usability test conducted in December 2018 with the participation of 30 students at the University of West Attica, Greece, aimed not only to record participants’ perspectives about the application but also to trace their attitudes towards this new kind of intervention. Post-test questionnaires yield a variety of positive rich-textured comments indicating students’ interest in the emerging conversation around library use data capitalization. The participants felt positive about the need to develop a culture that fosters the reconsideration of library value constituents and their new dynamic role in the educational context. The pilot-tested application could serve as a reference for the improvement of academic library use data collection practices.
Purpose - It has been more than two decades that LIS Education has been regarding information organizations (libraries, archives and museums) as an integrated field sharing a common basis of acquiring, handling and disseminating information independently of its source or substrate. In this respect LIS curriculum has treated resources at the basis of their descriptive, structural and administrative metadata; their semantic value; and the employment of technology as the means for creating a common platform for its organization, accessing and dissemination purposes. Design/methodology/approach - Within this framework, LIS curriculum has expanded in order to meet the informational needs of cultural heritage institutions, such as museums and cultural centers. Furthermore, their requisites to create the fundamentals for their digital information management and digital presence in the web and their obligations to supply information and communicate with each other became also part of the curriculum. The latter introduced almost simultaneously the need to operate in common environment with archives and libraries that not only hold a significant amount of related information but also have common operational attributes. The latter has brought forward issues of interoperability, communication between metadata standards, the use of controlled vocabularies and semantic representation techniques.All of the above, have established the notion in LIS Education that libraries, archives and museums are a global network of information organizations. At the same time, a series of cultural heritage projects, funded through the Horizon2020 call were focusing on employing new technologies for staging cultural heritage content. The need for metadata and semantics had acquired the expertise of information professionals. In this paper the case of the curriculum reform of the Department of Archives, Library and information Studies of the University of West Attica is presented and the specific interrelationship of the Horizon2020 Project “CrossCult" in which the aforementioned Department participated, is viewed as a parameter for shaping a cluster of courses within its curriculum.
The Shared Library Management System (LMS) model is not a new concept. Lately, many libraries consortia have migrated to a shared LMS to reduce their services' total costs. The Hellenic Academic Libraries consortium has implemented a shared LMS service, hosted in a private owned cloud infrastructure for its members during the past years (known as the MITOS project). Recognizing the complexity and significance that joining a shared LMS represents, it is important for librarians and other decision makers to have access to the MITOS experience for operational, technical and financial aspects, during and after the transition.
Purpose - This paper seeks to encourage reflections on the extent to which a one-shot workshop can help about-to-be information Professionals understand and appreciate the gamut of complexities and challenges associated with library position in the emerging Learning Analytics (LA) ecosystem. Design/methodology/approach – It focuses on the description of the experience in organizing a workshop at the Department of Archival, Library & Information Studies (ALIS) of the University of West Attica. Building upon desk and primary research findings, organizers envisioned providing a valuable opportunity for senior students to collaboratively help identify the hidden value of student generated data for the support of their success and retention. Analyses of lessons learned, student viewpoints and recommendations for the future, all aim to contribute knowledge to the meta-community of Higher Education library professionals that are exploring ways to streamline their smooth integration into the educational process taking full advantage of new ICT capabilities. Findings- Students seemed to have quickly developed a substantial understanding of the risks and opportunities involved in this type of innovation as reflected on detected differences between a set of pre and post-workshop survey indicators. Furthermore, student evaluations on workshop design, delivery and content quality have provided valuable input on its usefulness and a set of recommendations for change. Originality/value - It presents and analyses observations of the first Greek LIS community initiation experience to current Learning Analytics landscape, a topic germane to university libraries that could eventually influence New Information Professionals’ mindset and aspirations.
Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for offering RDF views over databases. In addition to these, a variety of tools exist that allow exporting database contents into RDF graphs. The approaches in the latter category have often been proved demonstrating better performance than the ones in the former. However, when database contents are exported into RDF, it is not always optimal or even necessary to export, or dump as this procedure is often called, the whole database contents every time. This paper investigates the problem of incremental generation and storage of the RDF graph that is the result of exporting relational database contents. In order to express mappings that associate tuples from the source database to triples in the resulting RDF graph, an implementation of the R2RML standard is subject to testing. Next, a methodology is proposed and described that enables incremental generation and storage of the RDF graph that originates from the source relational database contents. The performance of this methodology is assessed, through an extensive set of measurements. The paper concludes with a discussion regarding the authors' most important findings.
The purpose of this paper is to study advantages and challenges of electronic academic textbook (e-textbook) for the Hellenic higher education and the publishing community. In the higher education domain, the shift to e-textbook adoption entails numerous benefits. However, reluctance is noted in students as well as in publishers, impeding the faster realisation of this change. Decision-makers (such as the Ministry of Education and university administrations) need actual survey data to plan and perform the best strategy plan for the transition to the e-textbook era.
The cultural heritage artifacts Conservation Documentation format is not universally agreed upon nor has it always been considered an important aspect of the conservation profession. Conservation records present major drawbacks, which are the fragmentary and incomplete description of the contained information and related processes. On the other hand, as strict regulations prohibit invasive testing in the conservation of art works and monuments of great historical value, new type of examination methods such as Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT-E) techniques have become essential and are widely used by scientists. In this context, the present paper presents the DOC-CULTURE project approach to standardize the documentation of the NDT methods and their output data through CIDOC-CRM exploitation.
The Department of Library Science and Information Systems of the TEI of Athens is using a Moodle installation as its e-class platform for the past four semesters. Moodle is a freely distributed open source software, and has been one of the most popular Course Management Systems. The faculty has invested a significant amount of time and effort and has created 50 online courses, which provide students with all the necessary course material (multiple bibliographies, presentations, e-books and other text and multimedia resources). The online resources also include activity modules, assignments and quizzes that utilize the interactive and collaborative environment of Moodle. This study presents the evaluation of the department's e-class, which has been based on two online questionnaires, one addressed to the faculty and the other to the students. The questionnaires attempted to collect data concerning the users’ attitudes and profiles (visiting frequency, favorite activities) and their opinions about the functionality and usefulness of the e- class in enhancing the teaching and learning experience. The results fully confirm the faculty's view that the e-class is an indispensable addition to the departments teaching tools and demonstrate that it is extensively used and highly appreciated by both faculty and students.
In this paper, a Rate Adaptation Scheme (RAS) for media streaming applications, appropriate for future heterogeneous networks is presented. In such environments, vertical handovers across networks with highly diverse characteristics are likely to occur. In these cases, RASs should cope with abrupt network resources variations. Existing rate adaptations mechanisms would fail to adjust, in a timely manner, to the characteristics of the new network or recognise a vertical handover event. The proposed scheme enhances an existing rate adaptation algorithm towards providing uninterrupted streaming sessions to mobile terminals, when moving across networks with diverse characteristics. Applications can adapt their rate, based not only on application level feedback (e.g. packet and frame loss rate), but also on feedback received from a terminal management entity. The proposed scheme is evaluated using extensive simulations, is implemented over an open end-to-end MPEG-4 streaming suite and it is experimentally validated.
The wireless beyond 3G systems or the so called Composite Radio Environments (CRE) (or even 4G systems), consist of multiple type radio access technologies, collaborating with each other, providing both diverse access alternatives and QoS improvement, especially as far as concerns protection against traffic congestion and loss of radio coverage situations. The merits deriving from beyond 3G systems interest not only network and service providers but also the mobile users. Additionally, the need of broadband wireless access is directly associated with the intense demand for IP multimedia services (e.g. video streaming or high speed web browsing), mainly inside hot-spot areas. Taking into consideration the above described tendency in the area of wireless network systems, the IP-enabled DVB-T (the terrestrial specification of the Digital Video Broadcasting family) systems appear as an attractive alternative network access in the CRE context. Along this direction, this paper presents the most important aspects of a CRE network management system (NMS), focusing on the component responsible for the DVB-T resource management (RM). Finally, we implement and investigate through simulation a greedy algorithm suitable for DVB-T networks that performs fast resource management and configuration. We also provide some indicative results which prove that the algorithm demonstrates a close to optimal performance at the RM functionality.
Heterogeneous radio networks employ multiple different wireless access technologies, which act jointly towards providing enhanced network access and service provision, as well as exhibiting an increased potential in terms of: network coverage/availability, QoS guarantees, delivery cost and compliance with users’ requirements. Such an environment can prove considerably beneficial for network and service providers, as well as the end (mobile) user. Taking into account that the need for broadband wireless access becomes all the more intense, especially in relation to multimedia services (e.g., video streaming), DVB-T (the terrestrial specification of the DVB family) appears as an attractive access technology to be investigated in the heterogeneous wireless context. In this direction, the paper employs a prototype heterogeneous radio platform where DVB-T acts as an alternative access network and plays a key role in absorbing high rate traffic from other wireless segments. The paper deals with operational scenarios that highlight the effectiveness of DVB-T for the support of IP-based services in heterogeneous wireless environments, investigates associated system and performance aspects, and provides quantitative results from experiments on the platform.
Mobile multimedia services are expected to be in high demand from mobile wireless users on a worldwide scale. The research community and telecommunications industry have focused their efforts in providing suitable wireless networks for such services. The great advance achieved among wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies, combined with the current delays in deploying 3 G cellular networks, forces the network operators to investigate possible interworking mechanisms to exploit the broadband capabilities of WLANs jointly with currently deployed 2.5 G cellular networks, as well as other commercial broadband systems. The authors present a generic management platform, suitable for WLANs interworking with other wireless systems, targeting the implementation of a high-speed wireless environment and able to maintain multimedia services, especially at hot-spot locations. The main aim was to keep the functional layout of each individual wireless network as close as possible to its original form. Finally, the authors present examples of WLANs interworking with other wireless systems, using either real commercially deployed networks or laboratory testbeds.
In this paper, we explore the challenges towards the adoption/use of Open Educational Resources (OER) within the Greek Higher Education (HE). To achieve this objective, first we present “Kallipos”, a large-scale open access textbook publishing initiative that was launched in 2013 by the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link) consortium. Then, we analyse and interpret the results of two surveys performed at the outskirts of this project. The first survey, committed among faculty members that authored or peer-reviewed an open textbook, highlights the barriers they faced, as well as the teaching and learning benefits from OER adoption/use. The second survey, addressed to university administrative executives (Deans of Schools), identifies their views about the OER usefulness and further development. The empirical data were collected by the use of two questionnaires. The findings align with the results of the current European and international research, thus are usable not only by the national but also by the international policy makers and educational leaders. We conclude by summarising the main lessons learned by “Kallipos”, and by suggesting specific proposals for the sustainable continuation of the action guided by strategies for its potential international scope expansion.
Conservation activities, before and after decay detection, are considered as a prerequisite for maintaining cultural artifacts in their initial/original form. Taking into account the strict regulations where sampling from art works of great historical value is restricted or in many cases prohibited, the application of Non-Destructive Testing techniques (NDTs) during the conservation or even decay detection is highly appreciated by conservators. Non-destructive examination include the employment of multiple analysis approaches and techniques namely Infrared Thermography (IRT), Ultrasonics (US), Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), VIS–NIR Fiber Optics Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (FORS), portable X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF), Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis (ESEM-EDX), Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and micro-Raman Spectroscopy. These produce a huge amount of data, in different formats, such as text, numerical sets and visual objects (i.e. images, thermograms, radargrams, spectral data, graphs, etc). Moreover, conservation documentation presents major drawbacks, as fragmentation and incomplete description of the related information is usually the case. Assigning conservation data to the objects’ metadata collection is very rare and not yet standardized. The Doc-Culture Project aims to provide solutions for the NDT application methodologies, analysis and process along with their output data and all related conservation documentation. The preliminary results are discussed in this paper.
In addition to tools offering RDF views over databases, a variety of tools exist that allow exporting database contents into RDF graphs; tools proven that in many cases demonstrate better performance than the former. However, in cases when database contents are exported into RDF, it is not always optimal or even necessary to dump the whole database contents every time. In this paper, the problem of incremental generation and storage of the resulting RDF graph is investigated. An implementation of the R2RML standard is used in order to express mappings that associate tuples from the source database to triples in the resulting RDF graph. Next, a methodology is proposed that enables incremental generation and storage of an RDF graph based on a source relational database, and it is evaluated through a set of performance measurements. Finally, a discussion is presented regarding the authors' most important findings and conclusions.
The cultural heritage artifacts Conservation Documentation is not universally agreed upon nor has it always been considered an important aspect of the conservation profession. Conservation records present major drawbacks, which are the fragmentary and incomplete description of the contained information and related processes. On the other hand, art works and monuments of great historical value are subject to examination only through Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT-E) techniques. In this context, the present paper presents the DOC-CULTURE project approach to standardize the documentation of the conservation and the NDT-E methods and their output data through CIDOC-CRM extension.
This paper presents the initial results of a survey that took place among higher education students in Greece. The aim of the survey was to identify and analyze the attitude, and probable acceptance, of electronic textbooks as well as the transition from printed to electronic textbooks used by the Greek Universities and Technological Education Institutes. Although e-books have turned out to be the mainstream delivery method for the majority of publishers, the printed vs electronic academic textbook debate has become more often nowadays. The complexity of an e-book content as well as the intensity needed for reading are two of the most important reasons why students seem reluctant towards this transition.
This paper presents the initial results of a survey that took place among higher education students in Greece. The aim of the survey was to identify and analyze the attitude, and probable acceptance, of electronic textbooks as well as the transition from printed to electronic textbooks used by the Greek Universities and Technological Education Institutes. Although e-books have turned out to be the mainstream delivery method for the majority of publishers, the printed vs electronic academic textbook debate has become more often nowadays. The complexity of an e-book content as well as the intensity needed for reading are two of the most important reasons why students seem reluctant towards this transition.
This paper presents the initial results of a survey that took place among higher education students in Greece. The aim of the survey was to identify and analyze the attitude, and probable acceptance, of electronic textbooks as well as the transition from printed to electronic textbooks used by the Greek Universities and Technological Education Institutes. Although e-books have turned out to be the mainstream delivery method for the majority of publishers, the printed vs electronic academic textbook debate has become more often nowadays. The complexity of an e-book content as well as the intensity needed for reading are two of the most important reasons why students seem reluctant towards this transition.