title: Building a public digital library based on full-text retrieval

authors: Witten, Ian H.

subjects: computer science

abstract: Digital libraries are expensive to create and maintain, and generally restricted to a particular corporation or group of paying subscribers. While many indexes to the World Wide Web are freely available, the quality of what is indexed is extremely uneven. The digital analog of a public library a reliable, quality, community service has yet to appear. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a cost-effective collection of high-quality public-domain information, available free over the Internet. One obstacle to the creation of a digital library is the difficulty of providing formal cataloguing information. Without a title, author and subject database it seems hard to offer the searching facilities normally available in physical libraries. Full-text retrieval provides a way of approximating these services without a concomitant investment of resources. A second is the problem of finding a suitable corpus of material. Computer science research reports form the focus of our prototype implementation. These constitute a large body of high-quality public-domain documents. Given such a corpus, a third issue becomes the question of obtaining both plain text for indexing, and page images for readability. Typesetting formats such as PostScript provide some of the benefits of libraries scanned from paper documents such as paged-based indexing and viewing without the physical demands and error-prone nature of scanning and optical character recognition. However, until recently the difficulty of extracting text from PostScript seems to have encouraged indexing on plain-text abstracts or bibliographic information provided by authors. We have developed a new technique that overcomes the problem. This paper describes the architecture, the indexing, collection and maintenance processes, and the retrieval interface, to a prototype public digital library.

text: Building a public digital library based on full-text retrieval Digital libraries are expensive to create and maintain, and generally restricted to a particular corporation or group of paying subscribers. While many indexes to the World Wide Web are freely available, the quality of what is indexed is extremely uneven. The digital analog of a public library a reliable, quality, community service has yet to appear. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a cost-effective collection of high-quality public-domain information, available free over the Internet. One obstacle to the creation of a digital library is the difficulty of providing formal cataloguing information. Without a title, author and subject database it seems hard to offer the searching facilities normally available in physical libraries. Full-text retrieval provides a way of approximating these services without a concomitant investment of resources. A second is the problem of finding a suitable corpus of material. Computer science research reports form the focus of our prototype implementation. These constitute a large body of high-quality public-domain documents. Given such a corpus, a third issue becomes the question of obtaining both plain text for indexing, and page images for readability. Typesetting formats such as PostScript provide some of the benefits of libraries scanned from paper documents such as paged-based indexing and viewing without the physical demands and error-prone nature of scanning and optical character recognition. However, until recently the difficulty of extracting text from PostScript seems to have encouraged indexing on plain-text abstracts or bibliographic information provided by authors. We have developed a new technique that overcomes the problem. This paper describes the architecture, the indexing, collection and maintenance processes, and the retrieval interface, to a prototype public digital library.

year: 1995-08

title: Time to vote?

authors: Gibson, John

subjects: opportunity cost

abstract: Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to measure these costs accurately, outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New Zealand. We calculate distance and travel time by road from the place of residence to the nearest polling place and combine our time estimate with imputed wages for all sample members. Using this new measure of the opportunity cost of voting to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small increases in the opportunity costs of time can have large effects in reducing voter turnout.

text: Time to vote? Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to measure these costs accurately, outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New Zealand. We calculate distance and travel time by road from the place of residence to the nearest polling place and combine our time estimate with imputed wages for all sample members. Using this new measure of the opportunity cost of voting to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small increases in the opportunity costs of time can have large effects in reducing voter turnout.

year: 2012

title: Iwi case study report- Tarawera river: Tuwharetoa ki Kawerau, Te Arawa and Ngati Awa

authors: Dodd, Materoa

subjects: Iwi land rights

abstract: There is a deep sense of injustice and creeping despair that the cultural life of the Tarawera River has been destroyed. Cultural lore has been reduced to a perspective of the dominant cultures’ rule of law. The plea for the cultural voice of the Tarawera River to be heard echoes throughout this research, yet the silence of the response is deafening. This research informs on the cultural story of the Tarawera River, it examines the ways in which the relationship between Te Arawa, Tūwharetoa Ki Kawerau and Ngāti Awa and the Tarawera River changed since the discharge of effluent from pulp and paper mills into the river began nearly half a century ago. The research reported on here involves action research approached and informed by Māori epistemologies and what has come to be known as ‘kaupapa Māori research’, an approach that privileges indigenous values, attitudes and practices.

text: Iwi case study report- Tarawera river: Tuwharetoa ki Kawerau, Te Arawa and Ngati Awa There is a deep sense of injustice and creeping despair that the cultural life of the Tarawera River has been destroyed. Cultural lore has been reduced to a perspective of the dominant cultures’ rule of law. The plea for the cultural voice of the Tarawera River to be heard echoes throughout this research, yet the silence of the response is deafening. This research informs on the cultural story of the Tarawera River, it examines the ways in which the relationship between Te Arawa, Tūwharetoa Ki Kawerau and Ngāti Awa and the Tarawera River changed since the discharge of effluent from pulp and paper mills into the river began nearly half a century ago. The research reported on here involves action research approached and informed by Māori epistemologies and what has come to be known as ‘kaupapa Māori research’, an approach that privileges indigenous values, attitudes and practices.

year: 2002-02