Understanding e-book usage: using citation analysis to inform study skills teaching

To deliver effective information literacy teaching, an accurate understanding of user behaviour is vital. The increasing availability and use of e-books will impact upon student information seeking behaviour. We need to understand the extent of this if we wish to include the most appropriate content in the teaching that we deliver. This poster will show the findings of a recent piece of research at the University of Sussex that has taken an innovative approach to exploring user behaviour. The research considers the establishment of a more sophisticated measure of e-book usage that will inform information literacy teaching by focusing on user behaviour. Specifically this involves measuring e-book usage based on a new methodology concerning citation analysis and qualitative interviews instead of solely gathering data relating to traditional access counts such as full-text download. By analysing e-book citations in student coursework it has been possible to get a more complete picture of the e-books being used by our students, not just those that are held by the library. In addition, interviewing students directly has helped to uncover the ways in which students are searching for and interacting with e-books. This allows us to see exactly how students are using e-books and their reasons for doing so, as opposed to simply relying on our interpretations of the usage data that we collect. This poster will share our findings. Gathering information about these various aspects of user behaviour will help to identify gaps in practice and enable us to improve the information seeking and evaluation skills of our users. Furthermore it will help us to understand the barriers that our students face in accessing e-books and by highlighting these we can work towards making our collections as discoverable as possible, in addition to equipping our students with the skills needed to discover them

Pop-up Library Makerspace: academic libraries provide flexible, supportive space to explore emerging technologies.

The word Makerspace is a general term for a place where people get together to make things, create things and learn together. Antony Groves presents a look at a recent university library experiment hosting a pop-up makerspace. Working with local edtech leaders MakerClub and colleagues the library organised a two-hour workshop which offered the opportunity for students and staff to explore emerging technologies

The Great Chicago Fire- October 8-10, 1871

Essay on the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Application of a truncated normal failure distribution in reliability testing

Statistical truncated normal distribution function is applied as a time-to-failure distribution function in equipment reliability estimations. Age-dependent characteristics of the truncated function provide a basis for formulating a system of high-reliability testing that effectively merges statistical, engineering, and cost considerations

Hybridity in MT: experiments on the Europarl corpus

(Way & Gough, 2005) demonstrate that their Marker-based EBMT system is capable of outperforming a word-based SMT system trained on reasonably large data sets. (Groves & Way, 2005) take this a stage further and demonstrate that while the EBMT system also outperforms a phrase-based SMT (PBSMT) system, a hybrid 'example-based SMT' system incorporating marker chunks and SMT sub-sentential alignments is capable of outperforming both baseline translation models for French{English translation. In this paper, we show that similar gains are to be had from constructing a hybrid 'statistical EBMT' system capable of outperforming the baseline system of (Way & Gough, 2005). Using the Europarl (Koehn, 2005) training and test sets we show that this time around, although all 'hybrid' variants of the EBMT system fall short of the quality achieved by the baseline PBSMT system, merging elements of the marker-based and SMT data, as in (Groves & Way, 2005), to create a hybrid 'example-based SMT' system, outperforms the baseline SMT and EBMT systems from which it is derived. Furthermore, we provide further evidence in favour of hybrid systems by adding an SMT target language model to all EBMT system variants and demonstrate that this too has a positive e®ect on translation quality