Software tools, including Web browsers, e-books, electronic document formats, search engines, and digital libraries are changing the way people read, making it easier for them to find and view documents. However, while these tools provide significant help with short-term reading projects involving small numbers of documents, they provide less help with longer-term reading projects, in which a topic is to be understood in depth by reading many documents. For such projects, readers must find and manage many documents and citations, remember what has been read, and prioritize what to read next. This paper describes three integrated software tools that facilitate in-depth reading. A first tool extracts citation information from documents. A second finds on-line documents from their citations. The last is a document corpus browser that uses a zoomable user interface to show a corpus at multiple granularities while supporting reading tasks that take days, weeks, or longer. We describe these tools and the design principles that motivated them.

It is very di#cult for beginners to define and find the most relevant literature in a research field. They can search on the web or look at the most important journals and conference proceedings, but it would be much better to receive suggestions directly from experts of the field. Unfortunately, this is not always possible and systems like CiteSeer and GoogleScholar become extremely useful for beginners (and not only). In this paper, we present an agent-based system that facilitates scientific publications search. Users interacting with their personal agents produce a transfer of knowledge about relevant publications from experts to beginners. Each personal agent observes how publications are used and induces behavioral patterns that are used to create more e#ective recommendations. Feedback exchange allows agents to share their knowledge and virtual communities of cloned experts can be created to support novice users. We present a set of experimental results, obtained using CiteSeer as a source of information, that show the e#ectiveness of our approach.

Abstract. The Multivalent Document Model offers a practical, proven, nocompromises architecture for preserving digital documents of potentially any data format. We have implemented from scratch such complex and currently important formats as PDF and HTML, as well as older formats including scanned paper, UNIX manual pages, TeX DVI, and Apple II AppleWorks word processing. The architecture, stable since its definition in 1997, extends easily to additional document formats, defines a cross-format document tree data structure that fully captures semantics and layout, supports full expression of a format's often idiosyncratic concepts and behavior, enables sharing of functionality across formats thus reducing implementation effort, can introduce new functionality such as hyperlinks and annotation to older formats that cannot express them, and provides a single interface (API) across all formats. Multivalent contrasts sharply with emulation and conversion, and advances Lorie's Universal Virtual Computer with high-level architecture and extensive implementation. 1

Abstract. User interfaces for digital library systems must support a wide range of user activities. They include search, browsing, and curation, but perhaps the most important is actual reading of the items in the library. Support for reading, however, is usually relegated to applications which are only loosely integrated with the digital library system. One reason for this is the absence of toolkit widget support for the activity of reading. Most user interface toolkits instead provide support for either text editing or text presentation. This makes it difficult to write applications which support reading well. In this paper we describe the origins, design, and implementation of a new Java Swing toolkit widget called ReadUp, which provides support for reading page images in a digital library application, and discuss briefly how it is being used. 1

Abstract. An advanced interface is presented for fluid interaction in a personal digital library system. The system employs a zoomable planar representation of a collection using hybrid continuous/quantum treemap visualizations to facilitate navigation while minimizing cognitive load. The system is particularly well suited to user tasks which, in the physical world, are normally carried out by laying out a set of related documents on a physical desk — namely, those tasks that require frequent and rapid transfer of attention from one document in the collection to another. Discussed are the design and implementation of the system as well as its relationship to previous work. 1

In this paper we present a universal access architecture for digital libraries. Our architecture supports traditional fixed clients and mobile clients addressing the connection adaptation and limited resources challenges presented by mobile devices. We describe the requirements of universally available personal digital libraries and illustrate their applicability with a user scenario. These requirements are addressed by our universal access architecture, which targets to support multiple device access, including mobile devices. The main components of the architecture are the Client-Side Applications, the Data Server and the Mobile Communication Middleware (MCM). Our work has focused on the mobile connection support provided by the interaction of mobile clients with the MCM, obtaining a constant response rate in spite of variability of network conditions. The architecture of a mobile software client that benefits from these mechanisms is described and supplemented with implementation notes showing how—in spite of the limited computing resources of mobile devices—it can interact with a data server that has not been designed to support client mobility via adaptation techniques implemented in a middleware. 1

The Instant Bookplex system includes a zoomable user interface (ZUI) for navigating through a spatial representation of a document collection. This ZUI supports extended reading in the collection using semantic zooming, graphical presentation of metadata, animated transitions, and an integrated reading tool. It helps users find and re-find documents, choose good documents to read next, and navigate between documents.

We have produced a system that automatically incorporates syndicated materials from sources including library acquisition records and online news sites to form growing hypertextual structures. This system enables users to create personal and shared collections built upon growing collections.

Abstract. A preliminary framework, termed as DL2Go, that enables editable and portable personal digital libraries is presented. For mobile offline users of digital libraries, DL2Go can: (1) package digital libraries into mobile storage devices such as flash drives, along with needed application softwares (e.g., wiki and DBMS), (2) (de-)compress contents of digital libraries to address storage constraints of mobile users when needed, (3) enables users to add, delete, and update entities of digital libraries using wiki framework, and (4) share/sync edited contents with other DL2Go users and the server using web services and RSS framework. 1

We present a method for picture detection in document page images, which can come from scanned or camera images, or rendered from electronic file formats. Our method uses OCR to separate out the text and applies the Normalized Cuts algorithm to cluster the non-text pixels into picture regions. A refinement step uses the captions found in the OCR text to deduce how many pictures are in a picture region, thereby correcting for under- and over-segmentation. A performance evaluation scheme is applied which takes into account the detection quality and fragmentation quality. We benchmark our method against the ABBYY application on page images from conference papers. Categories and Subject Descriptors