Highlighting timely information in libraries through social and semantic web technologies

Abstract

Until now, timeliness of information in libraries is commonly used to underpin collection development and is directly related to quality in terms of realizing whether information is sufficiently up-to-date and available for use. In this paper, it is argued that timely information could be exploited from libraries in another context. More specifically, it would be meaningful for the users of a library to explore resources based on their relevancy to popular events that occasionally occur to the society. Along these lines, a prototype digital library service is implemented and accordingly deployed, based on popular crowd sourcing services (i.e. Twitter) that are integrated with semantic web technologies. The proposed service is evaluated in terms of its ability to provide accurate and timely information.