Search

The goal of this study is to revisit and contrast the original data from a previous publication entitled, "School Library eBook Providers and Spanish Language Equity: An Analysis of eBook Collections Available to School Libraries." The original study examined the collections of eBooks in Spanish provided by vendors of library resources to school libraries to determine if there are equitable offerings of eBooks in Spanish relative to the Spanish-speaking school population in the United States. The processes in that study were replicated where possible and expanded upon for shared understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If school library collections must meet the needs of the communities they serve, the native languages of the student population must be an important consideration when making purchasing decisions about eBooks. Many professionals in the library community believe that materials in electronic format have the potential to enrich library collections with linguistic diversity. To ensure that school library collections reflect the linguistic diversity of the community, as school library professionals we need to gain a better understanding of what resources are available for our students in digital format. Recent studies indicate that eBooks available from vendors to schools libraries do not meet the linguistic needs of children whose native language is not English. Several international organizations have recognized this issue and are developing initiatives to resolve the growing digital and linguistic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large archival collections, such as email or government documents, must be manually reviewed to identify any sensitive information before the collection can be released publicly. Sensitivity classification has received a lot of attention in the literature. However, more recently, there has been increasing interest in developing sensitivity-aware search engines that can provide users with relevant search results, while ensuring that no sensitive documents are returned to the user. Sensitivity-aware search would mitigate the need for a manual sensitivity review prior to collections being made available publicly. To develop such systems, there is a need for test collections that contain relevance assessments for a set of information needs as well as ground-truth labels for a variety of sensitivity categories. The well-known Enron email collection contains a classification ground-truth that can be used to represent sensitive information, e.g., the Purely Personal and Personal but in Professional Context categories can be used to represent sensitive personal information. However, the existing Enron collection does not contain a set of information needs and relevance assessments. In this work, we present a collection of fifty information needs (topics) with crowdsourced query formulations (3 per topic) and relevance assessments (11,471 in total) for the Enron collection (mean number of relevant documents per topic = 11, variance = 34.7). The developed information needs, queries and relevance judgements are available on GitHub and will be available along with the existing Enron collection through the popular ir_datasets library. Our proposed collection results in the first freely available test collection for developing sensitivity-aware search systems.

Shadow libraries, also known as ''pirate libraries'', are online collections of copyrighted publications that have been made available for free without the permission of the copyright holders. They have gradually become key players of scientific knowledge dissemination, despite their illegality in most countries of the world. Many publishers and scientist-editors decry such libraries for their copyright infringement and loss of publication usage information, while some scholars and institutions support them, sometimes in a roundabout way, for their role in reducing inequalities of access to knowledge, particularly in low-income countries. Although there is a wealth of literature on shadow libraries, none of this have focused on its potential role in knowledge dissemination, through the open access movement. Here we analyze how shadow libraries can affect researchers' citation practices, highlighting some counter-intuitive findings about their impact on the Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA). Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts do. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Scihub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers. The democratization of the use of Sci-hub may therefore lead to a vicious cycle, hindering efforts to develop full OA strategies without proposing a credible and sustainable alternative model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge., Comment: Scientometrics, 2023. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2206.06874

The pressing need for digitization of historical documents has led to a strong interest in designing computerised image processing methods for automatic handwritten text recognition. However, not much attention has been paid on studying the handwritten text written in the margins, i.e. marginalia, that also forms an important source of information. Nevertheless, training an accurate and robust recognition system for marginalia calls for data-efficient approaches due to the unavailability of sufficient amounts of annotated multi-writer texts. Therefore, this work presents an end-to-end framework for automatic detection and recognition of handwritten marginalia, and leverages data augmentation and transfer learning to overcome training data scarcity. The detection phase involves investigation of R-CNN and Faster R-CNN networks. The recognition phase includes an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model, with ResNet feature extraction, bidirectional LSTM-based sequence modeling, and attention-based prediction of marginalia. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been empirically evaluated on the data from early book collections found in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. Source code and pre-trained models are available at Github.

This document provides lidar-derived elevation data for Napakiak, Southwest Alaska, collected on August 20, 2021. The data includes a classified point cloud, digital surface model (DSM), digital terrain model (DTM), and an intensity model. The survey was conducted to assess flooding hazards and coastal erosion. The data is available for download on the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys website. The document also includes information on the mission plan, processing report, survey report, and acknowledgments. The document provides detailed information on elevation differences at various points, including coordinates and measurements. It also includes information on non-vegetated and vegetated check points, with corrected point cloud elevations and the differences between the corrected point cloud elevations and the checkpoint elevations. The average elevation difference for the non-vegetated check points is -0.007 meters, with a minimum difference of -0.202 meters and a maximum difference of 0.115 meters. The average elevation difference for the vegetated check points is 0.184 meters, with a minimum difference of 0.007 meters and a maximum difference of 0.494 meters. [Extracted from the article]

There is a wealth of data on air pollution within several users' reach, including modelled concentrations and depositions as well as observations from air quality stations. However, data integration to perceive spatial and temporal trends at the national level is a complex undertaking. The difficulties are mainly related to the data sources (many files with a lot of information and in different formats). In addition, the processing of this data is time-consuming and impractical when the time period under analysis increases. Furthermore,the processing of spatial-temporal data requires the use of multiple specific tools, such as geographic information systems software and statistical, which are not readily accessible to non-specialised users. The proposed solution is to develop libraries that are responsible for aggregating different types of data related with pollution. In addition to allowing the integration of different data, the libraries are also the basis for developing web applications. The libraries allow the collection of data made available by the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA) and official modelling results for Europe. The applications developed will extend the libraries to allow data processing and representation through Dashboards. These Dashboards provide access to non-specialised users, namely regarding the trends of pollutants in each region. The implemented libraries allow the development of projects that would need access to the same data sources. These Dashboards allow for simplified access to data and for studies that have so far been beyond the reach of researchers.

The article focuses on helping people find military service records, awards, and unit histories with thorough information on how to access various sources, such as personnel files at the National Archives, and ways to receive military awards. Topics include receiving military awards and decorations through the National Personnel Records Center and other pertinent authorities, accessing military service records and pension files, and navigating the corrections process.

Recent progress in natural language processing has been driven by advances in both model architecture and model pretraining. Transformer architectures have facilitated building higher-capacity models and pretraining has made it possible to effectively utilize this capacity for a wide variety of tasks. \textit{Transformers} is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. The library consists of carefully engineered state-of-the art Transformer architectures under a unified API. Backing this library is a curated collection of pretrained models made by and available for the community. \textit{Transformers} is designed to be extensible by researchers, simple for practitioners, and fast and robust in industrial deployments. The library is available at \url{https://github.com/huggingface/transformers}., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, more details at https://github.com/huggingface/transformers

The document titled "LIDAR-DERIVED ELEVATION DATA FOR WRANGELL ISLAND, SOUTHEAST ALASKA, COLLECTED JULY 2023" provides information on an aerial lidar survey conducted by the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys (DGGS) to gather elevation data for Wrangell Island. The survey collected data on surface elevations, including vegetation, buildings, and hydrographic features, which can be used for various purposes such as shoreline development, resource quantification, and slope stability modeling. The document includes details on the mission plan, data processing, and accuracy assessment. The dataset is available for download on the DGGS website. [Extracted from the article]

During the 2023 field season, geologists from the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys conducted bedrock geologic mapping in the Big Delta and Circle quadrangles in Alaska. The project areas are of interest for potential mineral resource development, including gold and copper deposits. This report provides field station locations, rock descriptions, and magnetic susceptibility measurements. The data is available for download from the DGGS website. The project aims to produce accurate geologic maps to support mineral resource exploration in eastern Interior Alaska. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the historical evolution of internet regulation in the United States, particularly during the 1990s when the government favored limited oversight and encouraged self-regulation by the private sector. It outlines key federal statutes related to the internet, such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Communications Decency Act, including the influential Section 230.

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) can drastically reduce memory size and accesses by applying bit-wise operations instead of standard arithmetic operations. Therefore it could significantly improve the efficiency and lower the energy consumption at runtime, which enables the application of state-of-the-art deep learning models on low power devices. BMXNet is an open-source BNN library based on MXNet, which supports both XNOR-Networks and Quantized Neural Networks. The developed BNN layers can be seamlessly applied with other standard library components and work in both GPU and CPU mode. BMXNet is maintained and developed by the multimedia research group at Hasso Plattner Institute and released under Apache license. Extensive experiments validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our implementation. The BMXNet library, several sample projects, and a collection of pre-trained binary deep models are available for download at https://github.com/hpi-xnor, Comment: 4 pages

The article focuses on Department of the Interior's (DOI's) Payments in Lieu of Taxes program provides compensation for certain tax-exempt federal lands, known as entitlement lands. It mentions PILT entitlement lands include lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It also mentions U.S. Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture; federal water projects; some military installations and selected other lands.

Members of Congress frequently receive requests from grantseekers needing funds for projects in districts and states. In considering a response, a congressional office might first determine its policies and procedures regarding appropriate assistance to give constituents, such as when to provide information on grants programs or active advocacy of projects. Each office handles grants requests in its own way, depending upon the Member’s legislative agenda and overall organization and workload of office staff. As for staffing, there may be a full-time grants specialist or several staff members under the supervision of a grants coordinator working solely in the area of grants and projects. In some offices, all grants requests are handled in the district or state office; in others, they are answered by Capitol Hill staff. Offices may encourage congressional grants staff to learn about the grants process themselves and identify practices, in accordance with office policies, that may assist grantseekers at each step in the process. To learn about grants work, congressional staff can use CRS reports to identify potential sources of information for government and private funding and for details on selected grants programs. In addition to the current report, reports on grants work include CRS Report RL34012, Resources for Grantseekers; and CRS Report RL32159, How to Develop and Write a Grant Proposal. CRS also offers reports on block grants and the appropriations process; federal assistance for homeland security and terrorism preparedness; and federal programs on specific subjects and for specific groups, such as state and local governments, police and fire departments, libraries and museums, nonprofit organizations, small business, and other topics. To educate constituents, a congressional office may provide selected grantseekers information on funding programs or may sometimes sponsor workshops on federal and private assistance. Because most funding resources are on the internet, Member home pages can also link to grants sources, such as Assistance Listings at SAM.gov and Grants.gov, so that constituents can search for grants programs and funding opportunities. The CRS web page, Grants and Federal Domestic Assistance (see sample Member Grants Page), can be added to a Member’s home page upon request and is updated automatically on House and Senate servers. Another CRS resource, Grants and Federal Assistance, covers key CRS products. To help communicate office policies and procedures, respond to frequent grants questions, and train new congressional staff, a congressional office may consider developing an internal grants manual. In addition to a single place to locate grants-related office policies and procedures, a grants manual may include templates for letters of support, instructional tools for new staff, and lists of local contacts. With reductions in federal programs, and with most government grants requiring matching funds, local contacts could include private or corporate foundations that may serve as alternatives or supplements to federal grants. This report will be updated at the beginning of each Congress and as needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from the U.S. Congressional Research Service on federal grants. Topics discussed include alternative funding options for grant seekers, such as loans or assistance programs; provides sources for identifying federal grants and private foundation funding; and report provides an overview of the grant process, eligibility for federal grants, and includes additional resources for writing grant proposals.

Today, several universal digital libraries exist such as Google Books, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive libraries, which possess texts from general collections, and many other archives are available, concerning more specific subjects. On the digitalized texts available from these libraries, we can perform several analyses, from those typically used for time-series to those of network theory. For what concerns time-series, an interesting tool provided by Google Books exists, which can help us in bibliographical and reference researches. This tool is the Ngram Viewer, based on yearly count of n-grams. As we will show in this paper, although it seems suitable just for literary works, it can be useful for scientific researches, not only for history of science, but also for acquiring references often unknown to researchers., Comment: Keywords: Computers and Society, Literary works, Time-series, Referencing

This publication covers parts of the Tanana, Norton Bay, Nulato, Ruby, Kantishna River, Medfra, and Mt. McKinley quadrangles west of Nenana, Alaska (fig. 1). Magnetic and radiometric data were collected with a fixed-wing aircraft from May 14 to August 31, 2023, by MPX Geophysics LTD. The survey contains a single block. A total of 86,712 line-kilometers were collected. The block covers 29,361 km2. The magnetometer was mounted to a rear-facing fixed boom ("tail stinger"). The radiometric crystals were located in the cabin of the aircraft. The block was flown with a line spacing of 400 m. The mean ground clearance is 184 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landslides are geologic hazards that threaten human lives, property, and infrastructure. Effective landslide threat mitigation requires identifying, inventorying, and studying landslides; developing a detailed landslide inventory map is the beginning of this process. Here we present the first landslide inventory map of parts of the Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB), Alaska, along with supporting data and a qualitative analysis of the results. This research was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) EDMAP program, which funds universities to train the next generation of geologic mappers. The map and geodatabase were developed using lidar-derived elevation data and satellite imagery, and supplemented with data from targeted fieldwork, which included field verification of landslides and a detailed field survey and series of laboratory soil tests on the large, informally named Tanana 440 landslide. We identified 1,679 landslides within the FNSB region, with 681 mapped within the focused EDMAP study area. These landslides occurred in bedrock and surficial loess deposits and vary widely in age, morphology, and material type. Most are prehistoric, but we did observe some historic and active landslides. Potential landslide triggers may include thawing permafrost, rain events, seismic events, and river erosion. Our goals with this work are to increase awareness of landslides as a potential geohazard and to aid state and local agencies and the general public in making informed land management decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tanana River and Big Delta airborne magnetic and radiometric geophysical survey covers parts of the Big Delta, Charley River, Circle, Eagle, Fairbanks, Kantishna River, Livengood, Mount Hayes, and Tanacross quadrangles near Fairbanks and Delta Junction, Alaska (fig. 1). Magnetic and radiometric data were collected with a fixed-wing aircraft from May 14 to August 4, 2022, by MPX Geophysics LTD. The survey contains six individual blocks. A total of 97,386 line kilometers were collected. The six blocks total 33,095 km2; they cover 32,944 km2 due to overlap. The magnetometer was mounted to a rear-facing fixed boom ("tail stinger"). The radiometric crystals were located in the cabin of the aircraft. The Tanana, Chena, Healy, Eisen, and North Pole blocks were flown with a line spacing of 400 meters (m). Mean ground clearances were: Tanana, 188 m; Chena, 352 m; Healy, 295 m; Eisen, 430 m; North Pole, 180 m. The Eisen Infill block was flown with a line spacing of 200 m and a mean ground clearance of 422 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The White Mountains airborne magnetic and radiometric geophysical survey covers parts of the Livengood, Circle, and Fairbanks quadrangles 25 kilometers north of Fairbanks, Alaska (fig. 1). Magnetic and radiometric data were collected with a fixed-wing aircraft June 30 to August 22, 2021 by MPX Geophysics LTD. A total of 36,933 line kilometers were collected covering 13,423 square kilometers. The magnetometer was mounted to a rear-facing fixed boom ("tail stinger"). The radiometric crystals were located in the cabin of the aircraft. The White Mountains survey was flown with a line spacing of 400 meters (m) and a mean ground clearance of 270 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA) present at the University at Albany and its historical value in future research and study. It mentions about the past of death penalty laws, functions, history which are worth preserving. Other topics include repository of NDPA which has capital punishment materials created by University's School of Criminal Justice and University libraries, papers by academicians including David Baldus, Michael Mello and Michael Radelet.

The Eagle airborne magnetic and radiometric geophysical survey covers parts of the Charley River, Eagle, and Tanacross quadrangles near Eagle, Alaska (fig. 1). Magnetic and radiometric data were collected with a fixed-wing aircraft May 24 to June 27, 2021 by MPX Geophysics LTD. A total of 26,926 line kilometers were collected covering 9,731 square kilometers. The magnetometer was mounted to a rear-facing fixed boom ("tail stinger"). The radiometric crystals were located in the cabin of the aircraft. The Eagle survey was flown with a line spacing of 400 meters (m) and a mean ground clearance of 330 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alaska communities located along coastlines and tidally influenced rivers are vulnerable to coastal erosion. These communities face decisions that require advance planning, such as implementing shore protection or moving infrastructure. To aid in erosion planning, we estimate erosion exposure for 48 communities from the Bering to the Beaufort seas. We conduct a shoreline change assessment, forecast 60 years of erosion, and estimate the replacement cost of infrastructure in the forecast area. Of 48 communities analyzed, 33 have infrastructure within the erosion forecast area. Fifteen communities comprise 90 percent of the total replacement cost. Eleven of these, and 80 percent of total estimated cost, are in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. More than 40 percent of the estimated cost is forecast to occur by the late 2030s. A summary of findings and map(s) of erosion forecast areas are provided for each community where an assessment could be performed. Erosion forecasts require a clearly identifiable shoreline that can be tracked through time in aerial imagery, as well as no major coastal protection structures in the forecast area. Erosion forecasts are not suitable for 12 communities, so we provide recommendations to address erosion concerns in those community assessment reports. The assessment conducted here is a tool for developing local hazard mitigation plans and strategies to address erosion. There are methodological limitations to linear shoreline change measurements, forecasts, and infrastructure replacement costs. Total costs are not reported in this summary due to these limitations. Users must incorporate expertise and local knowledge when interpreting results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]