Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Ville Miettinnen, CEO of Microtask: "Digitalkoot: Electrifying the Finnish Cultural Heritage"

Microtask is a Finnish technology company founded to create a technology platform for crowdsourcing and distributed work. Their product, Microtask Platform, is a software platform for global distribution of short-duration tasks to online workers. The most notable use case for such tasks has been human-assisted optical character recognition, for example, in digitized books.

Adam Farquhar, The British Library: "From Digital as Print to Print as Digital"

This keynote address will explore how digital materials have been treated much like print – finding, ordering, reading one item at a time - and how The British Library is now starting to have the corpus that enables to treat digital materials as data. The talk will also touch on some of the legal, infrastructural, and cultural changes that are taking place to enable this.

Goals

In recent years online book content has increased dramatically through the digitization of physical books and electronic publishing. Such collections present a great value to humanity and to commercial organizations. To match the great momentum in creating on-line book repositories, the BooksOnline workshop series aims to foster research initiatives that are focused on innovation opportunities and challenges created by large collections of digital books. This year, the workshop focuses more explicitly and deliberately on exploring the role of social media and crowdsourcing in the context of online books. Both have been key in defining new user experiences on the Web and thus we aim to jump-start the BooksOnline community into embracing and exploiting these phenomena.

Examples of where social media is promoting online book usage include LibraryThing.com and Amazon’s book service that integrates with Kindle. Crowdsourcing has also been used in building benchmarks for the evaluation of book search engines at INEX. However, these are merely the tip of the potential opportunities that such social engagement models and platforms can offer to online book services. Since social engagement and supporting infrastructure are clearly vital to the future of digital library platforms, the workshop will aim to unearth these potentials to advance both theory and development in designing user experiences and developing the technology for supporting such experiences.

Workshop format

The one day workshop will include keynote presentations, paper presentations covering both ongoing research efforts and proposals for new initiatives, a poster session, and a break-out session.

Previous workshops

BooksOnline'10 was organized at CIKM 2010.
BooksOnline'09 was organized at ECDL 2009.
BooksOnline'08 was organized at CIKM 2008.