BooksOnline 2011 - BooksOnline'11: Online Books, Complementary Social Media and Crowdsourcing

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. The one day workshop will include keynote presentations, paper presentations in panel sessions covering both ongoing research efforts and proposals for new initiatives, a poster session, and a break-out session to brainstorm around new ideas and research directions.

Gabriella Kazai (Microsoft Research, UK)
Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Carsten Eickhoff (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)

Website: http://research.microsoft.com/booksonline11/