Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Online books, complementary social media and crowdsourcing

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the BooksOnline 2011 Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories and Complementary Media. This year, the fourth edition of the workshop series places strong emphasis on the social dimension of reading and explores the role of social media in enhancing digital libraries and online digital book repository services. Online social networks and services have seen a tremendous increase in popularity in recent years. They enable a fast growing population of users to connect, socialize, and share data and experiences on the Web, as well as support users in working together, contributing towards common goals. Examples of such online social movements around books and book repositories include various efforts of cataloguing and sharing "home library" records and systems that elicit and share book recommendations and reviews. A related recent phenomenon is that of crowdsourcing, which aims to harness the abilities of communities or crowds of people to complete otherwise daunting tasks such as correcting OCR errors in whole libraries of digitized books. Such social interactions and resulting social media hold the potential to revolutionize online publishing and digital libraries. These themes are reflected in the topics chosen by our keynote speakers. We are honoured to have as our keynote speakers Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library and Ville Miettinen, founder and CEO of Microtask, a Finnish company specialised in commercializing technology for distributing digital labour. Ville Miettinen, who has been leading the digitization efforts of the Finnish National Library, will discuss the challenges of introducing human computation into heterogeneous large-scale digitization workflows. Adam Farquhar will address the transition from digital libraries as a means of supporting traditional book repositories to digital publishing. The social dimension of online publishing and reading is also reflected in the work of several authors who contributed research or position papers to the workshop. Overall, the program consists of a high-quality selection of papers that focus on: 1) Technological innovations in the fields of information retrieval and information extraction that further the usability and engagement of digital books in order to better exploit the capabilities of digital media rather than inheriting the limitations of conventional print media, and 2) Methodologies and studies of changes in reading behaviour as a consequence of societal and technological developments that can guide further innovation. We hope that you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking and that the workshop will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.