School of Information Sciences

Downie to deliver keynote at ICADL2018

Stephen Downie
J. Stephen Downie, Professor, Executive Associate Dean, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be a keynote speaker for the 20th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL2018), which will be held November 19-22 in Hamilton, New Zealand. The theme of this year's conference is "Maturity and Innovation in Digital Libraries."

Downie is codirector of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to text found in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The HTRC supports a "non-consumptive research model," where researchers can conduct computational analyses against the items found in its digital library collection but cannot copy, read, or redistribute the copyright-restricted materials contained within.

In his keynote, "Extracted Features: A Copyright-Sensitive Approach for Digital Library Data Sharing," Downie will focus on the HTRC's Extracted Features Dataset, which currently covers 15.7 million volumes of the HathiTrust Digital Library.

"My talk will provide an overview of the history, challenges, and evolution of the Extracted Features Dataset, including how it is being used by researchers and some possible future development directions," Downie said. "Because the data is derived from the underlying digital library content—and not merely copied—it satisfies the main principles of the non-consumptive paradigm and thus can be freely shared with users. Digital libraries everywhere should be encouraged to think about creating, and then sharing their own Extracted Features Datasets to help maximize the research impact of their collections in a copyright-sensitive manner."

In addition to his contributions to digital libraries and digital humanities research, Downie is known for helping to establish a vibrant music information retrieval research community. He is founder and first president of the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR). He holds a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition, along with master's and doctoral degrees in library and information science, all from the University of Western Ontario.

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