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The conundrum of resource sharing in Zimbabwe: case of academic libraries
Chisita, Collence Takaingenhamo ; Fombad, Madeleine
Resource sharing has gained impetus among academic libraries as they seek novel and innovative ways to provide for the dynamic and complex needs of users. Zimbabwe is not an exception to the global trend of resource sharing in support of teaching, learning and research as evidenced by the establishment of sector-specific library consortia. This article explores the challenges and opportunities encountered by academic libraries in their endeavour to provide quality services. It will examine how library consortia, namely the Zimbabwe University Library Consortia (ZULC) and the College and Research Libraries of Zimbabwe (CARLC), have been able to provide for the information needs of their users at a time when budgets are low or inadequate and subscription costs to journals remain unaffordable. The article will examine the extent to which library consortia are exploiting information and communication technologies (ICTs) and trendy initiatives, for example Open Access (OA). It will also examine how academic libraries, through resource sharing platforms, have been able to exploit ubiquitous technologies and build on from the traditional interlibrary loan (ILL). The article will recommend a strategy based on a model to strengthen access to scholarship through resource sharing.
Fulltext: idr-1367_1_paper -  PDF
Slides: idr-1367_2_presentation - PDF
Video: idr-1367_3_video -  MP4
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Semantic Enrichment Component
Doležal, Jan ; Otrusina, Lubomír (referee) ; Dytrych, Jaroslav (advisor)
This master's thesis describes Semantic Enrichment Component (SEC), that searches entities (e.g., persons or places) in the input text document and returns information about them. The goals of this component are to create a single interface for named entity recognition tools, to enable parallel document processing, to save memory while using the knowledge base, and to speed up access to its content. To achieve these goals, the output of the named entity recognition tools in the text was specified, the tool for storing the preprocessed knowledge base into the shared memory was implemented, and the client-server scheme was used to create the component.
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Clonal integration of Agrostis stolonifera in heterogeneous soil environment
Duchoslavová, Jana ; Weiser, Martin (advisor) ; Klimešová, Jitka (referee)
Clonal plants may be able to cope with spatial heterogeneity due to the physiological integration of ramets. Previous studies demonstrated that benefits of clonal integration increase with patch contrast between individual ramets. However, the same magnitude of contrast may be perceived differently in rich and poor environments. According to the theoretical work of Caraco and Kelly (1991), I expected these benefits to be the greatest in overall poor conditions and high between-patch contrast. To test this hypothesis, I conducted experiments with pairs of ramets of a stoloniferous grass, Agrostis stolonifera, grown in variously nutrient rich conditions. The experiment with pairs of ramet of similar developmental age showed only very weak effect of integration on growth of ramets, although integration significantly improved survival of ramets and also affected root-shoot ratio of ramets. Nevertheless, there were considerable benefits of integration in the experiment with developmentally older mother ramets and their daughter ramets. Contrary to the predictions, the benefits of integration were bigger in rich conditions and they decreased with increasing between-patch contrast. In addition, effect of integration on root-shoot ratio of ramets was opposite to the expected specialization for acquisition...
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Improving Accuracy of Software Performance Models on Multicore Platforms with Shared Caches
Babka, Vlastimil ; Tůma, Petr (advisor) ; Eeckhout, Lieven (referee) ; Black-Schaffer, David (referee)
The context of this work are performance models of software systems, which are used for predicting performance of a system in its design phase. For this purpose, performance models capture the explicit interactions of software components that make up the system, and the resource demands of primitive actions performed by the components. On contemporary hardware platforms, the software components however interact also through implicit sharing of numerous resources such as processor caches, which influence the performance of the primitive actions. Implicit resource sharing is often omitted in performance models, which affects their prediction accuracy. In this work we introduce two methods for including resource sharing models in performance models. Next, we propose an approximate resource sharing model based on linear regression, and a detailed model for predicting performance impact of cache sharing. The cache model is validated on a real processor and its design is preceded by extensive experiments which investigate the performance aspects of cache sharing. In addition, we introduce a method for robust validation of performance models using many automatically generated applications.
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