Report on BooksOnline'11: 4th workshop on online books, complementary social media, and crowdsourcing

The BooksOnline Workshop series aims to foster the discussion and exchange of research ideas and initiatives addressing challenges and exploring opportunities around large collections of digital or digitized books and complementary media. The fourth workshop in the series, BooksOnline'111 called for special attention to the role of social media and the phenomena of crowdsourcing in the context of online books, which are expected to be key in defining new user experiences in digital libraries and on the Web. The workshop boasted a high quality program, including keynote addresses by Ville Miettinnen, CEO of Microtask and Adam Farquhar, Head of Digital Library Technology at The British Library. From the accepted papers, two main themes became salient: 1) The role of relationships among authors, communities and books, and 2) Reading experiences and behaviours. This paper provides a summary of the workshop, its accepted contributions and the subsequent plenary discussion.