A Survey of Fungal Contamination on Books in Public Libraries with Mechanical and Natural Ventilation

Libraries are very propitious environments for the growth of fungi. The great concentration of organic material available for these microorganisms, and often with the lack of adequate ventilation or climate control, would favour this situation. This study was conducted in 2003 to determine the predominant genera of fungi in public libraries by a survey of fungi contaminating the upper surface of books, with and without air conditioning in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the winter and summer, during the respective periods with high and low levels of airborne fungi in that city. Six libraries were chosen, located on the campus of the University of Sao Paulo, three of them with air conditioning and the other three with natural ventilation. In these six libraries, 31 genera of fungi were identified in total. The genera and frequency of contaminant fungi recovered differed significantly between the libraries with and without air conditioning and in the samples collected in the summer as opposed to the winter. Cladosporium was the most frequent in the libraries with and without air conditioning, and in the winter. Aspergillus was isolated more often in the summer.

Adapting Web content for low-literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling

This paper presents an approach for assisting low-literacy readers in accessing Web online information. The oEducational FACILITAo tool is a Web content adaptation tool that provides innovative features and follows more intuitive interaction models regarding accessibility concerns. Especially, we propose an interaction model and a Web application that explore the natural language processing tasks of lexical elaboration and named entity labeling for improving Web accessibility. We report on the results obtained from a pilot study on usability analysis carried out with low-literacy users. The preliminary results show that oEducational FACILITAo improves the comprehension of text elements, although the assistance mechanisms might also confuse users when word sense ambiguity is introduced, by gathering, for a complex word, a list of synonyms with multiple meanings. This fact evokes a future solution in which the correct sense for a complex word in a sentence is identified, solving this pervasive characteristic of natural languages. The pilot study also identified that experienced computer users find the tool to be more useful than novice computer users do.