Search

Determination of degradation compounds of aged and deacidified papers requires an application of several analytical methods, including chromatographic and electrophoretic ones. Paper and paper extracts are very complex samples. Therefore, application of sample preparation methods is mostly involved in process of analysis. Sampling and sample preparation techniques provide transfer of analytes from a solid sample or from the gas phase (vapour) that exists above a solid sample into the extraction medium. Many extraction techniques were introduced, including conventional and advanced extractions utilizing water or organic extraction solvents, sampling tubes with adsorbents or fibre, often with the preconcentration of analytes. Passive sampling and solid-phase microextraction approaches were introduced as non-invasive techniques in the analysis of historical books and monitoring of indoor air in libraries and archives. This mini-review summarizes the sampling and sample preparation methods as well as new trends applicable in the analysis of degradation compounds of aged and deacidified papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural heritage conservation extends beyond individual interests, therefore preserving patrimony artworks is a timeless endeavor. This study proposes cold atmospheric plasma as a suitable method for the treatment of paper, deteriorated by cellulolytic bacteria. Three distinct methods of treating Bacillus velezensis isolated herein from an artificially deteriorated book were applied using cold atmospheric plasma. Bacteria were cultivated on membranes, in liquid media, and directly on paper. When used for five minutes at a power of 50 W and a current density of 12 mA/cm2, the designed cold atmospheric plasma device proved successful in preventing bacterial growth and spore formation. B. velezensis spore generation is a rare mechanism that has never been observed within these circumstances before. Moreover, the cold atmospheric plasma device can suppress the development of cellulolytic bacteria without damaging the paper substrate, which is a significant step in the preservation of patrimony artworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is devoted to the study of the composition of such a characteristic object for the 17–19 centuries as wafers, which were used to join sheets of paper in documents or to seal letters. Owing to the limited information in the literature and possible degradation processes that may occur with them in this paper, the modern optical techniques were applied to gain information about them. As the object of the investigation the wafers found in the hand-written documents of Academician Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (Vasily Yakovlevich Struve 1793–1864) were chosen (Fund number 721, the RAS Archive, Saint-Petersburg branch, Struve V.). Besides the common way it was found that a large number of colored wafers were used to join several sheets in one composite elongated document and also to make correction on top of what was written. As the part of a major task aimed at maintaining the fund documents dated 19th century and the stability of the used joining wafers in particular the Raman and UV–Vis absorbance spectroscopies were applied in order to investigate wafers chemical composition. It was found the use of two different types of pigments for orange hues. One of them is cinnabar and another one is made up of red lead and massicot mixture. The Prussian blue was used for wafers with dark blue hue and as a mixture with massicot for green hue. According to UV–Vis absorbance spectroscopy it was found the use of anthraquinone type pigment for the red, rose and purple hues. The presence of the wafers with different base materials were determined by means of the Raman spectroscopy, namely of the vegetable (presumably starch) and protein (presumably gelatin) origin. The obtained results were compared with the data available in the previous researches, including the recipes given in the publications of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The importance of the library environment for archival preservation. • Mildew proof and fire proof file packaging material. • Archive storage strategies for micro-environmental interventions. • Low carbon and environmental protection storage of archives. • Mildew proof and flame retardant properties of inorganic nanomaterials. Archives, books and other cultural classics represent precious cultural wealth in every nation. However, the interaction between the paper components and external environmental factors decreases paper durability, leading to the gradual loss of paper cultural relics. This includes the impact of fungi and fire on books, documents, maps and paper works of art leading to incalculable and irreversible cultural losses. In addition, fungal metabolites induce a wide range of allergic reactions that threaten the health of library/archive professionals and users. Given this, it is urgent to explore an alternative archive storage strategy to enhance the comprehensive control of archive mould disease. The preservation environment of paper affects its preservation time and quality, and microenvironment regulation is an important approach to the preventive protection of paper cultural relics. In the present study, inorganic materials were introduced into the archive packaging box to alter the microenvironment and enhance the mould and fire prevention effect without affecting the paper performance. Archive packaging boxes have good anti-microbial effects, with a low content of carbon and nitrogen sources effectively blocking the growth and colonization of mould, creating a microenvironment blocking the growth of surrounding mould, and significantly blocking the occurrence of fire, which could effectively improve storage capabilities and staff health in libraries. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practice, the multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) is typically challenging in two aspects. On the one hand, its Pareto front has imbalanced search difficulties; on the other hand, its search space contains many dominance resistant solutions (DRSs). Decomposing a complicated MOP into several simple MOPs for collaborative optimization (M2M) has been acknowledged to be efficient in coping with the imbalanced search difficulty. Nevertheless, the convergence efficiency of the M2M-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) is rarely investigated, especially on the MOP with DRSs. This paper reveals two convergence challenges faced by M2M-based MOEAs. Subsequently, a variant called MOEA/D-OMDEA is proposed to achieve better convergence efficiency without sacrificing advantages in diversity preservation. MOEA/D-OMDEA integrates a new relaxed dominance criterion, namely the OM-dominance criterion, into its environmental selection to alleviate the negative influence of inferior solutions (e.g., DRSs) as well as to better balance convergence and diversity. MOEA/D-OMDEA is compared with ten state-of-the-art MOEAs on two sets of MOP benchmarks with different characteristics and a real-world problem. Experimental results indicate that MOEA/D-OMDEA can significantly outperform the other ten competitors on these problems. In addition, this paper provides a thorough analysis of the effectiveness of each new algorithmic component and the sensitivity of each newly-introduced parameter. • Decomposing an MOP into multi-objective subproblems to diversity preservation. • A dominance criterion is proposed to deal with dominance resistant solutions. • An external archive is used to remove extreme solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When dealing with Constrained Multi-objective Optimization Problems (CMOPs) and struggling to enhance feasibility, convergence and diversity, the researchers of Constrained Multi-objective Optimization Evolutionary Algorithms (CMOEAs) gravitate toward feasibility or take precedence to preserve well-converged solutions ignoring diversity in the past. To compensate for the defects, the paper proposes CMOEA-MSWA to guide the search of infeasible regions by coordinated strategy of archive and weight vectors. Firstly, the archive carrying the information of population diversity updates the weight vectors. Secondly, the updated weight vectors perpetuate the diversity information to the search of infeasible regions. The circular effects between strategies promote the detection of infeasible solutions with good objectives and exhibit competitive performance in terms of spread and evenness. To testify the versatility the CMOEA-MSWA in enhancing diversity, the comprehensive performance is evaluated firstly and the diversity analysis of the CMOEA-MSWA is carried out on four benchmark suites with 34 test instances, where the number of objectives for some of test problems is scaled from three to five. In comparison with five state-of-the-art CMOEAs, the proposed algorithm yields highly competitive performance in diversity on different types of CMOPs. In addition, the effectiveness of collaboration between archive and weight vectors on handling infeasible solutions is also verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs) are commonly encountered in engineering practice. The key to effectively solving these problems lies in achieving a timely balance between convergence, diversity, and feasibility during iterations. Furthermore, the appropriate utilization of infeasible solutions is crucial for identifying potential feasible regions. In order to accomplish this comprehensive objective, we propose a novel dual-stage constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (CMOEA) called NACMOEA in this paper. It can be characterized by the following features: 1) Introducing a novel niche-based individual selection and infeasible solution utilization strategy to enhance convergence, diversity, and feasibility. 2) Presenting a cooperative search strategy assisted by dual archives to approximate the constrained Pareto front (CPF) from both feasible and infeasible perspectives, thereby improving the efficiency of obtaining the complete CPF. 3) Designing a new stage switch method based on non-dominant coverage rate to ensure proper completion of search stage switching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NACMOEA exhibits competitive comprehensive performance when compared with other advanced CMOEAs. • The search process of the proposed NACMOEA is divided into two stages, where a new dual archive collaboration strategy is developed iteratively. • A niche-based environmental selection and an infeasible individual utilization strategy are designed to better balance the performance. • A novel non-dominant coverage rate metric is developed to facilitate appropriate switching in the search stage. • The proposed NACMOEA performs well compared to other advanced algorithms on various complex CMOP test problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a visualising tool to explore the population of an Ontology, obtained through the processes of automatic migration and text information extraction. It was developed in the context of EPISA project, a R&D project that aims to represent the Portuguese National Archives records information in CIDOC-CRM, an ontology developed for museums. The tool allows the migration process developers to visualise the instances and their properties, and to debug the migration process and the migration representation model, or to explore the Archives by final users. It uses modeling and reasoners OWL-API with SPARQL-DL queries to obtain the exploration results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the process of digitizing paper archives at the machine-building enterprise. The manual method is used for post processing of images by means of graph editors. The other method is based on the use of the open source library OpenCV; it allows employees to correct positioning errors of scan images of engineering drawings automatically at the stage of scanning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coevolutionary algorithms have demonstrated high performance on many constrained multi-objective problems. However, on some problems with fraudulent constraints or small feasible regions, they may fail to converge to the Pareto front (PF) or even fail to find a feasible solution. To search for feasible solutions robustly for various problems and obtain solutions approaching the PF as possible, this paper proposes a coevolutionary algorithm assisted by two archives. To be specific, a population for minimizing constraint violation and a population for optimizing objectives without constraints coevolve to find a feasible solution first. Then, the feasible solutions are improved by the population with constrained dominance principle and an archive consisting of inversely-updated infeasible solutions. In addition to searching in the feasible regions found so far, the unconstrained population continues searching the objectives without constraints, expecting that new feasible regions can be spotted in the promising regions. To mitigate the issues that small feasible regions may be missed by the unconstrained population, a diversity archive is updated in a larger objective space than the unconstrained population to enhance exploration. In the experiments, the proposed method is compared with 11 state-of-the-art algorithms on 67 problems to demonstrate its effectiveness. The results show that the proposed method is very robust in finding feasible solutions and obtains better or competitive performance on most problems. • Four sources of parents are maintained in the process to achieve the robustness of the algorithm. • The optimization is divided into two stages to benefit from single-objective optimization. • Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pathology archive of any hospital is likely to contain tens of thousands of slides and formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) blocks, with their number constantly increasing. As a result, serious space and management issues are created. There has always been a favorable location for the pathology laboratory to rapidly and efficiently collect specimens and to meet the different service requirements of clinicians and patients. However, archiving may be one of the most neglected issues in the planning of spaces and activities, so much so that many laboratories are currently in trouble and looking for space inside and outside their hospitals. Another crucial issue is related to the environmental conditions of the identified preservation place, which, based on their characteristics, probably provide suboptimal habitats in most cases. For FFPE blocks, controlled temperature (<27 °C) and humidity (>30% and <70%) are recommended, with control systems for parasite infestation. For glass slides, systems suitable for guaranteeing their safety, traceability and conservation suitable for possible revision are recommended. The aim of this position paper is to outline the issues that currently exist in archives and to suggest a rational health policy solution to overcome the problems raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Geoswim programme is an expedition-type project which is aiming to survey, monitor and measure the entire perimeter of rocky coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. The project officially started in 2012 with the first one-man survey of 193.4 km by snorkeling along the northeastern Adriatic coasts, and is ongoing. So far, 559.5 km of rocky coasts have been surveyed, over 98 days of survey, and several hundred thousand time-lapse images, continuous videos and outline images have been collected, both above and below the waterline. Bathymetric data and physical/chemical parameters, such as temperature and electrical conductivity have also been collected during the snorkel surveys. Instruments are hosted on a specially-built raft, called instrumental-supported raft (ISR). The data are not homogeneous because over the years the approach has changed following the introduction of new technologies and some redesign of the instruments used, and, in part, also the type of data collected. Moreover, observational data for use in coastal studies and for integrating instrumental data are collected. The paper presents and take stock of the geometry of the database and discusses the main results of the Geoswim programme. Data analysed highlighted that the database is a significant archive that provides 1) images and videos as a baseline for subsequent comparisons, 2) large amount of images to be used to build 3D models of coastal landforms, 3) data for statistics, and 4) a valuable source of possible discoveries of unknown coastal objects, such as sea caves, tidal notches at unexpected sites, ecological observations, etc. • Presentation and take stock of the database of the Geoswim programme • Discussion of the potentialities of the swim-survey approach through published and new data collected during the expeditions • Analysis of the Geoswim programme and its evolution • Future perspectives of the programme [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) that widely exist in real world concern all optimal solutions compromised among multiple objectives. Chicken swarm optimization algorithm derived from emergent behaviors of organisms provides an effective way for handling MOPs. To speed up convergence and improve uniformity of Pareto-optimal solutions, a multi-objective chicken swarm optimization algorithm based on dual external archives and boundary learning strategy (MOCSO-DABL) is proposed in this paper. Dual external archives are employed to distinguish and choose two types of elite solutions, with the purpose of more effectively guiding individual evolution. A boundary learning strategy guides the chickens to learn from boundary individuals in the later stage of evolution. Moreover, fast non-dominated sorting is adopted to establish the hierarchical social structure of a chicken population, and learning strategies of roosters, hens and chicks are improved to meet the requirements of MOPs. Experimental results on 14 benchmark functions show that the proposed MOCSO-DABL outperforms other five state-of-the-art algorithms significantly. • Dual external archives are introduced and integrated into the CSO algorithm. • A boundary learning strategy is introduced to learn from boundary individuals. • A fast non-dominated sorting is adopted to construct the hierarchical structure. • Improved strategies ensure rapid convergence, uniformity, and universality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solving constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs) obtained more and more popularity in the last decade. Various constrained multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms were developed for the CMOPs. However, most of them are ineffective in dealing with CMOPs with complex infeasible regions. In this paper, the two archives assisted push–pull evolutionary algorithm (namely PPTA) is proposed to handle the CMOPs with complex infeasible regions effectively. PPTA has the following features: (i) Two archives (A and B) are used, where A is used in the push stage to promote convergence and diversity, and in the pull stage to explore undetected feasible regions; in the pull stage B is used for the promotion of convergence, diversity, and feasibility. (ii) A new push stage strategy is devised for better approximating the unconstrained Pareto front, as well as the constrained Pareto front. (iii) The aggregation function in the pull stage is improved to better explore the objective space. (iv) a new ɛ -constrained method is customized to enhance the ability to explore feasible regions. Results on 33 widely used instances and eight real-world problems verify the superiority of PPTA over 10 related methods. • A two archives assisted push–pull evolutionary algorithm is proposed. • The shortages and limitations of original PPS are remedied. • Our approach yielded the superiority over 10 related methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Soil physical archives are a valuable resource, and should be used sparingly. • We propose a strategy to subsample an archive from Ethiopia. • A model from cognate landscapes is used to evaluate proposed subsamples. • We publish our criteria to evaluate the strategy before receiving data. The value of physical archives of soil material from field sampling activities has been widely recognized. If we want to use archive material for new destructive analyses to support a task, such as spatial mapping, then an efficient sub-sampling strategy is needed, both to manage analytical costs and to conserve the archive material. In this paper we present an approach to this problem when the objective is spatial mapping by ordinary kriging. Our objective was to subsample the physical archive from the Ethiopia Soil Information System (EthioSIS) survey of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR) for spatial mapping of two variables, concentrations of particular fractions of selenium and iodine in the soil, which had not been measured there. We used data from cognate parts of surrounding regions of Ethiopia to estimate variograms of these properties, and then computed prediction error variances for maps in SNNPR based on proposed subsets of the archive of different size, selected to optimize a spatial coverage criterion (with some close sample pairs included). On this basis a subsample was selected. This is a preregistered experiment in that we have proposed criteria for evaluating the success of our approach, and are publishing that in advance of receiving analytical data on the subsampled material from the laboratories where they are being processed. A subsequent short report will publish the outcome. The use of preregistered trials is widely recommended and used in areas of science including public health, and we believe that it is a sound strategy to promote reproducible research in soil science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of fluvial archives as records of the landscape evolution and geomorphological configuration of the southeastern Brazilian highlands (Brazilian Atlantic Plateau), particularly in the Espinhaço meridional ridge. A cartographic bases search was carried out, complemented by fieldwork to support the definition of the studied 10 valleys. During fieldwork, depositional levels and sequences were described in terms of composition, thickness, organization, and transitions, vertical sections were selected and described. Different fluvial levels in each valley were identified mainly by the heights and characteristics of the sediments of which they were composed. Sediments were sampled at 24 representative points and dated using the Single-Aliquot Regenerative Optically Stimulated Luminescence technique (SAR OSL, five aliquots). The depositional archives allow the reconstruction of six regional relief evolution phases associated with fluvial processes throughout the Late Quaternary (from 26 ka to present). On the upper quartzite surfaces, the bottom valleys are wider, and the channels are straighter, with beds and/or rocky banks than the down surfaces. In this context, the current river dynamics have been controlled by local baseline levels that have reduced the intensity of downcutting. In the lower crystalline areas, valleys tend to be narrower and deeply dissected, favoring the mischaracterization of older archives. Stepped depositional levels in these compartments indicate the role of the Brazilian Shield tectonics (epirogenetic uplifts) in regional geomorphological evolution. Furthermore, the set of deposits and river system characteristics, which show filled valley bottoms, reflect the current stabilization of the regional base level and indicate the importance of lithostructural, climate, and anthropic aspects for understanding the role of fluvial processes in landscape configuration. • The relief evolution in Southern Espinhaço Ridge has been strongly influenced by the lithostructure since the Pleistocene. • The upper quartzite compartment and the Gouveia Depression have been modeled differently by fluvial processes. • Six fluvial phases since 26 ka have been identified in the Gouveia Depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solving nonlinear equations (NEs) has been obtained considerable attentions in recent years. However, it is still a difficult problem to improve the efficiency of the algorithm to find multiple roots of NEs. Aiming to deal with this issue, an archive guided speciation-based differential evolution (AGSDE) is presented in this paper. It contains three main components: (i) an archive construction approach is used to save the historical individual with poor fitness values in the selection phase; (ii) a reusing historical individual mechanism is implemented to guide the evolution; (iii) a local search method for solving NEs is performed on different subpopulations to refine the accuracy of the candidate solutions. The performance of AGSDE is tested on 30 NEs problems with different characteristics. Experimental results of AGSDE are competitive with those of other state-of-the-art methods in terms of root rate and success rate. In addition, AGSDE also shows its superiority for solving the other 10 complex NEs problems. • An archive construction approach is proposed to save the historical individuals. • A reusing historical individual strategy is developed to select suitable individuals for evolution. • A local search is performed on the subpopulation to refine the accuracy of the roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient manipulation of Pareto fronts and Pareto archives involves non-trivial data structures and algorithms. Because of this complexity, researchers and programmers might recur to naive strategies based on linear lists, where most operations require expensive pairwise comparisons between all elements. The lack of a functional container type for Pareto fronts and archives reduces their usefulness in multi-objective optimization, simulations in economics, decision making, data analysis, or any application that caches objects based on multiple criteria. Despite the existence of some frameworks for multi-objective optimization, there is no user-oriented solution focused exclusively on efficient implementations of dynamic fronts and archives as abstract data types with their fundamental operations for insertion, removal, searching, reference points, hyperbox queries, nearest points, and indicators. This paper describes such a library based on spatial data structures for Pareto fronts and archives with specialized algorithms to perform all of these operations with low asymptotic complexity. At a negligible integration cost, the results confirm this implementation achieves notable performance gains over naive methods for fronts of all sizes and dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the easy implement and fast convergence speed in single objective optimization problems, the particle swarm optimization algorithm has been extended to many-objective optimization problems. When designing a many-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm, archive maintenance strategy and selection of leaders are two crucial issues. To addressing these two problems, this paper proposed a vector angles-based many-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm using archive. In this algorithm, a new method was proposed to make the external archive getting a balance between convergence and diversity, based on the values of vector angles of each solution. Also, we designed a novel strategy based on vector angle and decomposition to select g b e s t and p b e s t from the archive to promote evolution of the population. Besides, the shift-based density estimation was used as the standard to clone elite solutions to strengthen the quality of the external archive. The experiment results indicate that our algorithm has competitive performance comparing with the six state-of-the-art many-objective optimization algorithms on three widely used benchmarks DTLZ, WFG, and MaF. • A novel external archive maintaining method based on vector angle is designed. • A new method based on vector angle and decomposition to select g b e s t , p b e s t in the external archive has been proposed. • An SDE-based clone strategy is used to reproduce a new external archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]