Search results

First, the authors analyze the key problems faced by the protection of digital library readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Second, the authors introduce the characteristics of all kinds of existing approaches to privacy protection and their application limitations in the protection of readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Lastly, the authors compare the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of existing approaches in terms of security, efficiency, accuracy and practicality and analyze the challenges faced by the protection of digital library reader privacy.

In this paper, the authors review a number of research achievements relevant to privacy protection and analyze and evaluate the application limitations of them in the reader privacy protection of a digital library, consequently, establishing the constraints that an ideal approach to library reader privacy protection should meet, so as to provide references for the follow-up research of the problem.

As a result, the authors conclude that an ideal approach to reader privacy protection should be able to comprehensively improve the security of all kinds of readers' privacy information on the untrusted server-side as a whole, under the premise of not changing the architecture, efficiency, accuracy and practicality of a digital library system.

Along with the rapid development of new network technologies, such as cloud computing, the server-side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrustworthy, thereby, posing a serious threat to the privacy of library readers. In fact, the problem of reader privacy has become one of the important obstacles to the further development and application of digital libraries.

In this paper, the authors propose an effective mechanism for the protection of digital library readers' lending privacy under a cloud environment.

The basic idea of the method is that for each literature circulation record, before being submitted to the untrusted cloud database of a digital library for storage, its reader number has to be encrypted strictly at a client, so as to make it unable for an attacker at the cloud to know the specific reader associated with each circulation record and thus protect readers' lending privacy. Moreover, the authors design an effective method for querying the encrypted literature circulation records, so as to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of each kind of database queries related to the encrypted reader number field of literature circulation records.

Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

This paper presents the first study attempt to the privacy protection of readers' literature circulations, which can improve the security of readers' lending privacy in the untrusted cloud, without compromising the accuracy and efficiency of each kind of database queries in the digital library. It is of positive significance to construct a privacy-preserving digital library platform.

The security of archival privacy data in the cloud has become the main obstacle to the application of cloud computing in archives management. To this end, aiming at XML archives, this paper aims to present a privacy protection approach that can ensure the security of privacy data in the untrusted cloud, without compromising the system availability.

The basic idea of the approach is as follows. First, the privacy data before being submitted to the cloud should be strictly encrypted on a trusted client to ensure the security. Then, to query the encrypted data efficiently, the approach constructs some key feature data for the encrypted data, so that each XML query defined on the privacy data can be executed correctly in the cloud.

Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the overall performance of the approach in terms of security, efficiency and accuracy.

This paper presents a valuable study attempting to protect privacy for the management of XML archives in a cloud environment, so it has a positive significance to promote the application of cloud computing in a digital archive system.

The problem of privacy protection in digital libraries is causing people to have increasingly extensive concerns. This study aims to design an approach to protect the preference privacy behind users’ book browsing behaviors in a digital library.

This paper proposes a client-based approach, whose basic idea is to construct a group of plausible book browsing dummy behaviors, and submit them together with users’ true behaviors to the untrusted server, to cover up users’ sensitive preferences.

Both security analysis and evaluation experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, which can ensure the privacy security of users’ book browsing preferences on the untrusted digital library server, without compromising the usability, accuracy and efficiency of book services.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper provides the first attempt to the protection of users’ behavior privacy in digital libraries, which will have a positive influence on the development of privacy-preserving libraries in the new network era.

This study explores the effect of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on corporations' environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and values in the Chinese financial market.

This study collected data covering 158 Chinese listed companies that have successfully completed at least one M&A activity between 2011 and 2020. Fixed effect and random models based on the Hausman test are adopted to mitigate potential heterogeneity issues in the selection.

Results show that acquiring targets with high ESG performance can help increase their own ESG performance, which in turn increases their market values. Heterogeneity and robustness tests also provide consistent results. Findings further confirm the bidirectional correlation between ESG and M&As, and then enrich related literature by suggesting the importance of utilizing M&As as a driver to increase corporate ESG performance.

This study embodies the practical implications of ESG and M&A. Managers, investors and policymakers can highly benefit from the results through practical applications.