Can Rule-Based Indexing Support Concept-BasedMultimedia Retrieval in Digital Libraries? Some Experimental Results∗

The authors discuss in this chapter the emergence of digital library environments of the modern world. The emerging field of digital libraries brings together participants from many existing areas of research. Currently, the field lacks a clear agenda independent of these other area. It is tempting for researchers to think that the field of digital libraries is a natural outgrowth of an already known field. From a database or information retrieval perspective, digital libraries may be seen as a form of federated databases. From a hypertext perspective, the field of digital libraries could seem like a particular application of hypertext technology. From a wide-area information service perspective, digital libraries could appear to be one use of the World Wide Web. From a library science perspective, digital libraries might be seen as continuing a trend toward library automation. New concepts and applications appear fast in the information world. Current exploitation of multimedia technology is changing our understanding of the interconnections of graphics, sound, and images, and the types of information they present. Thus, we need to understand both human psyche and available technologies in order to create and to interpret new expressions. The chapter highlights the benefits of digital information and how the libraries are helpful in enhancing the use of digital information. The chapter shows that libraries can provide Internet access, electronic contents, and training to the users. It explains the changing and changed attitude of information professionals in the present scenario.

PurposeA significant amount of digital repository research and development activity is taking place worldwide, which calls for the investigation of issues identified as critical to the development, management and sustainability of these repositories. The purpose of this paper is to establish a comprehensive set of critical success factors (CSFs) that would enable successful digital libraries implementation.Design/methodology/approachThe design of this study is exploratory in nature due to lack of previous research about CSFs in digital library projects. The paper builds the research framework to find CSFs for digital libraries initiatives by collecting possible factors from literature on CSFs of information systems; and feedback from ten experts who have had experience in digital library research and development as well as implementation, through e‐mail interviews. Six dimensions in the enterprise architecture framework (namely motivation, resource, people, process, location and time) needed to create the environment in which digital delivery can be effective and sustained, are mapped with the CSF established from the literature.FindingsThe results revealed six dimensions of CSFs and 36 potential success factor statements contributed by the study participants. Based on these findings, this paper postulates that successful deployment of a digital library implementation may depend on this set of success factors. The identification of these factors has important implications on digital library development.Originality/valueThere has been no comprehensive study on the success factors of digital libraries in the library and information science context, as such, no investigation of the factors in some real‐life contexts of digital library activities. It may help digital library start‐ups to understand what sources and services they need to develop to make their applications successful in an already very populated network. Both researchers and practitioners in the field of digital libraries may value the novelty and results of this study.

We present here our findings of a study, part of larger research focusing on understanding the structure and composition of the academic community of Digital Library (DL). Using social network analysis, the present study analyses the structural features of editorial boards (EBs) of leading journals of DL. Following the premise that boundaries and directions of a field, especially an evolving one such as digital libraries is shaped by journals and their editors, we undertook a study of the editorial boards of the top 56 journals in the field of digital libraries. Techniques from social network analysis are applied to the data to reveal the structures and relationships within the EBs and journals of the DL community. The paper reveals the structure of the scientific grouping as well as the key players in the system and finds the ‘diversified convergence’ of fields. The focus is on the stars of the DL community as well as journals. We have compared the results with our previous studies carried out on different communication platforms of the DL world. Our results show that while computer science is the common thread, library and information science is the field that dominates, both in the scheme of things of top-ranking journals as well as editors.

Although the field of digital libraries is still young, digital library collections have been built around the world and are being deployed on numerous public web sites. But what is a digital library, exactly? In many respects the best way to characterize the notion is by extension, in terms of actual examples, rather than by intension as in a conventional definition. In a very real sense, digital libraries are whatever people choose to call by the term “digital library.”

Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community

Digital libraries are truly the libraries of the future in light of the general trend occurring in the world as a whole towards the transition to the electronic world and digital content. The field of libraries and information is striving hard to catch up with this trend and try to benefit from the applications of new technologies in the field of computer technology, information and communications systems and their actual application in the world of libraries. Welcome, to prove that the field of libraries and information has not and will not die, but rather is trying closely to follow developments. In this paper, we try to identify the changes occurring in the field of digital libraries from the beginning of the idea until its development now, while mentioning the stages and steps that must be followed to plan digital library projects.

The digital library field is recently broadening its scope of applicability and it is also continuously adapting to the frequent changes occurring in the internet society. Accordingly, digital libraries are slightly moving from a controlled environment accessible only to professionals and domain-experts, to environments accessible to casual users that want to exploit the potentialities offered by the digital library technology. These new trends require, for instance, new search paradigms to be offered, new media content to be managed, and new description extraction techniques to be used.Building digital library applications, and effectively adapting them to new emerging trends, requires to develop a platform that offers standard and powerful building blocks to support application developers. In this paper we discuss our experience of using MILOS, a multimedia content management system oriented to the construction of digital libraries, to build a demanding application dedicated to non-professional users. Specifically, we discuss the design and implementation of an on-line photo album (PhotoBook), which is a digital library application that allows people to manage their own photos, to share them with friends, and to make them publicly available and searchable.PhotoBook, uses a complex internal metadata schema (MPEG-7) and allows users to simply express complex queries (combining similarity search and fielded search), enabling them to retrieve material of interest even if metadata are imprecise or missing.KeywordsDigital LibrarySimilarity SearchMultimedia ContentMulti Medium ServerMetadata SchemaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Digital libraries (DL) can be characterized as the “high end” of the Internet, digital systems which offer significant quantities of organized, selected materials of the type traditionally found in libraries, such as books, journal articles, photographs and similar documents (Schwartz, 2000). They normally offer quality resources based on the collections of well-known institutions, such as major libraries, archives, historical and cultural associations (Love & Feather, 1998). The field of digital libraries is now firmly established as an area of study, with textbooks (Arms, 2000; Chowdhury & Chowdhury, 2003; Lesk, 1997); electronic journals from the US (D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/) and the UK (Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/); even encyclopedia articles (McCarthy, 2004).

Digital libraries (DL) can be characterized as the “high end” of the Internet, digital systems which offer significant quantities of organized, selected materials of the type traditionally found in libraries, such as books, journal articles, photographs and similar documents (Schwartz, 2000). They normally offer quality resources based on the collections of well-known institutions, such as major libraries, archives, historical and cultural associations (Love & Feather, 1998). The field of digital libraries is now firmly established as an area of study, with textbooks (Arms, 2000; Chowdhury & Chowdhury, 2003; Lesk, 1997); electronic journals from the US (D-Lib Magazine: http://www.dlib.org/) and the UK (Ariadne: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/); even encyclopedia articles (McCarthy, 2004).

For the 30th anniversary of the Information Management Systems (IMS) research group of the University of Padua, we report the main and more recent contributions of the group that focus on the users in the field of Digital Library (DL). In particular, we describe a dynamic and adaptive environment for user engagement with cultural heritage collections, the role of log analysis for studying the interaction between users and DL, and how to model user behaviour.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implications of current theories that advocate for minimal levels of description in digital collections. Specifically, this paper looks at the archival theory of “More Product, Less Process” and its encouragement of collection-level description. The purpose of the study was to analyze how levels of description impact resource retrieval. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed 35 images from a New York Public Library (NYPL) digital collection present on the NYPL website and on Flickr. The methodology was designed to reflect users’ information seeking behavior for image collections. There were two research questions guiding this study: what are the descriptive terms used to describe items in digital collections? and what is the success rate of retrieving resources using assigned descriptive terms? Findings The results of this study revealed that the images from the NYPL collection were more difficult to find on the institution’s website as compared with Flickr. These findings suggest that lesser levels of description in digital collections hinder resource retrieval. Research limitations/implications These findings suggest that lesser description levels hurt the findability of resources. In the wake of theories such as “More Product, Less Process”, information professionals must find ways to assign metadata to individual materials in digital image collections. Originality/value Recent research concerning description levels of digital collections is several years old and focuses mostly on the usefulness of collection-level metadata as a supplement to or substitute for item-level metadata. Few, if any, studies exist that explore the implications of description levels on resource retrievability and findability. This study is also unique in that it discusses these implications in the context of less-is-more theories of archival processing.

Integration of experiential learning into the library and information science (LIS) courses has been a theme in LIS education, but the topic deserves renewed attention with an increasing demand for professionals in the digital library field and in light of the new initiative announced by the Library of Congress (LC) and the Institution of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for national residency program in digital curation. The balance between theory and practice in digital library curricula, the challenges of incorporating practical projects into LIS coursework, and the current practice of teaching with hands on activities represent the primary areas of this panel discussion.The panel brings together a representative from the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiative to talk about the Residency in Digital Curation program and LIS educators who are actively involved in developing and teaching DL courses with experiential components in face‐to‐face, hybrid, and online environments.

New Content Languages for Electronic Commerce and Digital Libraries

The re-use of text-particularly misuse, or plagiarism-is a contentious issue. Technological approaches to identifying student plagiarism are now widespread, but academic publications do not typically come under such scrutiny. It is common knowledge that plagiarism occurs, but we do not know how frequently or extensively, nor where in a document it is likely to be found. This paper offers the first assessment of text re-use in the field of digital libraries. It also characterises text re-use generally (and plagiarism specifically) according to location in the document, author seniority, publication venue and open access. As a secondary contribution, we suggest future routes towards more rigorous plagiarism detection and management.

Accessing information sources to retrieve data requested by a user can be expensive, especially when dealing with distributed information sources. One way to reduce this cost is to cache the results of queries, or related classes of data. This paper presents an approach to caching and addresses the issues of which information to cache, how to describe what has been cached, and how to use the cached information to answer future queries. We consider these issues in the context of the SIMS information server, which is a system for retrieving information from multiple heterogeneous and distributed information sources. The design of this information server is ideal for representing and reusing cached information since each class of cached information is simply viewed as another information source that is available for answering future queries.