Digital libraries: planning and requirements

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.

Features of criminal activity in cyberspace are considered, the dynamics and structure of cybercrimes, the specifics of the use of special knowledge during the investigation of cybercrimes are analyzed. Typical tasks of extracting computer information about economic activity are considered in the context of the possibilities for their solution by various subjects of special knowledge. The boundaries of the participation of an investigator (interrogator), a specialist in the field of economics and a specialist in the field of computer technology, have been determined. It is substantiated that at present, the field of computer technologies has passed from the sphere of special to the sphere of generally known knowledge and can be used directly by the investigator to solve the problems of contextual information retrieval and identifying local databases of accounting programs. It is recommended to involve a specialist in the field of computer technology only if the examination carried out by the investigator did not give a positive result. It is argued that the optimal procedural form of using special knowledge for the purpose of searching and detecting computer information in the course of investigating economic crimes is the participation in the investigative examination of a specialist in the field of economics together with a specialist in the field of computer technology.

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

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.

New Content Languages for Electronic Commerce and Digital Libraries

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.

The Digital Library – used here to connote a general category – aims to innovate the range of services offered to the public by ‘analogue libraries’ to a varied group of users. These services cross the multifaceted cases of public reading libraries (and a large and generalist pool of users), of university libraries (and an equally large pool of users made up of students, undergraduates, faculty, and researchers), and also extend to the world of conservation libraries, which attract a specialized niche audience, very often of international origin. The digitization of precious, ancient, books – both manuscript and printed – represents a great and complex challenge from many points of view (conceptual, design, implementation, logistics, economic, personnel management, etc.), but also the most intuitive way we have now to expand the services offered to users in digital form. In the (recent) past, many digital library initiatives have been carried out in this sense by individual library institutions, as well as by individual private programs or government projects, with variable results in terms of objectives actually achieved, sustainable permanence online, and their ability to effectively counteract the so-called ‘digital obsolescence’ by updating the entire technological infrastructure of the project itself, as well as the individual digital contents, to guarantee their survival. Nowadays, web- based technologies have evolved, increased, and standardized to such an extent that a new approach is possible for digital libraries in terms of usability, visualization, and multi-platform replication of digital content.

The Internet functions as a huge digital library, which is open to us all. As Internet rapidly grows and expands, this virtual library becomes real. The Web is surely world's libraries' largest copying machine. We now see in digital environment that two types of digital libraries are emerging and competing. The contrast between Internet digital library and digital library systems of traditional libraries is, however, outstanding with respect to dealing with digital material. Digital material is running around in former, while digital technology is constantly causing economic, legal and institutional problems in latter. I call this the digital technology complex. It is undeniable that digital works take on a new form of existence in digital world. One might ask whether such works still enjoy copyright protection. As they are no more than binary code? Do they express any idea? Copymart is a market for dealing directly with copyrights. Copyright information is registered in copyright market (CRM) and, because copyright holders themselves provide licensing terms with regard to use of their digital works, users in CRM can find copyright information they want and licensing terms. Furthermore, Copymart also provides a market for digital works, viz. copy market (COM).

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.

The emerging conception of a “digital library” as an information environment in which distributed information sources are made available in an integrated way implies new requirements for indexing and retrieval methods. Therefore, one important research topic in the field of digital libraries is the design of task-specific methods for very precise searching. In addition, we have to anticipate highly dynamic information bases which change continually. This paper outlines an approach which addresses both problems. Rule-based indexing can be used to support highly precise searches in dynamic information bases. The method enables users to perform conceptual searches in image collections, thus going far beyond contemporary content-based retrieval methods for pictorial material. The paper concludes with a discussion of the empirical results obtained so far.