Examples of Practical Digital Libraries: Collections Built Internationally Using Greenstone

Information seekers are generally on their own to discover and use a research library's growing array of digital collections, and coordination of these collections' development and maintenance is often not optimal. The frequent lack of a conscious design for how collections fit together is of equal concern because it means that research libraries are not making the most of the substantial investments they are making in digital initiatives. This paper proposes a framework for a research library's digital collections that offers integrated discovery and a set of best practices to underpin collection building, federated access, and sustainability. The framework's purpose is to give information seekers a powerful and easy way to search across existing and future collections and to retrieve integrated sets of results. The paper and its recommendations are based upon research undertaken by the author and a team of librarians and technologists at Cornell University Library. The team conducted structured interviews of forty-five library staff members involved in digital collection building at Cornell, studied an inventory of the library's more than fifty digital collections, and evaluated seven existing Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and federated search production or prototype systems. The author will discuss her team's research and the rationale for their recommendations to: present a cohesive view of the library's digital collections for both browsing and searching at the object level; take a programmatic (rather than project-based) approach to digital collection building; require that all new digital collections conform to library-developed and agreed-upon OAI best practices for data providers; and implement organizational structures to sustain the library's digital collections over the long term.

Information seekers are generally on their own to discover and use a research library's growing array of digital collections, and coordination of these collections' development and maintenance is often not optimal. The frequent lack of a conscious design for how collections fit together is of equal concern because it means that research libraries are not making the most of the substantial investments they are making in digital initiatives. This paper proposes a framework for a research library's digital collections that offers integrated discovery and a set of best practices to underpin collection building, federated access, and sustainability. The framework's purpose is to give information seekers a powerful and easy way to search across existing and future collections and to retrieve integrated sets of results. The paper and its recommendations are based upon research undertaken by the author and a team of librarians and technologists at Cornell University Library. The team conducted structured interviews of forty-five library staff members involved in digital collection building at Cornell, studied an inventory of the library's more than fifty digital collections, and evaluated seven existing Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and federated search production or prototype systems. The author will discuss her team's research and the rationale for their recommendations to: present a cohesive view of the library's digital collections for both browsing and searching at the object level; take a programmatic (rather than project-based) approach to digital collection building; require that all new digital collections conform to library-developed and agreed-upon OAI best practices for data providers; and implement organizational structures to sustain the library's digital collections over the long term.

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.

We present here the research work on data mining technologies for complicated attributes relationship in digital library collections. Firstly our work and ideology is introduced as the research ba ckground of this paper. Digital library evaluation is an important topic in information systems domain. We creatively import data mining technologies into it to get an intelligent decision support. But traditional data prediction algorithm didn't work well. This is the problem which would be solved in this paper. Secondly related preliminary research is introduced. We researched on attributes of digital library collections, proposed a parallel discretization algorithm based on z-score theory, and by the discretization algorithm disc overed a complicated condition attribute relation among attributes, it is the reason why traditional data prediction algorithm didn't wor k well. At last a stratified decision tree algorithm for value prediction about digital collection is put forward as the ultimate solution to solve the problem. Stratified attribute concept is imported in this algorithm. It can expand the selection of splitting attribute in decis ion tree from flat information to stereoscopic information, eliminate the influence of complicated condition attribute relationsh ip, nested use existing decision tree algorithms, and solve the bottleneck of data mining application in digital library evaluation.

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.

The library has the quality in the service in the collection of the library. Enhancing library service quality is paramount to ensure users derive greater satisfaction and value. The Faculty of Animal Husbandry Library, Universitas Padjadjaran, has special collection in the animal husbandry science can access students, lecturer, and staff. The purposes this research knew the collection quality analysis at the Animal Husbandry Library, Universitas Padjadjaran, with analyse of the physical and digital library collections’ at the Faculty of Animal Husbandry Library, Universitas Padjadjaran. The research method used a descriptive quantitative methodology using a survey with 132 participating respondents. The participants comprised students enrolled in the faculty, represented by every academic year, from incoming students to those in their final year. The study procedure encompassed problem identification, questionnaire design, participant selection, questionnaire distribution, and survey data handling. The collected survey data were analyzed descriptively and graphically displayed for simplicity in data interpretation. The survey questions were categorized into four evaluative themes: collection diversity, collection completeness, collection currentness, and collection condition. The outcomes indicated consistent satisfaction from the respondents regarding the evaluated areas. Several recommendations were proposed regarding the physical collection of rare books in sub-optimal conditions. In conclusion, users express satisfaction with the diversity, completeness, timeliness, and condition of both physical and digital collections in the Animal Husbandry Faculty Library, Universitas Padjadjaran. Regular assessment of user satisfaction is necessary as a roadmap for augmenting the quality of library services.

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.

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.

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.

Metadata has been proven to play a key role in managing bibliographic data in digital form. The use of metadata contributes to the efficiency of organization of access, search and management of bibliographic data. Through a systematic analysis of the use of metadata in the formation of digital collections, in particular on the example of the description of digital copies of archival documents from the Library's collection of the Manuscripts Department of the NTSh in Lviv, it was established that metadata significantly facilitates access, search, integration and management of digital resources. The analysis of the specifics of the use of metadata in the formation of the Library's digital collections confirms their significance. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the systematic study of the specifics of the application of metadata in this context. The proposed research methodology, which includes the analysis of standards, the development of a metadata scheme, annotation, testing and implementation of metadata, contributes to the improvement of accessibility, organization and structuring of digital collections in the library electronic infrastructure. The article analyzes the role of metadata in solving the problems of digital bibliographic data, such as access, search, integration and data management. A research methodology is proposed, which includes studying existing metadata standards and recommendations, developing a metadata schema, creating annotations for archival documents, performance testing, selecting metadata types, and implementation. This approach made it possible to systematize the process of forming digital collections and improve the accessibility, organization and finding of digital resources in the library's electronic infrastructure.

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.

We use digital library technology to help language learners express themselves by capitalizing on the humangenerated text available on the Web. From a massive collection of n-grams and their occurrence frequencies we extract sequences that begin with the word I, sequences that begin a question, and sequences containing statistically significant collocations. These are preprocessed, filtered, and organized as a digital library collection using the Greenstone software. Users can search the collection to see how particular words are typically used and browse by syntactic class. The digital library is richly interconnected to other resources. It includes links to external vocabularies and thesauri so that users can retrieve words related to any term of interest, and links the collection to the web by locating sample sentences containing these patterns and presenting them to the user. We have conducted an evaluation of how useful the system is in helping students, and the impact it has on their writing. Finally, language activities generated from the digital library content have been designed to help learners master important emotion related vocabulary and expressions. We predict that the application of digital library technology to assist language students will revolutionize second language learning.