Explore the stacks: a system for exploration in large digital libraries

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Large amounts of cultural heritage content have now been digitized and are available in digital libraries. However, these are often unstructured and difficult to navigate. Automatic techniques for identifying similar items in these collections could be used to improve navigation since it would allow items that are implicitly connected to be linked together and allow sets of similar items to be clustered. Europeana is a large digital library containing more than 20 million digital objects from a set of cultural heritage providers throughout Europe. The diverse nature of this collection means that the items do not have standard metadata to assist navigation. A range of methods for computing the similarity between pairs of texts are applied to metadata records in Europeana in order to estimate the similarity between items. Various methods for computing similarity have been proposed and can be classified into two main approaches: (1) knowledge-based, which make use of external knowledge sources and (2) corpus-based approaches, which rely on analyzing the frequency distributions of words in documents. Both techniques are evaluated against manual judgements obtained for this study and a multiple-choice test created from manually generated categories in cultural heritage collections. We find that a combination of corpus and knowledge-based approaches provide the best results in both experiments.

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.

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.

Geographic interfaces provide natural, scalable visualizationss for many digital library collections, but the wide range of data in digital libraries presents some particular problems for identifying and disambiguating place names. We describe the toponym-disambiguation system in the Perseus digital library and evaluate its performance. Name categorization varies significantly among different types of documents, but toponym disambiguation performs at a high level of precision and recall with a gazetteer an order of magnitude larger than most other applications.

In 2022, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew began the mass digitisation of 8.25 million herbarium and fungarium specimens and, at the same time, introduced a new integrated collections management system designed to manage specimen data from all the collections at Kew. For the herbarium curation team, this posed a challenge to adapt and update procedures. The herbarium curation team is responsible for the management and care of the herbarium collections, which includes recurating specimens according to new publications. Prior to mass digitisation, this would involve the physical rearrangement of collections and updates of the few specimens that had been digitised already, such as type specimens. Recurating specimens according to new publications is a complicated curation task. Pre-digitisation, curators would use publications to guide the curation task, looking for the name changes and specimens that are cited as being at Kew. Specimens would be pulled from the collections, new determinations would be added to cited specimens, species and genus covers would be updated with the name changes and specimens would be rearranged. Any specimens already barcoded from previous digitisation projects would be updated in the Kew Herbarium Catalogue, but only around 13% of the collection was digitised prior to this mass digitisation effort. The new Integrated Collections Management System (ICMS) database is bringing all of Kew’s collections data together into one place, linking related specimens in other collections at Kew. For example, a related herbarium specimen, spirit collection and seed collection can be linked together. It has been a steep learning curve for the curation team, learning how to update specimen data in this new database. The mass digitisation project has created a large digital herbarium collection for curators to manage. They must ensure that the physical and digital specimen data remain linked together, by avoiding specimen updates being made to one and not the other. As the herbarium is digitised, the data are added to ICMS. The curators need to reduce the risk that the physical and digital collections will diverge if not updated in parallel, and one of these collections would be missing data essential for keeping the specimens up to date to facilitate easy access both in person and online. An extra complication is that updates to the data impact linked specimens in other collections. Additionally, digitised specimen data are available via Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Global Plants database, and will soon be available online via the new data portal that Kew is developing. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that these data aggregators hold the correct information linking to the physical collections at Kew. When considering a recuration, it is important to complete the task fully to ensure that specimens are not misplaced, which causes confusion and wastes time for future users. Last year, curators needed to manage a large physical recuration of a plant family, whilst also updating these collections in the new database. A 12-month curation intern was recruited to dedicate time and focus on a recuration project post-digitisation. The case study aim was to work out the considerations and a procedure for any such large recuration post-digitisation. The Cyperaceae plant family was chosen, as this collection had been digitised. With the data available on ICMS and with an expert at Kew to help navigate the publications to determine the latest taxonomy, this ensured that there was someone to ask about any taxonomic issues that might arise. As the project progressed, many queries arose that involved consulting with experts in curation and digitisation, as well as cyperologists. It has been an incredibly useful project, as a procedure for recurations is being developed to guide curators in the future. We present here the considerations, insights, and a workflow for recurating physical and digital herbarium collections simultaneously, whilst also highlighting issues and how these were resolved.

This paper describes MiBiblio, a highly personalizable interface to large collections in digital libraries. MiBiblio allows users to create virtual places we term personal spaces. As users find useful items in the repositories, they organize these items and keep them handy in their personal spaces for future use. Personal spaces may also be updated by user agents.

ABSTRACTWhen a serendipitous discovery is made while searching within a digital library collection (such as an academic digital library at a university), the searcher has a difficult choice to make: either pursue the serendipitous discovery or set it aside and deal with it later. If they take the first option, this breaks the flow of the primary search activity which may make it difficult to resume. If they take the second option, they may have difficulty re‐finding what they discovered when they are finished with the primary search activity. We have developed a novel search interface that includes topic‐based workspaces and a “read it later” list. Serendipitous discoveries can be easily added to the “read it later” list, allowing the searcher to stay focused on their current search activity knowing that they can easily return to the discovered resource. For each resource saved to the “read it later” list, a textual similarity is calculated against the collection of documents saved in each of the searcher's workspaces. This allows them to easily identify which of their prior search tasks is a best fit for the discovery, as well as an ability to create a new workspace if desired.

Background of the study: In today’s libraries, increasing pressures on managing and visualizing digital collections in an efficient, interactive, and user-centered way continue to challenge the profession. Augmented Reality (AR) holds promise to facilitate spatial navigation, access to collections, and learning experiences in libraries. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to conduct a systematic review of the literature related to AR applications in library digital collections, visualization, and management. Method: Using a Systematized Literature Review (SLR) methodology, articles were found through the Publish or Perish software using Google Scholar as the primary search engine. A total of 100 articles were initially screened, and 36 articles that met predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria were selected for in-depth thematic analysis to uncover emerging patterns and research clusters. Findings: Five main themes were identified: 1) Augmented Reality (AR) for Library Navigation and Orientation, 2) AR for Visualization of Digital Assets: AR is increasingly investigated as a medium for the visualization of digital collections, 3) Integration of AR with Complementary Technologies, 4) Application of AR in Specialized Library Contexts, and 5) AR as a Facilitator of Educational Objectives. The most significant challenges identified include limited infrastructure, difficulties with system integration, and training/education issues for librarians. Conclusion: This review confirms the high potential for AR to improve user engagement, facilitate information connectivity, and enhance educational functions within libraries. However, the success of AR relies on broadband infrastructure, open content, and partnerships across community sectors, with implications for both theory and the development of immersive services.

A case study on migrating large digital collections into a consolidated repository

review-article Share on First workshop on very large digital libraries -- VLDL 2008 Authors: Paolo Manghi ISTI - CNR, Pisa, Italy ISTI - CNR, Pisa, ItalyView Profile , Pasquale Pagano ISTI - CNR, Pisa, Italy ISTI - CNR, Pisa, ItalyView Profile , Pavel Zezula Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Masaryk University, Brno, Czech RepublicView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGMOD RecordVolume 37Issue 4December 2008 pp 115–117https://doi.org/10.1145/1519103.1519127Published:20 March 2009Publication History 1citation135DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Downloads135Last 12 Months0Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access