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This special issue of JoDI covers the economic aspects of managing digital content and establishing digital libraries with articles from key figures and institutions.Topics covered include delivering and preserving information, journal and publishing issues, and the evaluation of the digital information environment.
The Journal of Digital Information Management (JDIM) is a new quarterly journal sponsored by the Digital Information Research Foundation. JDIM covers all aspects of digital information management including digital information processing, digital content management, digital world structuring, digital libraries, metadata, and other related fields. JDIM is an international peer reviewed journal that acts as a portal to the digital information world.
The CLIR commissioned a survey of North American based digital cultural heritage initiatiaves (DCHIs) in 2002 to identify the scope, financing, organizational structure, and sustainability of DCHIs. The survey was the initial step in a larger effort aimed at developing recommendations for a coordinated strategy to sustain and strengthen digital cultural heritage initiatives. The Survey revealed a vast array of missions, services, programs, and products. Most DCHIs are membership organizations with foundations being the largest source of financial support for digital cultural initiatives. Many DCHIs are not in a sustainable state. Recommendations for sustainability include conducting needs assessments, improved training, clarification of missions, improved communications, and identifying stable repositories.
In the context of the need to keep up with the content on the Internet that would be of value for the Scout Report's Signpost catalog of Internet resources, the article describes an approach to linking distributed collections of metadata so that they can be searched as a single collection. The infrastructure, based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) is described. The advantages of using linked metadata as opposed to keyword indexing searching are discussed. Other architectures for metadata discovery are also outlined. Research issues and future directions for the project are included. The Internet Scout Project was funded by NSF.
The digital archival records research program at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications investigates all aspects of creating and disseminating digital collections including proposed and adopted standards, emerging technologies and formats, effects on previously established processes, and protection of original materials. An example of early work conducted in this area is the Regional Medical Programs collection. Lister Hill is currently working with the NLM's History of Medicine Division (HMD) to effect a technology transfer which will result in a digital library developed and maintained by the Modern Manuscripts section of HMD. The section will house and disseminate historically significant digitized collections, particularly those of prominent biomedical scientists.
This paper identifies and scopes new issues in authentication and access management for sharing information across organizations, maps best-practice approaches using existing and emerging technologies to accomplish access by multiple communities, provides a common vocabulary and framework to assist in development of licensing and resource-sharing agreements, highlights technological and policy considerations, and lays the foundation for community standards.
This "index" page links to individual issues of the quarterly newsletter that provide coverage of scientific and technical electronic information, Internet, the Web, and related issues such as policy and standards, Web site development guidelines, and topical resources with S&T information content.
ICSU is a non-governmental organization, founded in 1931 to bring together natural scientists in international scientific endeavor. The Council acts as a focus for the exchange of ideas and information and the development of standards. This site links to the conference program, committees, and summaries of invited papers for this joint conference with UNESCO. The 13 invited papers cover topics on standards, archiving, electronic publishing in developing countries, digital libraries, S&T information, copyright, data security, and economics of information.
CLIR brings together libraries, archives, and information organizations to address issues of digital resources and services, preservation and access. The CLIR Home Page gives information on the Council and its publications and provides links to the Commission on Preservation & Access, digital libraries, economics of information, leadership and to a directory of public access networks.
The DLF operates under the Council on Library and Information Resources for the purpose of creating, maintaining, expanding and preserving distributed collections of digital materials. The site contains information about the Federation including DLF presentations and publications and links to Web resources on digital libraries.
A training guide describing the imaging process and quality review. A glossary is included. The manual prototypes a quality review process for any organization undertaking document imaging, and specifically addresses quality review of contractors performing document imaging.
This CENDI report details the digital/virtual library projects underway at nine CENDI agencies. Questions addressed during the workshop held in connection with this project include the audience for the digital/virtual library, the kinds of materials provided, the organization of the product, the system architecture that supports it, and challenges, issues, and plans for the future. This report is intended to serve as a baseline for future independent and collaborative projects within CENDI, and to provide information for others anticipating similar projects.
The traditional/historic view of the information world is described. The new model which is emerging after 117 years of Science was also described. Many of the services that are currently provided electronically or are envisioned cannot be done in paper. He described new features and the result of the integration that can be done. Payment in a pay-per-view model was discussed.
The work of the task group - to define a business model that can support the procurement of electronic journals and other electronic resources across a consortia of federal libraries - is discussed. Issues and concerns have been collected. A major issue is the publishers' definition of a site as being geographically centralized. Pricing, year-to-year government funding, and government contracting are also challenges.
The general philosophy and components of the CapNet digital library being developed to support the legislative process in Congress is described. It is based on an open systems, object-oriented architecture. Standards are important, with different media stored as data fragments and then integrated. Integration of commercial systems is also important. The five components of a digital library -- workflow, the network, object management information, the object content repository, and text indexing -- are described. Future plans are discussed.
The results (status and lessons learned) of the first round of digital library projects funded under the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) are described. The six initial projects, covering multimedia, indexing of video, Internet navigation, interoperability, creation of indexes from a large corpus of scientific published information, geospatial searching, and multi-valent documents, are described in detail. The preparations and descriptions of the new call for projects is also described.
The major tenets of the DARPA DLI program are presented, along with details about the six projects that are underway at major universities.
This report provides the outcome of discussions and presentations at a Digital Library Federal sponsored workshop on access issues in digital libraries. While the workshop focused on cultural heritage materials, the findings are applicable to other areas. The group identified key issues including authentication of users, legal responsibilities of research institutions, and balancing authors rights with access to information. Five key properties were identified simplicity, trustworthiness, good faith, reasonable terms and privacy. The attendees called for research into economic models and system usability.
A site containing links to many digital library resources including a bibliography, periodicals, organizations involved in digital libraries, and conferences. Links are also provided to projects dealing with cataloging and indexing, electronic journals, and metadata resources.
Geolibraries are digital libraries who primary access is by place, through spatial coordinate referencing. The goal is to access all information known about a particular place, or more specifically, an area on the earth's surface without the problems and imprecision of variant place name searching, and in a distributed fashion. The report describes content services that could be provided by a geolibrary, the infrastructure needed, intellectual property rights issues, and organizational issues involved to develop distributed geolibraries.
This is the homepage for the NSF Digital Libraries Initiatives. It presents information about the purpose of the initiative, previous awards and their results, announcements of upcoming proposal schedules, and announcements of related meetings/workshops. Links are generally provided to the sites for funded projects.
This is the Web site for a joint project of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutes Core Programmes and UNESCO. Many libraries world-wide are engaged in digization projects. However, there is no single resource from which to locate these projects. The goal of this project is to create a virtual library for these digitization projects. In addition, the programme is studying the issues related to such large scale projects and the provision of such a virtual library.
Digest of the Report. Full report is available for purchase. The issues related to copyright in the digital environment are reviewed. The group proposes technologies, policies, and education in copyright as better means to control theft of digital materials than legislation. The group cautions that legislatures should move slowly since the environment is still so new and so volatile.
This is a report that reviews the application of Knowledge Organization Systems to the digital environment. Such systems include term lists, classification schemes, glossaries, and thesauri.
This is a report of a workshop hosted by the Department of Energy and held at the National Academy of Sciences on May 30-31, 2000. The workshop was chaired by Dr. Alvin Trivelpiece with other participants being experts from the major disciplines in the physical sciences as well as science policy, information science, and scientific publishing. The main objective of the workshop was to obtain the scientific community's input regarding the merits of the concept of a "Future Information Infrastructure for the Physical Sciences" that would offer a comprehensive collection of scientific and technical information in the physical sciences. This information infrastructure would also offer services that would facilitate scientific communication and increase the productivity of the scientific enterprise in the United States. The Workshop consisted of general sessions and discussions on this topic; recommendations are included.
The DLF Newsletter is a quarterly web-based publication which reports the progress of DLF initiatives and new digital library services, collections, projects, and challenges of its members. The focus of the Newsletter is on the exchange of information rather than being an authoritative publication. The majority of the Newsletter is comprised of member reports that reflect recent digital library developments and experiences. The DLF also maintains serveral searchable databases including; (1) documenting the digital library - which consists of policies, strategies, working papers, standards and other guidelines, and technical documents; and (2) digital collections - which is composed of members' public- domain digital collections. The Newsletter also acts as a gateway to three registries that provide a clearinghouse of members' digital library expertise and activities.
This article describes Harvard's efforts in building its first-generation digital library infrastructure. Some of the key issues addressed include: metadata, technical formats, reformatting, legal issues, preservation, interfaces and access. Other areas discussed include the development of a core set of systems to support digital collections and the definition of an overall technical framework.
This article highlights some of the findings in the report "A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress." The author chaired the committee responsible for the document. In essence, the Library of Congress (LC) has no clear digital vision and has not begun to deal successfully with its responsibility to acquire, select, and preserve materials in this format. A major effort needs to be made to create a seamless system that enforces the mandatory deposit provisions of US law by acquiring, selecting, cataloging and making accessible material in electronic form. The author also noted that LC has some management issues that need to be resolved.
This comprehensive introduction to digital libraries was sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc. to assist public, academic, special, and government libraries in their efforts to develop, manage, and distribute digital content. The book is divided into three sections designed to cover all stages of the digital implementation. This second edition has expanded and updated all sections, particularly the third section on resources.
This article discusses the Electronic Bolles Archive of the history and topography of London project which explores the extent to which geographic visualization tools can assist readers to understand the complex temporal-spatial interactions that shape many documents. The goal of this project is to develop a temporal-spatial front end for digital libraries. The authors conclude by stating that we need a richer model for data exchange if digital libraries are to realize their potential.
The report identifies the key components needed to build good digital libraries. It provides a framework for identifying, organizing, and applying existing knowledge and resources in developing procedures. Discussions concerning principles and best practices for digital collections, digital objects, metadata, and project planning are provided.
Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) was designed to facilitate access for researchers and academicians to distributed, archived environmental datasets. The article discusses the use of interactive data analysis and display systems, "thick" client applications, distributed sources, etc., as they relate to the THREDDS system and the status of development.
The article discusses the approach taken by Arc (a federated digital library that is compliant with the Open Archives Initiative) in harvesting data from heterogeneous digital repositories. Because of the variability of metadata quality, Arc created an interface allowing both keyword and advanced searching as well as through an interactive approach.
The Virtual Data Center (VDC), developed under a grant from the Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase 2, is an instrument to manage and share numerical social science data across multiple institutions. The website provides access to the software, which is an "open-source digital library system for the management and dissemination of distributed collections of quantitative data." all face challenges when trying to find and use quantitative
Minutes from a presentation by George Roncaglia, NASA Langley Research Center at the CENDI meeting on February 2, 1999. Mr. Roncaglia discussed changes at NASA in the context of dwindling resources in a volatile environment. NASA 's products and services are dependent on partnerships with the NASA Centers and other organizations. He provided a brief explanation about the NASA Image Exchange System (NIX), a distributed photographic archive that has over 500,000 photographs, along with video and audio clips.
Minutes from a presentation by Marcia Hanna at the CENDI meeting on June 1, 1999.Ms. Hanna discussed DTIC's Defense Virtual Library (DVL) which was developed in conjunction with the Center for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and DARPA. THE DVL uses the Handle system for digital object identification. The library includes a variety of document and format types including audio clips, photographs, oral histories, and technical reports.
Minutes from a presentation by Pamela Q.J. Andre, National Agricultural Library (NAL) at the CENDI meeting on October 28, 1999. Ms. Andre discussed NAL' strategic objective of digital preservation and the process of its development. The USDA's framework for strategic planning was developed in 1997 and a steering committee with representation from all the USDA mission areas was created. Since there was no budget to support these efforts, a pilot inventory of digital publications was undertaken. During some of the discussions there emerged a difference in opinions between records management and libraries. The libraries approach was to save as much as possible, whereas the records managers' approach was to keep as little as possible.
Minutes from a presentation by Dr. David Nagel (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee) at the CENDI meeting on December 6, 2000. Dr. Nagel gave a brief history of PITAC and highlighted some of the major challenges it faces, one of which is digital libraries and their potential impacts on society and the economy. Of particular concern is our ability to create and manage digital libraries. In addition to the challenge of digital libraries, the Committee has identified the following areas for technical and policy research: intellectual property, privacy, preservation, retrieval, and security and authentication. Each of these issues were discussed briefly. He also discussed the use of a micro payment system for certain types of government information. Dr, Nagel has identified the following issues that also need to be investigated: productivity in an electronic environment, energy intensity and networking, and the need to abolish some of the myths about the cost of electronic publishing.
This Web-based registry is a listing of descriptions of a wide variety of digital initiatives in or involving libraries. It is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Chicago and ARL. Technical features, policy choices, and subject matter of the content are highlighted in the ARL database. Contact persons are also provided.
This article describes the joint efforts of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and Innovative Web Applications (IWA) to develop EnergyPortal Search, a Directed Query Engine used to search and retrieve content from the deep web. Deep web or invisible web content is described as documents in online databases that normal web crawlers are unable to reach. For example, the DOE Information Bridge, an online database of over 60,000 technical reports is part of the deep web and served as the cornerstone for OSTI's efforts. The EnergyPortal Search is a government product that enables users to simultaneously search across distributed, deep web database content with a single search query. Full text material, images, presentations and other media that are essentially invisible to search engines are constantly being added to the deep web. OSTI has been very aggressive in digitizing DOE's gray literature. OSTI's collaboration with IWA enabled them to identify eleven of the most popular databases from EnergyFiles and then configure the Distributed Explorer Directed Query Engine to search these multiple heterogeneous databases in parallel. A single interface was used to display the results. Thus the EnergyPortal Search was created. Information format and where it resides is no longer an issue. Building upon the successes of the EnergyPortal Search, OSTI created the PrePRINT Network in January of 2000. This is a searchable gateway to web-based collections of scientific preprints and reprints as provided by researchers. Again using the Directed Query Engine, the Network provides the ability to simultaneously search across multiple preprint databases and servers. PrePRINT Alerts is a new feature that provides patrons with personalized, profile-based notices of recent additions to any of the selected resources. Patrons set up their own profile interests and whenever new information is added, the patron is notified via email. Two other tools recently developed by OSTI using the Distributed Explorer Directed Query Engine are the GrayLIT Network and the Federal R&D Project Summaries. The value of this new technology lies in the fact that a single search can simultaneously search a number of databases in parallel. Also no obligations are placed on the site owners to change their current processes or configurations and there are no additional burdens placed on the information creators. The potential Next Generation architecture for the Physical Sciences Infrastructure (PSII) includes The Federal R&D Project Summaries and the GrayLit Network as part of the conent model. Efforts are still underway to make query results more accurate and relevant.
This Committee report presents four targeted findings and recommendations to the President and Congress on the importance of digital libraries. The Report is one of a series developed by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee on key contemporary issues in information technology. PITAC is charged with providing the Federal government with expert independent guidance on maintaining America's preeminence in high performance computing and communications, information technology, and Next Generation Internet R&D. The findings are as follows: (1) The full potential of digital libraries has not yet been realized; (2)The Government can and should do more to further the science, technology, and creation of digital libraries; (3)Digital technologies bring significant technical and operational challenges to the issue of preservation; and (4)The legal issues surrounding intellectural property rights need to be addresses immediately. PITAC's four recommendations are as follows: (1) Expand and support digital library research in metadata and metadata use, scalability, interoperability, archival storage, and preservation, intellectual property rights, privacy and security, and human use;(2) Create lare-scale digital library testbeds for research and development; (3)Provide the necessary resources to make all public Federal material persistently available in digital form on the Internet; and (4) The Federal government should continue to play a leadership role in evolving policy to deal fairly with intellectual property rights in the digital age.
The Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University is developing a workflow management system aimed at reducing the amount of human labor and time needed for large-scale digitization projects such as the one currently underway with the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music. This paper covers the second phase of that project (Levy II). The goals of the second phase are to: reduce costs for incorporating large digitization projects into the collection by creating processes, tools, and interfaces for workflow management; increase access capabilities to the digitized collection via research tools; and to demonstrate the utility of the workflow mangement system. In order to incorporate the newly digitized material into the existing collection in a cost efficient manner, automated tools were developed to reduce the amount of human labor involved in creating the metadata and increased access to the new material. An automated name authority control system (ANAC) was developed to enhance access to the Levy Collection by introducing authorized name searching. The ANAC would also reduce labor costs and improve interoperability of Levy metadata with other collections by using standard data sources and format. This system would also produce a name match confidence value so that managers can establish thresholds that trigger manual intervention. The search engine that is being developed augments metadata searching with unique search capabilities for lyrics and music. Secondary and parallel indices provide a versatile means of searching a variety of documents. The use of partitions on metadata fields allows for metadata-based searching and retrieval and a way to segment documents. Although the workflow management system was developed specifically for the Levy sheet music collection, the authors feel that the tools are generalized enough so that other collections can benefit from them.
This Web site is a guide to digital library collections in British Columbia and around the world. The site includes directories, guides and search engines to digital libraries that can be viewed by subject, title, and institution. The site also includes bibliographic resources for digital libraries and digital library construction tools.
This digitization project at the University of Pittsburgh offers free online searching and browsing of 60 year's worth of astronomical observation data that include tables of data and descriptions of observational instrumentation. The published reports are known as the "Publications of the Allegheny Observatory of the University of Pittsburgh" and are not easily found in their paper format. The project was started in March 2001.
This report describes the maturation of digital libraries. Section one describes the three stages of digital library growth: young--lexperimental and opportunistic in outlook; mature--has core competencies, focus on the integration of digital materials into the library's collections, and develops and supports the requisite policies, technical capabilities, and professional skills to sustain its services; and adult--exists only in theory at the moment, however, it is predicted to be more integrated into the library with funding and support coming from numerous budgets rather than one. The second section of the report describes six case studies of digital library development at six institutions.
This report describes the evolution of library roles in terms of the growth of distributed technologies, the development of open paradigms and models, and the emergence of the library as a diffuse agent. The author also explains how the library's roles in the areas of collection development, information access, user services, and the library as place have changed in the digital age. In the final chapter, Ms. Lougee describes the diffuse library as one that "will embody an intimacy of purpose and a full engagement, both with institutional goals and with the practical conduct of learning, teaching, and research."
This paper summarizes the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora) project which was funded through a $1,000,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Fedora is a new system designed to be a model upon which interoperable web-based digital libraries can be built. Cornell and the University of Virginia joined forces to build and implement the new open-source version of Fedora. The author provides an in-depth description of Fedora's architectural model, the prototype and test bed at Virginia, and the updated Fedora system specification that includes management service and access service interfaces. An alpha version of the software is planned for release in October 2002. Phase 2 of the project will entail performance optimization for XML.
The author summarizes the Library of Congress's (LC) efforts to create a national strategy to collect, archive, and preserve digital content. The Library's plan has three phases: a preliminary phase that will result in a master plan to request Congress to approve the release of funds; the development of partnerships with the archival community and the content distributor/creator community; and a testing and evaluating phase that will enable LC to go back to Congress in five to seven years to discuss the most viable options for long-term preservation.
ERPANET's goal is to enhance the knowledge base for the preservation of cultural and scientific digital objects by providing access to experience, and sharing policies and strategies. The ERPANET web site provides access to case studies; digital preservation professionals who can answer about and assist with digital preservation projects; assessments of digital preservation literature, technical guidelines and standards; digital preservation training; and tools to enable institutions to approach digital projects proactively. ERPANET is composed of a Management Board with partners and an Advisory Committee. Partners include The Humanities Technology and Information Institute (HATII); Nationaal Archief van Nederland; Institute for Archival and Library Science (Universita degli Studi di Urbino); and Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv.
Bielefeld University Library is developing the "Digital Library North Rhine-Westphalia" which offers integrated access to electronic resources in local and remote online library catalogues, and to licensed electronic resources. The Library has partnered with Fast Search & Transfer, the leading developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies to improve explore and develop tools to improve access to this and other digital collections.
This is the third edition of the ToolKit which is sponsored by Sun Microsystems Computer Company to address some of the questions that institutions and agencies face in trying to develop digital content and distribute it on the Worldwide Web. This state-of-the-art document is intended to provide guidance in the field of Digital Libraries.
This report summarizes and analyzes over 200 recent usage studies of electronic library resources published between 1995 and 2003. The studies were grouped as Tier 1 (major ongoing studies analyzed in detail) or Tier 2 (small scale studies looked at as a whole). The usage studies employed a variety of research methods to gather information with some surveys and interviews requesting information about preference as to the media used, while others solicited information on user behavior. Both Tier 1 and Tier 2 studies provided insights on user behavior with electronic resources. Some of these observations include the importance of a browsing feature for core journals; hyperlinks to related articles; ability to print; subject discipline specialists have different usage patterns and preferences for print or electronic; and that both faculty and students use and like electronic resources.
This report provides a summary of the points raised at the "Scholarship and Libraries in Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects." In particular it addresses concerns generated by Google's mass digitization project.
This site represents the proposal and findings of the WM-SHARE project, which examined the use of online repositories and information sharing amongst many participating institutions.
This website provides information on the establishment and maintenance of digital collections.
This report outlines the NISO's discussion of Digital Rights, notably issues of reproduction and library usage.
This report collects and outlines the issues the NSF must be prepared to address in regards to the growth of digital collections and long term maintenance of such collections.
This website serves as a collection of many prominent digitization projects.
This report identifies and proposes strategies for addressing the Intellectual Property concerns of preparing digital libraries.
This paper examines how the study of American Literature will be influenced by digitization efforts. It also addresses issues of providing service and of gathering opinions from the field.
This report discusses the difficulties libraries are encountering in establishing electronic resouce management and what methods may be employed to address them.
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