Abstract
This article is an attempt to develop Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology into an analytical tool for examining the relationships between the height of the bookshelves and the behavior of library readers in utilizing books within a library. The tool would contain a database to store book-use information and some GIS maps to represent bookshelves. Upon analyzing the data stored in the database, different frequencies of book use across bookshelf layers are displayed on the maps. The tool would provide a wonderful means of visualization through which analysts can quickly realize the spatial distribution of books used in a library. This article reveals that readers tend to pull books out of the bookshelf layers that are easily reachable by human eyes and hands, and thus opens some issues for librarians to reconsider the management of library collections.
Highlights
Using an XML Harvester product created by Innovative Interfaces, machine-readable cataloging (MARC) records are generated based upon MARC encoding analogs included in the EAD markup and loaded into an Innovative Interfaces INNOPAC system
The strengths and weakn esses of the native XML technology employed by the consortiu m can be best understood by looking at alternative XML products and product categor ies
Second, the sea rch-andretrieval softw are had to sup port several basic fun ctions: Keywo rd searching across all union-cat alog finding aids; specific field searching based upon elements or attribut es in the EAD docum ent ; an abilit y to customize the look and feel of the interface and search-results screens; and the ability to display search term(s) in the conte xt of the finding aid
Summary
The Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) is a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded effort by fifteen institutions in the PacificNorthwest to createa finding-aids repository. Roth described survey results obtained on EAD deployment that underscore the recognized need at that time for a "costeffective server-side XML delivery system." The lack of such a solution motivated institutions to choose HTML as a delivery method for EAD finding aids.[4]. In a 2001 article, GillilandSwetland recommended several desirable features for an EAD searchand-retrieval system She emphasized the challenge of EAD search and retrieval by noting the nature of finding aids themselves: Archivists have historically been materials-centric rather than user-centric in their descriptive practices, resulting in the finding aid assuming a form quite unlike the concise bibliographic description with name and subject access most users are accustomed to using in other information systems such as library catalogs, abstracts, and indexes.'. A single OAI record is created from the collectionlevel information and multipl e records from component-level information in an EAD docum en t.11
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