Digital Library Initiatives Research Articles

Digital library research: major issues and trends

Digital library research has attracted much attention in the most developed, and in a number of developing, countries. While many digital library research projects are funded by government agencies and national and international bodies, some are run by specific academic and research institutions and libraries, either individually or collaboratively. While some digital library projects, such as the ELINOR project in the UK, the first two phases of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme in the UK, and the first phase of DLI (Digital Library Initiative) in the US, are now over, a number of other projects are currently under way in different parts of the world. Beginning with the definitions and characteristics of digital libraries, as proposed by various researchers, this paper provides brief accounts of some major digital library projects that are currently in progress, or are just completed, in different parts of the world. There follows a review of digital library research under sixteen major headings. Literature for this review has been identified through a search on LISA CD‐ROM database, and a Dialog search on library and information science databases, and the resulting output has been supplemented by a scan of the various issues of D‐Lib Magazine and Ariadne, and the websites of various organisations and institutions engaged in digital library research. The review indicates that we have learned a lot through digital library research within a short span of time. However, a number of issues are yet to be resolved. The paper ends with an indication of the research issues that need to be addressed and resolved in the near future in order to bring the digital library from the researcher‘s laboratory to the real life environment.

Perspectives on DLI‐2 – Growing the Field

Perspectives on DLI‐2 – Growing the Field

Nothing but 'Net Scores Big

ABSTRACT The Oscar A. Silverman Undergraduate Library at the University at Buffalo initiated a successful series of Internet workshops as part of a campus Digital Library Initiative. Such an effort requires planning, team work, flexibility, and constant learning as described within the article.

The National Library of Canada’s digital library initiatives

The National Library of Canada (NLC) is involved in a range of digital library (DL) initiatives which contribute to the fulfillment of its mandate and support the growing range of DL services that complement the Library’s more traditional collections and services. Incorporated in the NLC’s DL initiatives are projects relating to digitization, collecting Canadian networked electronic publications, development of virtual catalogues, metadata creation, and preservation of digital resources. Issues relating to collaboration, access to digital collections and databases, and preservation are addressed in the Canadian context based on NLC’s experience to date.

Electronic Journals as a Component of the Digital Library

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Library provides its users in four geographic locations with digital library services including over 500 electronic journals. The InfoWeb Information System and Gateway serves as a single point of access to these services. InfoWeb capabilities prominently featured in this article include the following: (1) the TORPEDO Ultra Digital Library Initiative, (2) the Library's web-based Unicorn STILAS catalog, (3) a locally-mounted "Web of Science" Science Citation Index Expanded database, and (4) Contents-to-Go, a custom-developed current awareness and document delivery service. TORPEDO Ultra provides institutional researchers with a unified way to search all the Library's digital collections, whether these materials originate from a commercial publisher such as Elsevier; an association publisher such as the American Physical Society; or a government publisher such as NRL. In addition. TORPEDO Ultra provides an infrastructure that enables databases that have traditionally served as pointers to documents to now deliver that content directly. In a future release, TORPEDO Ultra will enable end-user scientists to search and link to journals residing on publisher web sites at the same time that they are searching locally mounted electronic journals.

Document structure and digital libraries: how researchers mobilize information in journal articles

This paper explores how academic researchers disaggregate and reaggregate scientific journal articles in both print and digital environments. Journal article disaggregation refers to the ability to access and manipulate individual components of a document, such as its figures, conclusions or references. In reaggregation, article components are compiled and integrated into a new written work. Data gathered in the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois are analyzed to describe how components are mobilized in the work of researchers as they identify, retrieve, read and use material in articles of interest. Results lead to a discussion of the nature of metadata, the role of context in constraining component use, the complex assemblage of information system use and implications for digital library system design and user education.

Federated search of scientific literature

The Internet of the 21st Century will radically transform how we interact with knowledge. The rise of the World Wide Web and the information infrastructure have rapidly developed the technologies of collections for independent communities. In the future, online information will be dominated by small collections. The information infrastructure must similarly be radically different to support indexing of community collections and searching across such small collections. Users will consider themselves to be navigating in the Interspace, across logical spaces of semantic indexes, rather than in the Internet, across physical networks of computer servers. The digital libraries initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. The goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. This article details their efforts.

Digital Libraries for the Next Millennium: Challenges and Research Directions

The unprecedented growth of Internet technologies has made resources on the World Wide Web instantly accessible to various user communities through digital libraries. Since the early 1990s, there have been several digital library initiatives sponsored by government agencies and/or private organizations all over the world. A digital library is a networked system environment that provides diverse user communities with coherent, seamless and transparent access to large, organized, and digitized information resources. This article provides a comprehensive overview of major digital library projects that are currently being undertaken across the globe. We also identify and discuss major challenges and research issues to be addressed in the design and implementation of digital libraries for the next millennium. We believe that digital libraries are ripe with research opportunities, offer many challenges, and will continue to grow in the next several years.

Project PATRON—Audio and video on demand at the University of Surrey

In the March 1997 issue, Derek Law described the “Follet Program” which has provided finding and guided the development of digital library initiatives in the United Kingdom for several years now. In this column Elizabeth Lyon and Jon Maslin describe work at the University of Surrey which is a practical illustration of the success of the program in fostering leading edge experimentation resulting in production systems using a mix of off-the-shelf technology and local development. Project PATRON is an excellent example of the ways that libraries may support the teaching-learning process using technology enabled multi-media—CBL, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative

NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative

A smart itsy bitsy spider for the Web

As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent agent approach to Web searching. In this experiment, we developed two Web personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques, respectively. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the Web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A graphical, dynamic, Java-based interface was developed and is available for Web access. A system architecture for implementing such an agent-based spider is presented, followed by detailed discussions of benchmark testing and user evaluation results. In benchmark testing, although the genetic algorithm spider did not outperform the best first search spider, we found both results to be comparable and complementary. In user evaluation, the genetic algorithm spider obtained significantly higher recall value than that of the best first search spider. However, their precision values were not statistically different. The mutation process introduced in genetic algorithm allows users to find other potential relevant homepages that cannot be explored via a conventional local search process. In addition, we found the Java-based interface to be a necessary component for design of a truly interactive and dynamic Web agent. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An intelligent personal spider (agent) for dynamic Internet/Intranet searching

As Internet services based on the World-Wide Web become more popular, information overload has become a pressing research problem. Difficulties with search on Internet will worsen as the amount of on-line information increases. A scalable approach to Internet search is critical to the success of Internet services and other current and future National Information Infrastructure (NII) applications. As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent personal spider (agent) approach to Internet searching. The approach, which is grounded on automatic textual analysis and general-purpose search algorithms, is expected to be an improvement over the current static and inefficient Internet searches. In this experiment, we implemented Internet personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A plain, static CGI/HTML-based interface was developed earlier, followed by a recent enhancement of a graphical, dynamic Java-based interface. Preliminary evaluation results and two working prototypes (available for Web access) are presented. Although the examples and evaluations presented are mainly based on Internet applications, the applicability of the proposed techniques to the potentially more rewarding Intranet applications should be obvious. In particular, we believe the proposed agent design can be used to locate organization-wide information, to gather new, time-critical organizational information, and to support team-building and communication in Intranets.

Building the Collections of the California Digital Library

In October of 1997, the University of California announced the creation of the California Digital Library, an initiative that will harness the power of digital technologies to make the University's unique library and information resources more widely available to all Californians, as well as provide leadership and support to other segments in order to enhance access to digital information resources throughout the state. In addition to providing valuable new services to the people of California, the California Digital Library will enhance library service to UC faculty and students while supporting the library system during its transition to the digital future. This article will discuss the main elements of the California Digital Library initiative.

AskA's: Lessons Learned from K-12 Digital Reference Services

The Internet has brought libraries to a crossroads. The nature of collection, service, and information organization is changing rapidly. there is considerable anxiety about changing roles and responsibilities in this new digital environment. While a great deal of research and development is occurring in both collection development (such as NSF's Digital Library Initiatives) and information organization (metadata), little attention has been paid to how reference and user services will function in this new digital environment. This article outlines some of the thinking in this area as it relates to K-12 digital reference services. These services answer thousands of questions every week and have addressed many issues involved in providing human-intermediated information and referral services via the Internet

A smart itsy bitsy spider for the Web

As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this research proposes an intelligent agent approach to Web searching. In this experiment, we developed two Web personal spiders based on best first search and genetic algorithm techniques, respectively. These personal spiders can dynamically take a user's selected starting homepages and search for the most closely related homepages in the Web, based on the links and keyword indexing. A graphical, dynamic, Java-based interface was developed and is available for Web access. A system architecture for implementing such an agent-based spider is presented, followed by detailed discussions of benchmark testing and user evaluation results. In benchmark testing, although the genetic algorithm spider did not outperform the best first search spider, we found both results to be comparable and complementary. In user evaluation, the genetic algorithm spider obtained significantly higher recall value than that of the best first search spider. However, their precision values were not statistically different. The mutation process introduced in genetic algorithm allows users to find other potential relevant homepages that cannot be explored via a conventional local search process. In addition, we found the Java-based interface to be a necessary component for design of a truly interactive and dynamic Web agent. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Towards a California Geospatial Digital Library: A Strategy for Networked Knowledge

In this paper, digital libraries, a new form of networked organization, are examined. Suitable organizational frameworks are necessary to develop and sustain digital library initiatives and to use them most effectively. This paper assumes that today's information network, in the broadest sense, will form the environment for tomorrow's organization. The technological and institutional factors driving and supporting the development of digital libraries are explored. The benefits of digital libraries are listed as are institutional impediments to their implementation and technical and organizational challenges to their operation. The core management needs of a digital library are discussed. Experience is drawn from the proposed California Digital Library and the emerging Alexandria Digital Library.

Taking the initiative for digital libraries

Stephen M. Griffin is Program Manager of the Digital Libraries Initiative at the National Science Foundation (http://www.cise.nsf.gov/iris/DLHome.html).

Digital libraries: new initiatives with worldwide implications

We are witnessing an explosion of digital information, some of it in unstructured repositories, some in still primitive digital libraries. This trend is certain to accelerate as the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and Global Information Infrastructure (GII) become a reality. Several digital library projects in the USA and abroad are in progress, with the goal of developing the enabling technologies for creating a single, integrated and “universal” library, composed of the large numbers of individual heterogeneous repositories. These include materials in personal information collections, collections in conventional libraries, and large data collections shared by scientists, engineers and other researchers. Six US institutions received funding for Digital Library Initiatives in the fall of 1994. In addition, the Library of Congress (LC) has a National Digital Library Project under way that is funded, in part, by private corporations and foundations to make some of its large text and image collections accessible via computer networks. Focuses on projects at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois and the Library of Congress, including how these initiatives will affect the way image and text archives are organized as we enter the next century, and their implications for the international community. Addresses the following issues: how can we encourage global intellectual access and p articipation by our citizenry? How does one locate (“navigate”) information of interest in a very large, distributed and possibly disconnected collection of libraries and archives around the world? And how can we protect the intellectual property of authors and publishers and detect violations in this new information environment?

Australian Digital Library Initiatives

The Digital Library undoubtedly promises to provide many social, economic, scholarly, and technical advantages to the information industry. Enabling information to be accessed and manipulated over networked environments and providing enhanced services to clients will further the importance and contributions that Digital Libraries provide. But there are still many issues to be addressed by Digital Library projects - apart from the purely technical issues such as interoperability. Some of the thorny issues still to be resolved (and for which technology may provide a means of implementing) include understanding intellectual property rights, which has national and international implications; security; and privacy.Australian libraries (at the Federal, State, and University levels) together with commercial and research organisations are supporting a diverse set of Digital Library projects that take on many of these technical and related issues. Collectively, the projects add up to an extremely proactive approach. This report provides an overview of some of the current projects and gives an insight into the issues being addressed. Only eighteen projects are reported, but this is by no means a complete and exhaustive list - its main aim is to give a snap-shot of some of the current activities. Each report has hypertext links to documents containing more detailed information.

Federating diverse collections of scientific literature

The Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing the information infrastructure to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The authors are constructing a large testbed of scientific literature, evaluating its effectiveness under significant use, and researching enhanced search technology. They are building repositories (organized collections) of indexed multiple-source collections and federating (merging and mapping) them by searching the material via multiple views of a single virtual collection. Developing widely usable Web technology is also a key goal. Improving Web search beyond full-text retrieval will require using document structure in the short term and document semantics in the long term. Their testbed efforts concentrate on journal articles from the scientific literature, with structure specified by the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Research efforts extract semantics from documents using the scalable technology of concept spaces based on context frequency. They then merge these efforts with traditional library indexing to provide a single Internet interface to indexes of multiple repositories.