Digital Library Domain Research Articles

Online author name disambiguation in evolving digital library

Name ambiguity is a prevalent problem in digital library domain where mapping of bibliographic records to authors is a major issue. The unprecedented growth of the bibliographic records and absence of unique identifiers are further exacerbating the problem. Specifically, name ambiguity affects various bibliometric analysis tasks that include record management as well as scientific assessment of the authors thereby necessitating the name disambiguation. The name disambiguation task is to assign the records, possibly with the ambiguous authorship, to corresponding authors. While existing techniques are good at extracting abstract features from set of records with a common author name that can be subsequently used for clustering the records based on unique author identities, however, such techniques usually perform poorly in disambiguating isolated individual record entries that arrive continuously. Disambiguation of only newly arrived records, rather than the whole records of the digital library is challenging, however, computationally rewarding and thus, not only preferable but becoming the necessity due to tremendous growth in the number of bibliographic records with the time, which is likely to continue. In this regard, we propose an online author name disambiguation approach for evolving digital library. Our approach involves representation learning of records in an online manner in evolving (academic networks) digital library using dynamic graph embedding and clustering of latent representation of records. We show the use of our online name disambiguation method in batch setting (for static or initial records of digital library) and incremental setting (for new records of digital library). Significant improvement, over existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of various evaluation metrics, has been observed which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Navigation leads for exploratory search and navigation in digital libraries

Exploratory search (in contrary to the traditional lookup search) is characterized by the search tasks that have exploration, learning, and investigation as their goals. An example of this task in the domain of digital libraries is exploration of a new domain, a task that is typically performed by a researcher novice, such as a master’s or a doctoral student. To support the researcher novices in this task, we proposed an approach of exploratory search and navigation using navigation leads, with which we augment the search results, and which serve as navigation starting points allowing users to follow a specific path by filtering only documents pertinent to the selected lead. In this paper, we present a method of selection of navigation leads considering their navigational value in the form of a corpus relevance. We examined this method by the means of an offline evaluation on the dataset from a bookmarking service Annota. We showed that considering the corpus relevance helps to cover significantly more (relevant) documents when conducting the exploratory search. In addition, our relevance metric combining document and corpus relevance of a lead outperformed the popularity metric based on the frequency of the term in the document corpus.

E-lending in digital libraries: a systematic review

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to systematically review e-lending research studies in the digital library domain to identify their subjects, existing research gap and their research methods. Design/methodology/approach This is a systematic review. Through several stages of searching in related databases, 30 research works including journal and conference research papers, theses and dissertations, research and technical reports were identified and reviewed based on the guidelines of systematic review protocols. Findings It was found that research in e-lending domain is growing, and the subject will receive greater attention in the near future. Studies were in the following four categories: e-books (specifications, creation and software and viewpoints), business models, e-book status in libraries and copyright issues, e-book lending and inter-library loan. Some research gaps were identified including e-lending domain, business models and legislation. Little has been done with qualitative and mixed approaches in terms of research methods. Moreover, findings showed that this area has received less attention in developing countries. Originality/value This is the first review of the e-lending domain in digital libraries. It identifies the key works related to e-lending, categorizes them, provides an overview and identifies emerging research issues.

Selecting publication keywords for domain analysis in bibliometrics: A comparison of three methods

Publication keywords have been widely utilized to reveal the knowledge structure of research domains. An important but under-addressed problem is the decision of which keywords should be retained as analysis objects after a great number of keywords are gathered from domain publications. In this paper, we discuss the problems with the traditional term frequency (TF) method and introduce two alternative methods: TF-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and TF-Keyword Activity Index (TF-KAI). These two methods take into account keyword discrimination by considering their frequency both in and out of the domain. To test their performance, the keywords they select in China's Digital Library domain are evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively. The evaluation results show that the TF-KAI method performs the best: it can retain keywords that match expert selection much better and reveal the research specialization of the domain with more details.

Recent Developments in Digital Mathematics Libraries

The paper presents recent developments in the domain of digital mathematics libraries towards the envisioned 21st Century Global Library for Math ematics. The Bulgarian Digital Mathematical Library BulDML and the Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML - CZ are founding partners of the EuDML Initiative and through it contribute to the sustainable development of the European Digital Mathematics Library EuDML and to the global advanc ements in this area.

Introduction to the focused issue on the 17th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013)

Over the human life-span, seventeen years are an amount of time which marks the long transition from infancy into maturity. Definitely, conference maturity is not to be measured with the same metrics, but looking back in the areas of establishment and growth of the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, started in 1997, it would be worthy to ask what is making this conference a reference point of a community? We will argue that one of the unique impacts of this conference on the digital library domain is in the quality of sharing it offers and in its particular role to inspire.While its first editions helped the establishment and the professional recognition of the digital library community, isn’t it a great compliment to this community that this domain sprouted in a whole range of new areas, which grew strong and now meet at their specialized well-established events—digital curation and preservation, metadata or evaluation of information services to mention just a few. In 2013, the conference took place in Valletta, Malta during September 22–26, 2013 and it had the challenging task to re-connect its community in a climate of economic austerity. Once again, the conference called for sharing and inspiration: the general theme “Sharing meaningful information” addressed the challenges of interoperability and long-term preservation in the environment of the web of data. The advent of the technologies enhances the exchange of information with rich semantics, facilitates metadata interlinking

An exploration of the digital library evaluation literature based on an ontological representation

Evaluation is a vital research area in the digital library domain, demonstrating a growing literature in conference and journal articles. We explore the directions and the evolution of evaluation research for the period 2001–2011 by studying the evaluation initiatives presented at 2 main conferences of the digital library domain, namely the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE) Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), and the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL; since 2011 renamed to the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries [TPDL]). The literature is annotated using a domain ontology, named DiLEO, which defines explicitly the main concepts of the digital library evaluation domain and their correlations. The ontology instances constitute a semantic network that enables the uniform and formal representation of the critical evaluation constructs in both conferences, untangles their associations, and supports the study of their evolution. We discuss interesting patterns in the evaluation practices as well as in the research foci of the 2 venues, and outline current research trends and areas for further research.

Dealing with metadata quality: The legacy of digital library efforts

In this work, we elaborate on the meaning of metadata quality by surveying efforts and experiences matured in the digital library domain. In particular, an overview of the frameworks developed to characterize such a multi-faceted concept is presented. Moreover, the most common quality-related problems affecting metadata both during the creation and the aggregation phase are discussed together with the approaches, technologies and tools developed to mitigate them. This survey on digital library developments is expected to contribute to the ongoing discussion on data and metadata quality occurring in the emerging yet more general framework of data infrastructures.

Interpreting the knowledge map of digital library research (1990–2010)

A knowledge map of digital library (DL) research shows the semantic organization of DL research topics and also the evolution of the field. The research reported in this article aims to find the core topics and subtopics of DL research in order to build a knowledge map of the DL domain. The methodology is comprised of a four‐step research process, and two knowledge organization methods (classification and thesaurus building) were used. A knowledge map covering 21 core topics and 1,015 subtopics of DL research was created and provides a systematic overview of DL research during the last two decades (1990–2010). We argue that the map can work as a knowledge platform to guide, evaluate, and improve the activities of DL research, education, and practices. Moreover, it can be transformed into a DL ontology for various applications. The research methodology can be used to map any human knowledge domain; it is a novel and scientific method for producing comprehensive and systematic knowledge maps based on literary warrant.

디지털도서관 분야의 학제적 공동연구 분석에 관한 연구

The domain of digital libraries is one of interdisciplinary fields since it contains various aspects of digital libraries. The main findings of digital library interdisciplinarity have been discussed in terms of contents, management and infrastructural technologies within the field of library and information science. The purpose of this study is to identify and widen the interdisciplinary structure of digital library domain by analyzing the collaborations from different disciplines. With 1,394 research articles of digital libraries from 1997 to 2010, the analysis of collaborations of authors from various disciplines was conducted. The results identified that three subject areas of authors such as Information science and library science, Computer science and Engineering were found as the centers to collaborate with various disciplines. In addition, sub-domains of digital library were recognized in terms of core digital library area, natural science area, medical related area and biology and medical area. The findings of this study depict the domain of digital libraries as a variety of subject areas since digital library domain is characterized with both research and practices.

An unsupervised heuristic-based approach for bibliographic metadata deduplication

Digital libraries of scientific articles contain collections of digital objects that are usually described by bibliographic metadata records. These records can be acquired from different sources and be represented using several metadata standards. These metadata standards may be heterogeneous in both, content and structure. All of this implies that many records may be duplicated in the repository, thus affecting the quality of services, such as searching and browsing. In this article we present an approach that identifies duplicated bibliographic metadata records in an efficient and effective way. We propose similarity functions especially designed for the digital library domain and experimentally evaluate them. Our results show that the proposed functions improve the quality of metadata deduplication up to 188% compared to four different baselines. We also show that our approach achieves statistical equivalent results when compared to a state-of-the-art method for replica identification based on genetic programming, without the burden and cost of any training process.

Opportunities and risks for libraries in applying for European funding

PurposeThis paper seeks to analyse the opportunities and potential risks for libraries applying for European support to fund projects regarding digitisation or availability of their already digitised content. The European Commission has a range of specific funding programs devoted to access, use and preservation of digital cultural heritage, so libraries and other “cultural institutions” holding European heritage are the natural applicants for this kind of calls. Sometimes, however, they do not know how to apply and fully understand the advantages and commitments involved. This paper aims to help libraries to understand European funding programs.Design/methodology/approachThe paper has complementary experience with respect to applications and participation in EU‐funded projects, as well as the evaluation of proposals and the reviewing of approved projects. Apart from the lessons drawn from the personal experiences of the paper, the content is based on the most recent documentation and information about the Call For Proposals (CFP) made available by the European Commission.FindingsCompetition among proposals for European funding in the context of Digital Libraries (DLs) has grown considerably over the last few years. Therefore, it is essential for potential applicants to ensure the quality of their proposal by matching its content to the objectives of the Call and meeting the relevant evaluation criteria. In addition, the scope of the proposal needs to be embedded within the long‐term research and management strategy of the institutions applying to ensure both a successful application procedure and maximum sustainability of the project.Originality/valueApart from the documentation offered by the European Commission and several public reports of consultancy firms, no previous papers have been published which provide an insight into the workflow of the submission and evaluation of proposals for European funding in the domain of Digital Libraries.

Bridging the gap between business process models and service-oriented architectures with reference to the grid environment

In recent years, organisations have been seeking technological solutions for enacting their business process models using ad-hoc and heuristic approaches. However, limited results have been obtained due to the expansion of business processes across geographical boundaries and the absence of structured methods, frameworks and/or Information Technology (IT) infrastructures to enact these processes. In an attempt to enact business process models using distributed technologies, we introduce a novel architectural framework to bridge the gap between business process models and Grid-aware Service-Oriented Architectures (GSOA). BPMSOA framework is aligned with the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach and is instantiated for role-based business process models [in particular Role Activity Diagramming (RAD)], using mobile process languages such as pi-ADL. The evaluation of the BPMSOA framework using the Submission process from the digital libraries domain has revealed that role-based business process models can be successfully enacted in GSOA environments with certain limitations.

Service Systems Through the Prism of Conceptual Modeling

We seek means of further improving the process of service innovation by providing conceptual framework that would uniformly model information about a service system. Since value co-creation is achieved through knowledge-based interactions, such a framework should be a connection-oriented one. We propose uniform approach to context-sensitive relationships modeling and representation, based on semantic conceptual modeling, suitable for modeling both service system interactions and information about a service system itself. Its application is illustrated on digital libraries domain. The proposed representation may be combined with goal-driven development methods to allow closer interconnection of goals and value proposition. The paper presents application of an original conceptual reference model of service system, which may provide more elaborated background for service innovation process. [Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]

Towards a digital library theory: a formal digital library ontology

Digital libraries (DLs) have eluded definitional consensus and lack agreement on common theories and frameworks. This makes comparison of DLs extremely difficult, promotes ad-hoc development, and impedes interoperability. In this paper we propose a formal ontology for DLs that defines the fundamental concepts, relationships, and axiomatic rules that govern the DL domain, therefore providing a frame of reference for the discussion of essential concepts of DL design and construction. The ontology is an axiomatic, formal treatment of DLs, which distinguishes it from other approaches that informally define a number of architectural variants. The process of construction of the ontology was guided by 5S, a formal framework for digital libraries. To test its expressibility we have used the ontology to create a taxonomy of DL services and to reason about issues of reusability, extensibility, and composability. Some practical applications of the ontology are also described including: the definition of a digital library services taxonomy, the proposal of a modeling language for digital libraries, and the specification of quality metrics to evaluate digital libraries. We also demonstrate how to use the ontology to formally describe DL architectures and to prove some properties about them, thus helping to further validate the ontology.

Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community

The field of digital libraries (DLs) coalesced in 1994: the first digital library conferences were held that year, awareness of the World Wide Web was accelerating, and the National Science Foundation awarded $24 Million (U.S.) for the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). In this paper we examine the state of the DL domain after a decade of activity by applying social network analysis to the co-authorship network of the past ACM, IEEE, and joint ACM/IEEE digital library conferences. We base our analysis on a common binary undirectional network model to represent the co-authorship network, and from it we extract several established network measures. We also introduce a weighted directional network model to represent the co-authorship network, for which we define $AuthorRank$ as an indicator of the impact of an individual author in the network. The results are validated against conference program committee members in the same period. The results show clear advantages of PageRank and AuthorRank over degree, closeness and betweenness centrality metrics. We also investigate the amount and nature of international participation in Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).

Experiences Using Domain Specific Techniques within Multimedia Software Engineering

Domain specific techniques take advantage of the commonalities among applications developed within a certain domain. They are known to improve quality and productivity by incorporating domain knowledge and previous project experiences and promote reuse. This paper describes six domain specific software engineering techniques for developing multimedia applications within the digital library domain. We provide examples of each technique from several projects in which they were used, how the techniques are used within general software engineering practice (in particular, MBASE), how the techniques address some of the particular challenges multimedia software engineering, and the positive impacts we have measured resulting from their use within a graduate level software engineering course.

Assisting the “virtual” user

The development of online assistance for remote users of computer-based systems depends upon the assumptions made about the barriers users face and about the available strategies for addressing them. Drawing from the domain of digital libraries and information discovery and retrieval, this commentary speculates about missed opportunities hidden by those assumptions. Critical questions about strategies to remove user barriers, to guide users past barriers, and to help educate users to anticipate and independently overcome barriers suggest transitions for online user assistance technologies that could take the form of "confusion recognizers," "assistance avatars," and "pedagogically aware" user interfaces.