Future Digital Library Research Articles

Fossils in a Digital Age

Digital libraries are a powerful tool for preserving and disseminating information in a technology-driven world. Providing options for housing non-traditional information, such as three-dimensional (3D) data, digital libraries also address barriers (e.g., geographic location and physical space) that affect traditional libraries. While there are certainly still barriers that may prevent users from accessing and utilizing digital content, digital libraries offer ways of preserving, housing, and disseminating non-traditional information that physical libraries cannot. Within the anthropological community, digital libraries can serve as a method of housing 3D fossil data. There are unique challenges and barriers associated with studying fossils that digital libraries help to break down. Through the preservation and dissemination of 3D fossil data, researchers across the globe can work with fossil data without the concerns associated with handling fragile fossils. However, such 3D digital libraries are not without challenges. While there are clear standards and metadata schemas (e.g., RDA and DCMI) for digital libraries containing traditional materials, no such standardization exists for digital libraries containing 3D data. As such, metadata requirements and elements for existing 3D digital libraries are inconsistent and may lack important details about the data, which can compromise functionality. This paper explores trends and challenges that digital libraries containing 3D data experience and highlights best-practice solutions for future 3D digital libraries to overcome these challenges.

Research on Multi-level Extension Optimal Decision Analysis of Network Digital Library Resources

Network digital libraries have exploded in recent years, with numerous and complicated evaluation indicators. The main body of evaluation is gradually showing the diversification characteristics of evaluation objects, and comprehensive evaluation standards. In order to better ensure the overall quality and construction level of network digital library resources, this research innovation incorporates multi-level extension optimization evaluation. Based on the network digital library, a multi-level extension optimization decision-making mechanism combining qualitative and quantitative is proposed. It has developed a new direction and provided new ideas for the resource quality and data evaluation of the future network digital library.

Identifying the future direction of legal deposit in the United Kingdom: The Digital Library Futures approach

PurposeTo date, there has been little research into users of the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013. This paper addresses that gap by presenting key findings from the AHRC-funded Digital Library Futures project. Its purpose is to present a “user-centric” perspective on the potential future impact of the digital collections that are being created under electronic legal deposit regulations.Design/methodology/approachThe study utilises a mixed methods case study of two academic legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom: The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; and Cambridge University Library. It combines surveys of users, web log analysis and expert interviews with librarians and cognate professionals.FindingsUser perspectives on NPLD were not fully considered in the planning and implementation of the 2013 regulations. The authors present findings from their user survey to show how contemporary tensions between user behaviour and access protocols risk limiting the instrumental value of NPLD collections, which have high perceived legacy value.Originality/valueThis is the first study to address the user context for UK Non-Print Legal Deposit. Its value lies in presenting a research-led user assessment of NPLD and in proposing “user-centric” analysis as an addition to the existing “four pillars” of legal deposit research.

Colecciones digitales del patrimonio cultural de Canarias: situación actual y propuesta de actuación

Se presentan los resultados obtenidos en un estudio realizado entre finales del 2015 yprincipios del 2017 sobre el estado del patrimonio de Canarias digitalizado y accesible a través deInternet, de cara a plantear una futura biblioteca digital regional en el ámbito de las tecnologías de laweb semántica. Se analizan los 87 proyectos existentes. La mayoría de ellos están liderados porinstituciones públicas, pero con una clara desconexión entre ellas. Se están llevando a cabo muchasiniciativas, pero este trabajo pone de manifiesto las carencias que existen. Estas provocan una faltaclara de interoperabilidad que impide a muchos de los proyectos participar en plataformas colectivasmayores como Hispana o Europeana. Se observa que cada administración camina, a nivel general, ensu propia dirección y con sus propios objetivos y planteamientos, pareciendo que la difusión digital desu patrimonio debiera ser más un reflejo de su propia estructura administrativa que de la propiaidiosincrasia del patrimonio que se publica en la red. Se proponen soluciones para paliar estasdeficiencias y poder hacer realidad una biblioteca digital regional de Canarias adaptada a otros usosnacionales e internacionales.

An investigation of benchmark image collections: how different from digital libraries?

PurposeThis paper aims to introduce the construction methods, image organization, collection use and access of benchmark image collections to the digital library (DL) community. It aims to connect two distinct communities: the DL community and image processing researchers so that future image collections could be better constructed, organized and managed for both human and computer use.Design/methodology/approachImage collections are first identified through an extensive literature review of published journal articles and a web search. Then, a coding scheme focusing on image collections’ creation, organization, access and use is developed. Next, three major benchmark image collections are analysed based on the proposed coding scheme. Finally, the characteristics of benchmark image collections are summarized and compared to DLs.FindingsAlthough most of the image collections in DLs are carefully curated and organized using various metadata schema based on an image’s external features to facilitate human use, the benchmark image collections created for promoting image processing algorithms are annotated on an image’s content to the pixel level, which makes each image collection a more fine-grained, organized database appropriate for developing automatic techniques on classification summarization, visualization and content-based retrieval.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper overviews image collections by their application fields. The three most representative natural image collections in general areas are analysed in detail based on a homemade coding scheme, which could be further extended. Also, domain-specific image collections, such as medical image collections or collections for scientific purposes, are not covered.Practical implicationsThis paper helps DLs with image collections to understand how benchmark image collections used by current image processing research are created, organized and managed. It informs multiple parties pertinent to image collections to collaborate on building, sustaining, enriching and providing access to image collections.Originality/valueThis paper is the first attempt to review and summarize benchmark image collections for DL managers and developers. The collection creation process and image organization used in these benchmark image collections open a new perspective to digital librarians for their future DL collection development.

Emerging scenarios of data infrastructure and novel concepts of digital libraries in intelligent infrastructure for human-centred communities: A qualitative research

This research investigated the strategic development of a large-scale transdisciplinary area, named intelligent infrastructure for human-centred communities, at Virginia Tech. Within such development, this study explored the future vision and anticipated scenarios of data infrastructure and digital libraries for smart community development. It draws upon the mixed-methods approach combining ethnographic participant observation, document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Grounded in socio-technical framework and rooted in empirical methods, this research produces results that augment design thinking and visioning practice for digital data libraries beyond traditional boundaries. The findings reveal the emerging scenarios around complex adaptive systems, intelligent data infrastructure and future digital libraries all in the context of building infrastructure for human-centred communities. Situated in this advancing reality, the results further discuss the next-generation data and information user experience, smart infrastructure data environment and future library capabilities. The article concludes that a smart library system, whether in its conceptual form of a ‘digital octopus’ or a ‘smart village data hub’ or an ‘intelligent virtual assistant’, will provide intelligence in data gathering, processing, summarising, communication and recommendations. By delivering unified and personalised data solutions, it will offer an end-to-end seamless experience for users throughout their journey of knowledge pursuit.

Encouraging Statistical Learning Through Eastern and Western Mathematical History and Its Butterfly Effect Consequences

What are those factors that affect students’ academic performance? In this study, it is shown that children’s self-efficacy and achievement goals together with their parents’ involvement can affect the scholar outcome. This author employs a test in whether (creating meanings) to historical context can attract young teenagers in learning mathematics. Moreover, it is also interesting to have a research in its consequences butterfly effect. Indeed, for the Singapore’s mathematics curriculum, meanings for historical context is used to motivate students to understand difficult mathematics concepts. However, the country lacks the application of these ideas to their daily application. It is no doubt that too much emphasis on applications will lead us into the road of traditional Babylonians – they knew much about numerical mathematics but can’t generalize our modern mathematical laws like Pythagoras Theorem. One of the applications of the Butterfly effect framework is to help us establish our future digital library. The limitation is an unexpected result may happen where the framework becomes invalid. This can be remediated by using expectancy to solve the problem associated.

Section-wise indexing and retrieval of research articles

Relevant information extraction is a dire need of the scholarly community. There are a number of systems available to find relevant information from scientific literature such as search engines, citation indexes, digital libraries etc. For a search query, a long list of irrelevant documents is presented to the users mainly due to the huge number of availability of the full-text document, and furthermore due to the unstructured nature of indexed scientific resources. The contemporary systems have formally defined the structure of scientific documents. However, populating the already available enriched scientific structure from unstructured/semi-structured scientific documents has not been addressed previously. In this research paper, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated an automated technique that is able to tag each paper’s content with logical sections appearing in the scientific document. The proposed system has been evaluated against the benchmark, subsequently, the proposed system have been also compared with machine learning techniques that may be used for the same task. It has been empirically shown that the overall correctness and completeness of our proposed technique is 0.78 and 0.79 respectively and thus the overall accuracy of about 0.78 was achieved. The achieved results are good as compared to machine learning based classification. The developed system may help future information retrieval systems, digital libraries, and citation indexes to index, retrieve, rank and visualize most relevant scientific documents for the scientific community.

The Role of Judges in Deciding the Future of Digital Libraries

AbstractJudges sitting in US and EU courts have adjudicated a number of high-profile cases of mass and small-scale digitization and access to digitized material. These cases have important policy effects mounting to shaping the future of digital libraries insofar as the current copyright framework does not change from the legislative branch. This article focuses on the judges’ struggle to achieve progressive (pro-libraries and pro-technology) results interpreting the applicable rules. American judges, on the one hand, primarily utilized doctrinal tools such as the fair use doctrine. European judges, on the other hand, used interpretative methods that can push the limits of exceptions and limitations favoring libraries. The article seeks to bring the role of the judiciary to the spotlight, analyze the wording of the relevant decisions and offer a possible reading of the responsibility that the judges must have experienced adjudicating these cases. Ultimately it urges legislative reform to be a follow-up to the judges’ support of the benefits of digitization the future of libraries in the digital era.

An Academic Library Model in the Creative Industries System of the Digital Age

Information revolution has resulted in fundamental changes in the fields of technology, economy, science and education, politics, publishing industry, culture and arts, but also in the way people think and behave. Social awareness for more progressive education, and also the urgent response to new requirements of research community, has prompted the new way of information creation and dissemination, which is reflected in electronic publishing and scientific production in open access. The main goal of this paper is to define a model for building the academic library as the vault of organized digital collections. The digital library mission implies systematic acquisition and organization of digital collections, managing collections and ensuring long-term access for users according to pre-established rules. The future of digital libraries depends on the ability of self organization and transformation, in order to become the main centre of knowledge and distance learning, using complex software systems and constantly developing into flexible network structures. Digitization of the existing library materials, development of institutional repository, electronic publishing and organization of collections in open access, taking into account copyright regulations, should be in the focus of building a digital library. There are many significant digital library projects worldwide, but in Croatia, they are just starting. This article explores the possibilities of developing a model of the academic digital library that will be horizontally and vertically networked with other libraries, and thereby contribute not only to its own academic institution, but also to the entire creative industry on which it relies through its innovative activities and partnership with the economy.

Research on the Frame System of Digital Library Mobile Cloud Service Platform

Mobile cloud computing provides a deeper hierarchical tangibility for the construction and environment of digital library and mobile cloud services will certainly become the service mode of the future digital library. From three aspects: information resources integration, the expansion of mobile terminal device capability, information service innovation, this paper discusses upgrade of overall strength of mobile cloud design to digital library information service. At the same time, it also detailed introduces the main function of mobile computing platform layer, mobile cloud library platform layer and mobile terminal application layer.

VisInfo: a digital library system for time series research data based on exploratory search—a user-centered design approach

To this day, data-driven science is a widely accepted concept in the digital library (DL) context (Hey et al. in The fourth paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery. Microsoft Research, 2009). In the same way, domain knowledge from information visualization, visual analytics, and exploratory search has found its way into the DL workflow. This trend is expected to continue, considering future DL challenges such as content-based access to new document types, visual search, and exploration for information landscapes, or big data in general. To cope with these challenges, DL actors need to collaborate with external specialists from different domains to complement each other and succeed in given tasks such as making research data publicly available. Through these interdisciplinary approaches, the DL ecosystem may contribute to applications focused on data-driven science and digital scholarship. In this work, we present VisInfo (2014) , a web-based digital library system (DLS) with the goal to provide visual access to time series research data. Based on an exploratory search (ES) concept (White and Roth in Synth Lect Inf Concepts Retr Serv 1(1):1---98, 2009), VisInfo at first provides a content-based overview visualization of large amounts of time series research data. Further, the system enables the user to define visual queries by example or by sketch. Finally, VisInfo presents visual-interactive capability for the exploration of search results. The development process of VisInfo was based on the user-centered design principle. Experts from computer science, a scientific digital library, usability engineering, and scientists from the earth, and environmental sciences were involved in an interdisciplinary approach. We report on comprehensive user studies in the requirement analysis phase based on paper prototyping, user interviews, screen casts, and user questionnaires. Heuristic evaluations and two usability testing rounds were applied during the system implementation and the deployment phase and certify measurable improvements for our DLS. Based on the lessons learned in VisInfo, we suggest a generalized project workflow that may be applied in related, prospective approaches.

Fair Use & Mass Digitization: The Future of Copy-Dependent Technologies After Authors Guild v. HathiTrust

This Note discusses the future of digital libraries and other products reliant on mass digitization in the wake of the HathiTrust decision. First, this Note presents an overview of U.S. copyright protection and the ways in which its goal of incentivizing authors has consistently been balanced by efforts to protect preservation, access, and fair use. Next, the Note explores early formalities and the establishment of the national archive before discussing the modern Copyright Act and its series of statutory exemptions. After outlining the statutory provisions, the Note then discusses the fair use doctrine, focusing on its application to cases involving use for educational and research purposes. Second, this Note discusses the trial court opinion in Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust and the court’s fair use finding regarding the full-text search index and copies for the print disabled. The Note argues that this decision rightly solidifies the growing body of jurisprudence protecting uses that have a transformative purpose and that pose no threat of artistic substitution while providing a public benefit. However, the Note also argues that the same consideration cannot be applied to HathiTrust’s copies for the print-disabled and that the trial court’s fair use application and interpretation of § 121 may be narrowed or corrected on appeal. Third, this Note discusses the HathiTrust decision’s effect on the future of the Google Books case and argues that the fair use ruling paves the road for a similar finding while also giving Google leverage in its ongoing settlement negotiations. The Note argues that Google’s fair use defense is equally as strong as HathiTrust’s despite Google’s commercial exploitation because no artistic substitution exists and Google Books helps rather than harms the market for the copyrighted works. Fourth, after exploring the judicial efforts to protect useful technologies as a matter of public policy, this Note explores legislative solutions that would better advance copyright’s goals of promoting education, research, preservation, and access. The Note advocates for (1) expansion of § 108 library privileges to cover mass digitization and noncommercial exploitation; (2) expansion of protected entities that may make copies for the print-disabled under § 121; (3) establishment of a regulatory board to govern the exploitation of orphan works; and (4) categorical protection for technological uses that make use of copyrighted works in a way that does not substitute for the original’s expressive content.

Metadata overhaul: Upgrading metadata in the University of Houston Digital Library

This paper outlines the metadata audit/upgrade process conducted by members of the Metadata and Digitization Services Department at the University of Houston (UH) Libraries. It identifies key recommendations and highlights some of the new guidelines and workflows created for future UH Digital Library (UHDL) metadata creation. It is organised by the major steps in the upgrade process. First, the methodology used to gather data is discussed. Next, key recommendations are outlined. Strategies were formed for upgrading the legacy metadata in the UHDL. Details on these strategies follow a discussion on the recommendations. After the strategies, readers will find information on the new standard and workflow that was established to implement the recommendations into the future. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief discussion on the importance of maintaining metadata over time.

The Digital Library Futures Conference and the future of digital libraries within IFLA

The Digital Library Futures Conference and the future of digital libraries within IFLA

The libraries of Second Life: How MUVE could shape the future of digital libraries

AbstractThis panel will present an overview of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE), specifically Second Life (SL), and its applications in library services and education. The panel includes practitioners as well as educators that have been developing applications in Second Life. They will be presenting current applications of SL in Libraries and virtual campuses, and discuss usability issues associated to these environments.

In our cages with golden bars

PurposeThis paper aims to postulates on the current limitations of digital libraries, and what digital libraries might be if librarians and digital library developers thought about digital libraries differently.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is in the form of an experiential commentary.FindingsThe paper finds that libraries should be more accepting of change and embrace the digital world.Originality/valueThis paper seeks to move the thinking about the future of digital libraries beyond its current scope. It should be of interest to digital library developers, librarians, and information scientists.

One digital library, two undergraduate classes, and four learning modules: Uses of a digital library in classrooms

AbstractThe KMODDL (kinematic models for design digital library) is a digital library based on a historical collection of kinematic models made of steel and bronze. The digital library contains four types of learning modules including textual materials, QuickTime virtual reality movies, Java simulations, and stereolithographic files of the physical models. The authors report an evaluation study on the uses of the KMODDL in two undergraduate classes. This research reveals that the users in different classes encountered different usability problems, and reported quantitatively different subjective experiences. Further, the results indicate that depending on the subject area, the two user groups preferred different types of learning modules, resulting in different uses of the available materials and different learning outcomes. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future digital library design.

Digital library futures: collection development or collection preservation?

PurposeTo argue that theoretical models from non‐LIS disciplines can be of practical benefit to practitioner LIS research. In the area of digitisation collection development policy, such models highlight the importance of digital library preservation issues.Design/methodology/approachAn application of formal models from cultural theories derived from structuralism and semiotics to LIS problems.FindingsTheoretical models from non‐LIS disciplines help illustrate and understand problems such as developing information literacy in the digital library environment or creating a balance between the need to develop new digital collections and the preservation of the digital collections which have already been created.Research limitations/implicationsThis is a theoretical argument that could be tested by practical case study investigation.Practical implicationsThe paper suggests that resourcing should be applied to digital preservation activity rather than a fresh round of digitisation of print originals, the preservation implications of which are uncertain.Originality/valueThis paper gives some original perspectives on practical LIS challenges by applying abstract ideas from the area of cultural theory and applied linguistics.

Digital library futures: a UK HE and FE perspective

PurposeThe aim of this article is to review the future of digital library development over the next three to five years. The article is written from a UK viewpoint, and with special reference to higher and further education. Unattributed quotations in the text of this article are taken directly from respondents to the survey or contributors to the Blue Skies event. The article aims to build on two previous articles in Interlending & Document Supply.Design/methodology/approachThe research was undertaken for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of a route‐mapping exercise relating to digital library resources and services in higher and further education (referred to jointly as tertiary education (TE)). The route map was formulated on the basis of: a survey, using the “Delphi” approach, of higher and further education libraries in the UK; a major “blue skies” event held in May 2005 at the University of Essex and attended by senior stakeholders from the academic library community; iteration with JISC committees and officers.FindingsThe key aspects of current and future environments are analysed and a possible future state‐of‐the‐art in library provision given. A number of areas are considered: key strategic drivers; scholarly communication: the need for quality assurance; users and their requirements; systems and services; “the library” and its future in an e‐world; economics; technology and the likely impact of the latest technological developments and fashions.Practical implicationsThe Routemap will be used to help JISC and the UK TE library community to plan the next three to five years of development in the field of digital libraries.Originality/valueThis article provides a summary of both digital library work to date and the views of key stakeholders in the field; it presents a coherent vision of a future state‐of‐the‐art in the field and a practical set of steps as to how this can be achieved.