Semantic browsing of digital collections

Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor’s interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. We propose the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed

Creating digital library collections with Greenstone

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information based on metadata and publishing ti on the Internet. This paper introduces Greenstone and explains how librarians use it to create and customize digital library collections. Through an end-user interface, they add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

Creating and customizing digital library collections with the Greenstone Librarian Interface

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet. This paper describes how digital library collections can be created and customized with the new Greenstone Librarian Interface. Its basic features allow users to add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place so for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures. At the most advanced level, the Librarian Interface gives expert users interactive access to the full power of Greenstone, which could formerly be tapped only by running Perl scripts manually

Power to the people: end-user building of digital library collections

Naturally, digital library systems focus principally on the reader: th e consumer of the material that constitutes the library. In contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the user's own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. End users can easily build new collections styled after existing ones from material on the Web or from their local files-or both, and collections can be updated and new ones brought on-line at any time. The interface, which is intended for non-professional end users, is modeled after widely used commercial software installation packages. Lest one quail at the prospect of end users building their own collections on a shared system, we also describe an interface for the administrative user who is responsible for maintaining a digital library installation

Digital Collections

Poster presented at JMU Libraries Showcase, Harrisonburg, VA

Organizing digital music for use: an examination of personal music collections

Current research on music information retrieval and music digital libraries focuses on providing access to huge, public music collections. In this paper we consider a different, but related, problem: supporting an individual in maintaining and using a personal music collection. We analyze organization and access techniques used to manage personal music collections (primarily CDs and MP3 files), and from these behaviors, to suggest user behaviors that should be supported in a personal music digital library (that is, a digital library of an individual's personal music collection)

My digital photos: where and when?

In recent years digital cameras have seen an enormous rise in popularity, leading to a huge increase in the quantity of digital photos being taken. This brings with it the challenge of organising these large collections. We preset work which organises personal digital photo collections based on date/time and GPS location, which we believe will become a key organisational methodology over the next few years as consumer digital cameras evolve to incorporate GPS and as cameras in mobile phones spread further. The accompanying video illustrates the results of our research into digital photo management tools which contains a series of screen and user interactions highlighting how a user utilises the tools we are developing to manage a personal archive of digital photos

MediAssist: Using content-based analysis and context to manage personal photo collections

We present work which organises personal digital photo collections based on contextual information, such as time and location, combined with content-based analysis such as face detection and other feature detectors. The MediAssist demonstration system illustrates the results of our research into digital photo management, showing how a combination of automatically extracted context and content-based information, together with user annotation, facilitates efficient searching of personal photo collections

Lifecycle information for e-literature: full report from the LIFE project

This Report is a record of the LIFE Project. The Project has been run for one year and its aim is to deliver crucial information about the cost and management of digital material. This information should then in turn be able to be applied to any institution that has an interest in preserving and providing access to electronic collections. The Project is a joint venture between The British Library and UCL Library Services. The Project is funded by JISC under programme area (i) as listed in paragraph 16 of the JISC 4/04 circular- Institutional Management Support and Collaboration and as such has set requirements and outcomes which must be met and the Project has done its best to do so. Where the Project has been unable to answer specific questions, strong recommendations have been made for future Project work to do so. The outcomes of this Project are expected to be a practical set of guidelines and a framework within which costs can be applied to digital collections in order to answer the following questions: • What is the long term cost of preserving digital material; • Who is going to do it; • What are the long term costs for a library in HE/FE to partner with another institution to carry out long term archiving; • What are the comparative long-term costs of a paper and digital copy of the same publication; • At what point will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper for publications available in parallel formats; • What are the relative risks of digital versus paper archiving. The Project has attempted to answer these questions by using a developing lifecycle methodology and three diverse collections of digital content. The LIFE Project team chose UCL e-journals, BL Web Archiving and the BL VDEP digital collections to provide a strong challenge to the methodology as well as to help reach the key Project aim of attributing long term cost to digital collections. The results from the Case Studies and the Project findings are both surprising and illuminating