The Development and Usage of the Greenstone Digital Library Software

The Greenstone software has helped spread the practical impact of digital library technology throughout the world-particularly in developing countries. This article reviews the project’s origins, usage, and the development of support mechanisms for Greenstone users. We begin with a brief summary of salient aspects of this open source software package and its user population. Next we describe how its international, humanitarian focus arose. We then review the special requirements imposed by the conditions that prevail in developing courtiers. Finally we discuss efforts to establish regional support organizations for Greenstone in India and Africa

A framework for evaluating automatic indexing or classification in the context of retrieval

Tools for automatic subject assignment help deal with scale and sustainability in creating and enriching metadata, establishing more connections across and between resources and enhancing consistency. While some software vendors and experimental researchers claim the tools can replace manual subject indexing, hard scientific evidence of their performance in operating information environments is scarce. A major reason for this is that research is usually conducted in laboratory conditions, excluding the complexities of real-life systems and situations. The paper reviews and discusses issues with existing evaluation approaches such as problems of aboutness and relevance assessments, implying the need to use more than a single “gold standard” method when evaluating indexing and retrieval and proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework. The framework is informed by a systematic review of the literature on indexing, classification and approaches: evaluating indexing quality directly through assessment by an evaluator or through comparison with a gold standard; evaluating the quality of computer-assisted indexing directly in the context of an indexing workflow, and evaluating indexing quality indirectly through analyzing retrieval performance

Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) in scientific Libraries in Germany : an explorative study with triangulation of quantitative and qualitative Methods

Hintergrund: Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) wird in zahlreichen Anwendungen des täglichen digitalen Lebens eingesetzt. Auch in Bibliotheken findet FLOSS immer öfter Anwendung. Jedoch existieren keine Untersuchungen zur Thematik, weder in einzelnen Aufsätzen noch in der einschlägigen Fachliteratur. Diese Studie versucht, sich der Erforschung dieses Bereichs anzunähern. Methoden: In dieser mit Methoden der qualitativen und quantitativen Forschung erstellten Studie wurden zunächst grundlegende Informationen zur Thematik erarbeitet, mit Hilfe einer Literaturanalyse der Forschungsstand zur Thematik dargelegt und die in Deutschland eingesetzte FLOSS vorgestellt. Anschließend wurden Interviews mit Experten aus Bibliotheken geführt und ausgewertet. Die Dimensionen dieser Interviews wurden mit Hilfe einer Online-Umfrage weiteren Experten aus Bibliotheken in Deutschland vorgelegt. Die abschließende Auswertung erfolgt mit Hilfe einer Triangulation der beiden Methoden. Ergebnisse: Die Studie belegt, dass FLOSS in zunehmendem Maße von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken in Deutschland eingesetzt wird. Kernbereich ist hierbei die Suchmaschinentechnologie. Es gibt Hinweise auf ein mögliches Defizit an Kooperation zwischen den Akteuren des Bibliothekswesens, wenngleich FLOSS und damit auch FLOSS-Ökosysteme als strategisches Konzept innerhalb der Personen auf der Ebene des Managements (Direktion, Bibliotheksleitungen) angekommen zu sein scheint. FLOSS stellt aus unterschiedlichen Gründen eine Herausforderung für die Bibliotheken dar. Weiter vermittelt die Studie einen Überblick über die momentan von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken in Deutschland eingesetzte FLOSS.Background: Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) is a basic part of our daily digital life. Also in libraries there is a growing number of FLOSS used for different processes. For german scientific libraries there is a deficit in research in this subject, neither in journals nor in specialized books. This study aims to approach this subject. Methods: In the first part of this Study there was fundamental research about the topic and an analysis of the literature to get the current state of resarch. Then, in the mixedmethods part, Interviews with experts from libraries were kept and the outcomes from the interviews were presented to other experts from libraries. At the end there was a triangulation of the qualitative and the quantitative part. Outcomes: The study showed that FLOSS is used by libraries in growing numbers. Core Area is the search engine technology. The study also shows that there might be a deficit in cooperation between the libraries, allthough the management has recognized the strategical concept of FLOSS and FLOSS-Ecosystems. Commitment of FLOSS is a challenge for different reasons. The study gives an overview about FLOSS in german scientific libraries

A Fedora Librarian Interface

The Fedora content management system embodies a powerful and flexible digital object model. This paper describes a new open-source software front-end that enables end-user librarians to transfer documents and metadata in a variety of formats into a Fedora repository. The main graphical facility that Fedora itself provides for this task operates on one document at a time and is not librarian-friendly. A batch driven alternative is possible, but requires documents to be converted beforehand into the XML format used by the repository, necessitating a need for programming skills. In contrast, our new scheme allows arbitrary collections of documents residing on the user’s computer (or the web at large) to be ingested into a Fedora repository in one operation, without a need for programming expertise. Provision is also made for editing existing documents and metadata, and adding new ones. The documents can be in a wide variety of different formats, and the user interface is suitable for practicing librarians. The design capitalizes on our experience in building the Greenstone librarian interface and participating in dozens of workshops with librarians worldwide