Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

Development of Domain Specific Cluster : An Integrated Framework for College Libraries under the University of Burdwan

This paper discusses the development of six domain specific cluster software in the college libraries under the University of Burdwan. Library is the heart of educational institutions. So, as to select the open source relevant with comprehensive software and global parameters on the basis of global recommendations like IFLA-Working Group, Integrated Library System for Discovery Interface (ILS-DI), Request for Proposals (RFP), Request for Comments (RFC), Service Oriented Architectre (SOA) and Open Library Environment Projects (OLE) including the areas like integrated library system cluster, digital media archiving cluster, content management system cluster, learning content management system cluster, federated search system cluster and college communication interaction cluster for designing and developing the college libraries under the University of Burdwan. Also develop the single window based interface in six domain specific cluster for the college librarians and the users to access their necessary resources through open source software and open standards. These six domain specific cluster softwares are to be selected for easily managed the digital and library resources in the college libraries affiliated to the University of Burdwan. This integrated framework can easily managed the housekeeping operations and information retrieval systems like acquisition, cataloguing, circulation, member generation, authority control, report generation and online public access catalogue for the users as well as library professionals also

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Servicing the federation : the case for metadata harvesting

The paper presents a comparative analysis of data harvesting and distributed computing as complementary models of service delivery within large-scale federated digital libraries. Informed by requirements of flexibility and scalability of federated services, the analysis focuses on the identification and assessment of model invariants. In particular, it abstracts over application domains, services, and protocol implementations. The analytical evidence produced shows that the harvesting model offers stronger guarantees of satisfying the identified requirements. In addition, it suggests a first characterisation of services based on their suitability to either model and thus indicates how they could be integrated in the context of a single federated digital library

HELIN Federated Search Task Force Final Report

Final report of the HELIN Federated Search Task Force, a group appointed by the HELIN Reference Committee at the request of the HELIN Directors to investigate and report on available federated search engines, which allow users simultaneously to search multiple databases. The task force was not asked to recommend a specific one for licensing by HELIN member libraries and did not do so

dLIST

This is a presentation at the ASIS&T 2005 Annual Meeting session on Progress in the Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries: Implications for Research and Education (moderator: Kyung-Sun Kim). The presentation discusses the creation, design, and management of dLIST, an open access archive for the Information Sciences, and the affiliated DL-Harvest, an open access aggregator and federated search engine. As an Eprints-based open access archive, dLIST is a digital repository but it is a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary repository built on the concept of sustainable information behaviors. Elements such as openness, transparency, information quality and interoperability are critical components along with a focus on connected communities of practice. Sustainable information behaviors can take us beyond the information-seeking-in-context agenda and enable a transformation of scholarly and research commmunity information sharing and communication that is more in tune with the values of a digitally flat (connected) world

A Generic Alerting Service for Digital Libraries

Users of modern digital libraries (DLs) can keep themselves up-to-date by searching and browsing their favorite collections, or more conveniently by resorting to an alerting service. The alerting service notifies its clients about new or changed documents. Proprietary and mediating alerting services fail to fluidly integrate information from differing collections. This paper analyses the conceptual requirements of this much-sought after service for digital libraries. We demonstrate that the differing concepts of digital libraries and its underlying technical design has extensive influence (a) the expectations, needs and interests of users regarding an alerting service, and (b) on the technical possibilities of the implementation of the service. Our findings will show that the range of issues surrounding alerting services for digital libraries, their design and use is greater than one may anticipate. We also show that, conversely, the requirements for an alerting service have considerable impact on the concepts of DL design. Our findings should be of interest for librarians as well as system designers. We highlight and discuss the far-reaching implications for the design of, and interaction with, libraries. This paper discusses the lessons learned from building such a distributed alerting service. We present our prototype implementation as a proof-of-concept for an alerting service for open DL software