Studying Conceptual Models for Publishing Library Data to the Semantic Web

This thesis studies the library data and the way that linked data technologies may affect libraries. The thesis aims to contribute to the research regarding the devel-opment and implementation of a framework for the integration of bibliographic data in the semantic web. It seeks to make sound propositions for the interopera-bility of conceptual bibliographic models, as well as for future library systems and search environments integrating bibliographic information

To Map or Not to Map: Rethinking Crosswalk Agendas

In the two decades since their publication, the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records and succeeding standards such as the Library Reference Model have had a marked impact on discourse concerning descriptive theory and practice. The BIBFRAME model, which began as an effort to replace MARC as a linked data-capable modeling format, offers an alternate view of the bibliographic universe with three principal entities rather than four. Differences between BIBFRAME and LRM are based in competing intuitions on the nature of creative works, and at first the two approaches appear to compete for the same intellectual space. BIBFRAME offers us a less constrained model of bibliographic descriptions than the FRBR models, and if interoperability between BIBFRAME and WEMI-aligned standards like Resource Description and Access requires translation of RDA records both to and from BIBFRAME descriptions, then the latter’s flexibility poses problems for mapping between the models. Proposed solutions to those problems reveal as much about different modeling philosophies as they do about different views of creative works and their relationships to texts and copies. Linked data protocols are intended to support resources and scenarios that are far too diverse for either a single account of creative works or for a subsumption-based taxonomy of models. But a need for descriptions flexible enough to include them all does not require us to retreat from modeling commitments to either reductionism or operationalism. BIBFRAME can be seen as reaching for or pointing toward a descriptive domain that supports a complementary role to the IFLA standards

Bibliographic Control in the Digital Ecosystem

With the contributions of international experts, the book aims to explore the new boundaries of universal bibliographic control. Bibliographic control is radically changing because the bibliographic universe is radically changing: resources, agents, technologies, standards and practices. Among the main topics addressed: library cooperation networks; legal deposit; national bibliographies; new tools and standards (IFLA LRM, RDA, BIBFRAME); authority control and new alliances (Wikidata, Wikibase, Identifiers); new ways of indexing resources (artificial intelligence); institutional repositories; new book supply chain; “discoverability” in the IIIF digital ecosystem; role of thesauri and ontologies in the digital ecosystem; bibliographic control and search engines

Un nuevo entorno de la catalogación. La entidad ítem en el contexto de las RDA y del Modelo de Referencia Bibliotecaria de la IFLA

Han transcurrido casi veinte cinco años desde que se inició el camino para establecer un estándar internacional que permitiera modelar de manera efectiva el universo bibliográfico y posibilitara la puesta en marcha de normas para la catalogación de recursos en el entorno digital. En agosto de 2017 se presentó el Modelo de Referencia Bibliotecaria de la IFLA (Riva, Le Bœuf y Žumer, 2017a), y poco después el RDA Steerling Committee, conocido por sus siglas RSC, anunció su deseo de alinear las instrucciones RDA. Recursos, Descripción y Acceso (JSC, 2010; RSC, 2020) con el modelo conceptual consolidado, proceso que concluyó en diciembre de 2020. Este contexto de cambios estructurales implica una nueva visión en los flujos de trabajo de los bibliotecarios tanto desde el punto de vista teórico como desde el tecnológico. Esta tesis pretende profundizar en la entidad ítem, uno de los elementos del modelo, para valorar cuales son las principales repercusiones que tiene el nuevo entorno en los catálogos o herramientas de descubrimiento, los servicios a los usuarios y también en las tareas de gestión de las colecciones. Se parte de la base del establecimiento de un marco teórico que sitúa el punto de inicio y define el marco de actuación. Posteriormente se realiza un análisis global de los metadatos descriptivos y administrativos asociados a los ítems de una muestra de registros de ejemplar de una colección patrimonial que da lugar a la creación de una taxonomía del ítem relacionada con su ciclo de vida. Posteriormente, se analizan un conjunto de ítems de la misma colección, seleccionados en función de sus características diferenciadoras, a los que se les aplican las normas RDA (JSC, 2010; RSC, 2020) para obtener datos que comparados posibilitan la creación de una herramienta para facilitar la creación de perfiles de aplicación RDA (RSC, 2020) para el ítem. Se observa que, en este contexto, se abre un amplio margen de mejora, una oportunidad para integrar la gestión de los metadatos en las bibliotecas atendiendo a un enfoque holístico, que integre en el mismo proceso los datos considerados administrativos y de gestión o circulación con los descriptivos para ofrecer nuevos servicios a los usuarios, mejorar las visualizaciones que ofrecen los catálogos y la eficiencia en la gestión de colecciones.It has been almost twenty-five years since the way to establish an international standard that would model the bibliographic universe, and enable the implementation of standards for cataloging resources for the digital environment, was started. The IFLA’s Library Reference Model (Riva, Le Boeuf y Žumer, 2017) was presented in 2017, and afterward, the RDA Steering Committee, the RSC, announced his desire to align the consolidated conceptual model with the rules RDA: Resources Description and Access. This process was finally completed in December 2020. In this context, characterized by structural changes, a new vision of the library’s workflows, in a theoretical and technological way, is needed. This work aims to go deeper into the Item entity, an element of the model, to assess what are the main repercussions that this new environment may have on catalogs or resource discovery tools, user services and, also on collection management tasks. The starting point is to establish a theoretical framework that sets and defines it. Subsequently, an overall analysis is made on the descriptive and administrative metadata associated with the items in a sample of records from a heritage library collection, to create a taxonomy of the item. After that, a set of items from the same collection, selected according to their differentiating characteristics, were analyzed applying to them the RDA instructions, (RSC, 2020) to elaborate a useful tool to create an RDA (RSC, 2020) item application profiles. A holistic approach was discovered to improve the systems in a wide sense, and a great opportunity to integrate the metadata management systems in libraries. The data considered as administrative and management or circulation data, with the descriptive data to offer new and better services to users, improve the visualizations offered in the catalogs, and promote efficiency in the collection management are integrated into the same process.Programa de Doctorado en Documentación: Archivos y Bibliotecas en el Entorno Digital por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Blanca Rodríguez Bravo.- Secretario: Fátima García López.- Vocal: Juan Antonio Pastor Sánche

Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives. Semantic Web Applications for Connoisseurship

The purpose of this work is threefold: (i) to facilitate knowledge discovery in art historical photo archives, (ii) to support users' decision-making process when evaluating contradictory artwork attributions, and (iii) to provide policies for information quality improvement in art historical photo archives. The approach is to leverage Semantic Web technologies in order to aggregate, assess, and recommend the most documented authorship attributions. In particular, findings of this work offer art historians an aid for retrieving relevant sources, assessing textual authoritativeness (i.e. internal grounds) of sources of attribution, and evaluating cognitive authoritativeness of cited scholars. At the same time, the retrieval process allows art historical data providers to define a low-cost data integration process to update and enrich their collection data. The contributions of this thesis are the following: (1) a methodology for representing questionable information by means of ontologies; (2) a conceptual framework of Information Quality measures addressing dimensions of textual and cognitive authoritativeness characterising art historical data, (3) a number of policies for metadata quality improvement in art historical photo archives as derived from the application of the framework, (4) a ranking model leveraging the conceptual framework, (5) a semantic crawler, called mAuth, that harvests authorship attributions in the Web of Data, and (6) an API and a Web Application to serve information to applications and final users for consuming data. Despite findings are limited to a restricted number of photo archives and datasets, the research impacts on a broader number of stakeholders, such as archives, museums, and libraries, which can reuse the conceptual framework for assessing questionable information, mutatis mutandi, to other near fields in the Humanities

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project

Digital Classical Philology

The buzzwords “Information Society” and “Age of Access” suggest that information is now universally accessible without any form of hindrance. Indeed, the German constitution calls for all citizens to have open access to information. Yet in reality, there are multifarious hurdles to information access – whether physical, economic, intellectual, linguistic, political, or technical. Thus, while new methods and practices for making information accessible arise on a daily basis, we are nevertheless confronted by limitations to information access in various domains. This new book series assembles academics and professionals in various fields in order to illuminate the various dimensions of information's inaccessability. While the series discusses principles and techniques for transcending the hurdles to information access, it also addresses necessary boundaries to accessability.This book describes the state of the art of digital philology with a focus on ancient Greek and Latin. It addresses problems such as accessibility of information about Greek and Latin sources, data entry, collection and analysis of Classical texts and describes the fundamental role of libraries in building digital catalogs and developing machine-readable citation systems

From social tagging to polyrepresentation: a study of expert annotating behavior of moving images

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThis thesis investigates “nichesourcing” (De Boer, Hildebrand, et al., 2012), an emergent initiative of cultural heritage crowdsoucing in which niches of experts are involved in the annotating tasks. This initiative is studied in relation to moving image annotation, and in the context of audiovisual heritage, more specifically, within the sector of film archives. The work presents a case study of film and media scholars to investigate the types of annotations and attribute descriptions that they could eventually contribute, as well as the information needs, and seeking and searching behaviors of this group, in order to determine what the role of the different types of annotations in supporting their expert tasks would be. The study is composed of three independent but interconnected studies using a mixed methodology and an interpretive approach. It uses concepts from the information behavior discipline, and the "Integrated Information Seeking and Retrieval Framework" (IS&R) (Ingwersen and Järvelin, 2005) as guidance for the investigation. The findings show that there are several types of annotations that moving image experts could contribute to a nichesourcing initiative, of which time-based tags are only one of the possibilities. The findings also indicate that for the different foci in film and media research, in-depth indexing at the content level is only needed for supporting a specific research focus, for supporting research in other domains, or for engaging broader audiences. The main implications at the level of information infrastructure are the requirement for more varied annotating support, more interoperability among existing metadata standards and frameworks, and the need for guidelines about crowdsoucing and nichesourcing implementation in the audiovisual heritage sector. This research presents contributions to the studies of social tagging applied to moving images, to the discipline of information behavior, by proposing new concepts related to the area of use behavior, and to the concept of “polyrepresentation” (Ingwersen, 1992, 1996) applied to the humanities domain.Esta tesis investiga la iniciativa del nichesourcing (De Boer, Hildebrand, et al., 2012), como una forma de crowdsoucing en sector del patrimonio cultural, en la cuál grupos de expertos participan en las tareas de anotación de las colecciones. El ámbito de aplicación es la anotación de las imágenes en movimiento en el contexto del patrimonio audiovisual, más específicamente, en el caso de los archivos fílmicos. El trabajo presenta un estudio de caso aplicado a un dominio específico de expertos en el ámbito audiovisual: los académicos de cine y medios. El análisis se centra en dos aspectos específicos del problema: los tipos de anotaciones y atributos en las descripciones que podrían obtenerse de este nicho de expertos; y en las necesidades de información y el comportamiento informacional de dicho grupo, con el fin de determinar cuál es el rol de los diferentes tipos de anotaciones en sus tareas de investigación. La tesis se compone de tres estudios independientes e interconectados; se usa una metodología mixta e interpretativa. El marco teórico se compone de conceptos del área de estudios de comportamiento informacional (“information behavior”) y del “Marco integrado de búsqueda y recuperación de la información” ("Integrated Information Seeking and Retrieval Framework" (IS&R)) propuesto por Ingwersen y Järvelin (2005), que sirven de guía para la investigación. Los hallazgos indican que existen diversas formas de anotación de la imagen en movimiento que podrían generarse a partir de las contribuciones de expertos, de las cuáles las etiquetas a nivel de plano son sólo una de las posibilidades. Igualmente, se identificaron diversos focos de investigación en el área académica de cine y medios. La indexación detallada de contenidos sólo es requerida por uno de esos grupos y por investigadores de otras disciplinas, o como forma de involucrar audiencias más amplias. Las implicaciones más relevantes, a nivel de la infraestructura informacional, se refieren a los requisitos de soporte a formas más variadas de anotación, el requisito de mayor interoperabilidad de los estándares y marcos de metadatos, y la necesidad de publicación de guías de buenas prácticas sobre de cómo implementar iniciativas de crowdsoucing o nichesourcing en el sector del patrimonio audiovisual. Este trabajo presenta aportes a la investigación sobre el etiquetado social aplicado a las imágenes en movimiento, a la disciplina de estudios del comportamiento informacional, a la que se proponen nuevos conceptos relacionados con el área de uso de la información, y al concepto de “poli-representación” (Ingwersen, 1992, 1996) en las disciplinas humanísticas.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Documentación: Archivos y Bibliotecas en el Entorno DigitalPresidente: Peter Emil Rerup Ingwersen.- Secretario: Antonio Hernández Pérez.- Vocal: Nils Phar