Volume 26, Number 1, March 2006 OLAC Newsletter

Digitized March 2006 issue of the OLAC Newsletter

Database of Demons and Death Gods: The Creation Process

Here lies the Database of Demons and Death Gods: a full-text database of stories about death gods and demons from around the world. This paper describes the background literature useful to the creation of such a database and a detailed walkthrough of the process of creating and launching the database. Process topics include system architecture, principles of story selection and file naming, metadata, search functionality, user interface, graphic design, database launch and evaluation, and areas for future development.Master of Science in Library Scienc

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

Investigating Multilingual, Multi-script Support in Lucene/Solr Library Applications

Yale has developed over many years a highly-structured, high-quality multilingual catalog of bibliographic data. Almost 50% of the collection represents non-English materials in over 650 languages, and includes many different non-Roman scripts. Faculty, students, researchers, and staff would like to make full use of this original script content for resource discovery. While the underlying textual data are in place, effective indexing, retrieval and display functionality for the non-Roman script content is not available within our bibliographic discovery applications, Orbis and Yufind. Opportunities now exist in the Unicode, Lucene/Solr computing environment to bridge the functionality gap and achieve internationalization of the Yale Library catalog. While most parts of this study focus on the Yale environment, in the absence of other such studies it is hoped that the findings will be of interest to a much larger community.Arcadia Foundatio

Japanese bibliographic records and CJK cataloging in U.S. university libraries.

In the last two decades, American university libraries have developed Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) enhancements to their library automation systems and transitioned from conventional card catalogs to online public access catalogs (OPAC) by using CJK vernacular scripts, although non-Roman script search options of these systems are still limited

Semantic Domains in Akkadian Text

The article examines the possibilities offered by language technology for analyzing semantic fields in Akkadian. The corpus of data for our research group is the existing electronic corpora, Open richly annotated cuneiform corpus (ORACC). In addition to more traditional Assyriological methods, the article explores two language technological methods: Pointwise mutual information (PMI) and Word2vec.Peer reviewe

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions provides case studies on archaeology, objects, cuneiform texts, and online publishing, digital archiving, and preservation. Eleven chapters present a rich array of material, spanning the fifth through the first millennium BCE, from Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Iran. Customized cyber- and general glossaries support readers who lack either a technical background or familiarity with the ancient cultures. Edited by Vanessa Bigot Juloux, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and Alessandro Di Ludovico, this volume is dedicated to broadening the understanding and accessibility of digital humanities tools, methodologies, and results to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Ultimately, this book provides a model for introducing cyber-studies to the mainstream of humanities research

An exploratory study of translations of the Dewey Decimal Classification system into South African languages

This research investigated the feasibility of South African translations of Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). The study provides an introductory overview of DDC throughout the world, followed by its use in South Africa. The introduction highlights shortcomings and possible solutions – of which translations seem to be the most ideal. This research involved a critical analysis of the literature on DDC translations, a documentary analysis and technology-based research in the form of Google translations and evaluation of parts of Abridged Edition 15 of DDC. The critical analysis of the literature and the documentary analysis identified problems relating to translations, how translations deal with shortcomings in DDC, the fact that no literature exists on multilingual translations, and the process of translations (including the fact that this is an expensive endeavour). It also revealed information about sponsorship and the mixed translation model. The technology-based research, using Google Translate for translations of parts of Abridged Edition 15 and the subsequent evaluation of these translations indicated that Google translations were comprehensive and needed minimum editorial effort. Further to this it paved the way for describing a possible workflow for South African translations and indicated that the parts already translated as well as further Google translations can expedite the translation process. A model for South African translations, based on only the cost of the Pansoft translation software was proposed. The mixed model approach, where some languages are used as main languages (schedules, Relative Index terms and the like) and others for Relative Index terms only, was deemed the most appropriate in the South African context. This led to the conclusion that DDC translations into ten of the official South African languages are indeed feasible. The research supports translations that keep the integrity of DDC intact, with possible expansions based on literary arrant. It is important, though, to get the support of the South African library community and authoritative bodies such as the National Library of South Africa and/or the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) to negotiate and sign a contract for these translations.Information ScienceD. Litt. et Phil. (Information Science

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives: LangArc 2023

Conference proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held on June 30, 2023 as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023. It includes 10 peer-reviewed papers that were presented at the workshop and an introduction from the workshop organizers

to_be_classified: A Facet Analysis of a Folksonomy

This research examines Ranganathan’s postulational approach to facet analysis with the intention of manually inducing a faceted classification ontology from a folksonomy. Folksonomies are viewed as a source to a wealth of data representing users’ perspectives. An in-depth study of faceted classification theory is used to form a methodology based on the postulational approach. The dataset used to test the methodology consists of over 107,000 instances of 1,275 unique tags representing 76 popular non-fiction history books collected from the LibraryThing folksonomy. Preliminary results of the facet analysis indicate the manual inducement of two faceted classification ontologies in the dataset; one representing the universe of books and one representing the universe of subjects within the universe of books. The ontology representing the universe of books is considered to be complete, whereas the ontology representing the universe of subjects is incomplete. These differences are discussed in light of theoretical differences between special and universal faceted classifications. The induced ontologies are then discussed in terms of their substantiation or violation of Ranganathan’s Canons of Classification.Master i bibliotek- og informasjonsvitenska