Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)

This chapter describes the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD, see www.ndltd.org), as an example of digital library practice. It builds upon discussion in earlier chapters on policy – touching on content, preservation, evaluation, and economics. In the remainder of this section we explain the rationale (Section 1.1), give a library perspective (Section 1.2), and explain our very broad perspective regarding evaluation. In the next section (2) we describe the community served and involved. Section 3 discusses the content, especially at the level of collection, considering its management, size, and access. Section 4 relates this work to the world of scholarly publishing, including perspectives of authors and publishers, considering as well intellectual property rights and preservation. The last section points toward future growth in membership, organization, and services

Guide to Options for ETD Programs

Dr. Martin Halbert of the University of North Texas documents the spectrum of ETD program implementation and offers guidance for academic decision-makers who are either creating or modifying ETD programs. Dr. Halbert identifies and offers in-depth analysis regarding the five key decisions that ETD programs must make. He also provides a literature review of publications, standards and reports that have been produced to date, and relates these to the key decisions

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Profiles of Academic Libraries

Collectively, the profiles included in this book are designed to give a bird‘s eye view of the various aspects of academic librarianship, not only in the United States, but in other countries as well, such as Egypt, Jordan, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. These profiles enable the reader to compare the various aspects of academic librarianship on a national as well as international level. These comparisons may also lead to identifying best practices used by college and university libraries in such areas as management, marketing, information fluency and the like. Reading the chapters, the reader can draw examples of best practices in academic library management.https://dc.uwm.edu/sois_facbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

Towards digital library service integration

Digital Library Service Integration (DLSI) aims to provide a systematic approach in integrating the services and collections of National Science and Digital Library. The National Science and Digital Library collections can share the services among themselves in a totally integrated environinent. Collections as such will require no change to plug into the DLSI architecture. Collections will keep using the services of NSDL in the similar manner as before. These services will in turn pass few parameters to the services of DLSI. With the help of these parameters, wrappers will fetch the details and priority of the users. These wrappers will be using the services of Search and Discovery module, Metadata Management services, and Access Management services. Users will see a totally integrated environment. They will see their digital library system just as before. In addition to that, they will find some extra link anchors on the document. These links serve to provide the supplemental information or arrange the information in the user preferred way. For this matter, the DLSI maintains basic user\u27s information and preferences. Other contributions include incorporating collaborative filtering for customizing large sets of links, and advance lexical analysis tool to identify the objects of interest in a document

Digital Scholarship 2009

The work is a bibliography of digital scholarship containing citations of articles, books, and technical reports on institutional repositories and scholarly electronic publishin

Enriching e-learning metadata through digital library usage analysis

Purpose: In this paper we propose an evaluation framework for analyzing learning objects usage, with the aim of extracting useful information for improving the quality of the metadata used to describe the learning objects, but also for personalization purposes, including user models and adaptive itineraries. Methodology: We present experimental results from the log usage analysis during one academic semester of two different subjects, 350 students. The experiment looks into raw server log data generated from the interactions of the students with the classroom learning objects, in order to find relevant information that can be used to improve the metadata used for describing both the learning objects and the learning process. Findings: Preliminary studies have been carried out in order to obtain an initial picture of the interactions between learners and the virtual campus, including both services and resources usage. These studies try to establish elationships between user profiles and their information and navigational behavior in the virtual campus, with the aim of promoting personalization and improving the understanding of what learning in virtual environments means. Research limitations: During the formal learning process, students use learning resources from the virtual classroom provided by the academic library, but they also search for information outside the virtual campus. Not all of these usage data are considered in the model we propose. Further research needs to be done in order to get a complete view of the information search behavior of students for improving the users’ profile and creating better personalized services. Practical implications: In this paper we suggest how a selection of fields used in the LOM standard could be used for enriching the description of learning objects, automatically in some cases, from the learning objects usage performed by an academic community. Originality: Ever since the beginnings of libraries, they have been a “quiet storage place”. With the development of digital libraries, they become a meeting place where explicit and implicit recommendations about information sources can be shared among users. Social and learning process interactions, therefore, can be considered another knowledge source