Website Design and Evaluation Workshop

Workbook on website design prepared for presentation at LIBRARIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE 2004: HUMAN INFORMATION BEHAVIOUR AND COMPETENCIES FOR DIGITAL LIBRARIES includes chapters on pre-planning, card sort technique, focus groups, usability, site architecture, accessibility, and assessmentunpublishednot peer reviewe

Planning strategically, designing architecturally : a framework for digital library services

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced

Metadata Architecture for Digital Libraries: Conceptual framework for Indian Digital Libraries

This paper describes approach of development of Metadata solution for digital library architecture for resource description and retrieval. This deals with the concept of Metadata [2], the different Metadata standards (Dublin core in particular [5]), Digital library environment, computer network capabilities etc. This paper also discusses two of the Digital Library architecture protocols, for resource description and retrieval. They are STARTS (Stanford Protocol Proposal for Internet Retrieval and Search) [8] and SODA (Smart Objects and Dump Archives)[13] architecture to arrive at a possible protocol that would help to build Indian Digital Libraries [5]. While proposing the new architecture the existing Indian environment with respect to information sources and user's query of the information sources [5.1], which are feasible for launch of this protocol for information processing and retrieval has been dealt with. This is a pilot study which the author has done while doing his Fulbright fellowship in the College of Library Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD during 1999-2000

Improving Knowledge Retrieval in Digital Libraries Applying Intelligent Techniques

Nowadays an enormous quantity of heterogeneous and distributed information is stored in the digital University. Exploring online collections to find knowledge relevant to a user’s interests is a challenging work. The artificial intelligence and Semantic Web provide a common framework that allows knowledge to be shared and reused in an efficient way. In this work we propose a comprehensive approach for discovering E-learning objects in large digital collections based on analysis of recorded semantic metadata in those objects and the application of expert system technologies. We have used Case Based-Reasoning methodology to develop a prototype for supporting efficient retrieval knowledge from online repositories. We suggest a conceptual architecture for a semantic search engine. OntoUS is a collaborative effort that proposes a new form of interaction between users and digital libraries, where the latter are adapted to users and their surroundings

Managing smart campus and smart libraries: a look at challenges and the way forward for libraries in developing countries

The paper focused on the challenges faced in creating and managing smart libraries in developing countries. The highlight of the paper are an overview of smart campuses and smart libraries; the justification for smart campuses and smart libraries. The key points for driving a smart campus and smart libraries include deep understanding of smart technological architecture; availability of smart devices and availability of smart platforms; The related technologies for smart libraries in smart campus include but not limited to cloud computing, radio frequency identification (RFID), mobile technology applications, internet of things (IoT) and wireless technology. Several challenges were identified such as unavailability of digital infrastructure, low level of partnership drive, lack of ict skills among library and information science professionals, high cost of maintenance and shortage of smart librarians. Provision of digital infrastructures, engaging in sustainable partnership initiatives, training and re-training of library and information science professionals, organizing of in-house training for library and information science professionals, recruitment of smart librarians, adequate funding were recommended. Keywords: Smart libraries, smart campuses, developing countries, librarie

KIIT Digital Library: An open hypermedia Application

The massive use of Web technologies has spurred a new revolution in information storing and retrieving. It has always been an issue whether to incorporate hyperlinks embedded in a document or to store them separately in a link base. Research effort has been concentrated on the development of link services that enable hypermedia functionality to be integrate into the general computing environment and allow linking from all tools on the browser or desktop. KIIT digital library is such an application that focuses mainly on architecture and protocols of Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS), providing on-line document authoring, browsing, cataloguing, searching and updating features. The WWW needs fundamentally new frameworks and concepts to support new search and indexing functionality. This is because of the frequent use of digital archives and to maintain huge amount of database and documents. These digital materials range from electronic versions of books and journals offered by traditional publishers to manuscripts, photographs, maps, sound recordings and similar materials digitized from libraries' own special collections to new electronic scholarly and scientific databases developed through the collaboration of researchers, computer and information scientists, and librarians. Metadata in catalogue systems are an indispensable tool to find information and services in networks. Technological advances provide new opportunities to facilitate the process of collecting and maintaining metadata and to facilitate using catalogue systems. The overall objective is how to make best use of catalogue systems. Information systems such as the World Wide Web, Digital Libraries, inventories of satellite images and other repositories contain more data than ever before, are globally distributed, easy to use and, therefore, become accessible to huge, heterogeneous user groups. For KIIT Digital Library, we have used Resource Development Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core (DC) standards to incorporate metadata. Overall KIIT digital library provides electronic access to information in many different forms. Recent technological advances make the storage and transmission of digital information possible. This project is to design and implement a cataloguing system of the digital library system suitable for storage, indexing, and retrieving information and providing that information across the Internet. The goal is to allow users to quickly search indices to locate segments of interests and view and manipulate these segments on their remote computers

Katsir: A Framework for Harvesting Digital Libraries on the Web

The information era has brought with it the wellknown problem of \u27Information Explosion\u27. There are many and varied search engines on the Internet but it is still hard to locate and concentrate only on materials relevant to a specific task. Digital libraries, on the other hand, provide better services for focused discovery of relevant Web resources. However, digital libraries have been much less researched and implemented than search engines. The \u27Katsir/Harvest\u27 project laid the ground for our understanding that a new paradigm should to be developed - the Harvested Digital Library (HDL). The contribution of this article is in presenting a new framework and harvesting model for constructing HDLs. The open harvesting architecture proposed here uses advanced information retrieval tools and provides a set of integrated DL services to its users. This model and architecture are discussed throughout the article, including description of the implemented Katsir system and discussion of future research directions. The future DLs will be knowledge rich in the sense that each DL contains relevant meta-information on its domain and employs advanced knowledge management techniques

Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum – Meeting the Challenges of Digitisation

The conservation, spread, comprehension and recreation of traditional culture heritages is one of the main purpose of the National Ethnographic Museum in Bulgaria. As other cultural and scientific heritage institutions, it begins to use new information technologies and strategies for providing access to its cultural heritage treasures. This paper aims to present digital libraries with multimedia content as a modern technological solution for innovative presentation of Bulgarian ethnographical heritage. It includes some basic concepts of digital libraries with multimedia content and a description of three types of architecture. The paper also describes the ideas, conceptual decisions and strategies in the project Experimental Digital Library “Bulgarian Ethnographic Treasury”

Expert knowledge management based on ontology in a digital library

The architecture of the future Digital Libraries should be able to allow any users to access available knowledge resources from anywhere and at any time and efficient manner. Moreover to the individual user, there is a great deal of useless information in addition to the substantial amount of useful information. The goal is to investigate how to best combine Artificial Intelligent and Semantic Web technologies for semantic searching across largely distributed and heterogeneous digital libraries. The Artificial Intelligent and Semantic Web have provided both new possibilities and challenges to automatic information processing in search engine process. The major research tasks involved are to apply appropriate infrastructure for specific digital library system construction, to enrich metadata records with ontologies and enable semantic searching upon such intelligent system infrastructure. We study improving the efficiency of search methods to search a distributed data space like a Digital Library. This paper outlines the development of a CaseBased Reasoning prototype system based in an ontology for retrieval information of the Digital Library University of Seville. The results demonstrate that the used of expert system and the ontology into the retrieval process, the effectiveness of the information retrieval is enhanced