Domain-specific markup languages and descriptive metadata: their functions in scientific resource discovery

While metadata has been a strong focus within information professionals’ publications, projects, and initiatives during the last two decades, a significant number of domain-specific markup languages have also been developing on a parallel path at the same rate as metadata standards; yet, they do not receive comparable attention. This essay discusses the functions of these two kinds of approaches in scientific resource discovery and points out their potential complementary roles through appropriate interoperability approaches

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

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

A Component-Based Approach for Scientific Services for Education and Research (Scientific SEARCH)

Today’s challenge for retrieving digital information by users such as “students,” educators,” or “researchers” is coping, more than ever before, with the excessive data and information available. The problem is further compounded because of the way scientific knowledge is structured, in terms of expert interviews, articles, conference coverage, journal scans etc. Great progress has been made in digital library research. The NSF/NSDL through their initiatives has assembled a great set of tools and techniques that hold significant potential. Many projects are now underway applying these tools and techniques to meet the information needs of different user communities. The primary focus of Scientific SEARCH project is enhancing access to high quality learning materials and resources, modules, and other digital objects targeted towards scientific consumer and scientific producer. The project will use a multi-phased approach to achieve the objective. The paper describes the first-phase work submitted to NSF 04-542 solicitation

Strategies for Sustaining Digital Libraries

This collection of essays is a report of early findings from pioneers who have worked to establishdigital libraries, not merely as experimental projects, but as ongoing services and collectionsintended to be sustained over time in ways consistent with the long-held practices of print-basedlibraries. Particularly during this period of extreme technological transition, it is imperative thatprograms across the nation – and indeed the world – actively share their innovations,experiences, and techniques in order to begin cultivating new isomorphic, or commonly held,practices. The collective sentiment of the field is that we must begin to transition from apunctuated, project-based mode of advancing innovative information services to an ongoingprogrammatic mode of sustaining digital libraries for the long haul

Virtual Telescopes in Education

Virtual Telescopes in Education is providing the services required to operate a virtual observatory comprising distributed telescopes, including an interactive, constraint-based scheduling service, data and resource archive, proposal preparation and review environment, and a VTIE Journal. A major goal of VTIE is to elicit from learners questions about the nature of celestial objects and the physical processes that give rise to the spectacular imagery that catches their imaginations. Generation of constrained science questions will assist learners in the science process. To achieve interoperability with other NSDL resources, our approach follows the Open Archives Initiative and the W3C Semantic Web activity

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

Augmenting Dublin Core digital library metadata with Dewey Decimal Classification

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a new approach to a well-known problem for digital libraries, how to search across multiple unrelated libraries with a single query. Design/methodology/approach – The approach involves creating new Dewey Decimal Classification terms and numbers from existing Dublin Core records. In total, 263,550 records were harvested from three digital libraries. Weighted key terms were extracted from the title, description and subject fields of each record. Ranked DDC classes were automatically generated from these key terms by considering DDC hierarchies via a series of filtering and aggregation stages. A mean reciprocal ranking evaluation compared a sample of 49 generated classes against DDC classes created by a trained librarian for the same records. Findings – The best results combined weighted key terms from the title, description and subject fields. Performance declines with increased specificity of DDC level. The results compare favorably with similar studies. Research limitations/implications – The metadata harvest required manual intervention and the evaluation was resource intensive. Future research will look at evaluation methodologies that take account of issues of consistency and ecological validity. Practical implications – The method does not require training data and is easily scalable. The pipeline can be customized for individual use cases, for example, recall or precision enhancing. Social implications – The approach can provide centralized access to information from multiple domains currently provided by individual digital libraries. Originality/value – The approach addresses metadata normalization in the context of web resources. The automatic classification approach accounts for matches within hierarchies, aggregating lower level matches to broader parents and thus approximates the practices of a human cataloger. </jats:sec

Indexing standard for sharing health education multimedia resources: the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) metadata schema

Journal ArticleHealth sciences educators are increasingly incorporating multimedia (including images, animations, and videos) into educational materials , such as PowerPoint lectures, web sites, and interactive quizzes and cases. Educators continue to "reinvent the wheel" and develop costly duplicates of multimedia resources, despite new opportunities offered by the Internet to share resources. The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is designed to provide health sciences educators with freely available, high quality multimedia materials to augment health sciences education. We describe an XML schema that we created to index the health sciences multimedia resources in HEAL. The metadata schema provides a common mechanism by which remotely located distributed systems may share metadata records, allowing the end user to search many collections through one interface