The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture

The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of the bibliographic data itself. The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes. To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of hardware and software platforms. The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or unsupervised fashion. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

Library systems: the trends, the developments, the future

This article introduces some of the latest developments and trends taking place with respect to library systems, and makes some informed judgements on what the future holds

Yale Leaf Morphology Digitization and Network Project

This article describes a digitization project inspired by the innovative leaf morphology classification work of a faculty member in the Geology and Geophysics Department and the Peabody Museum at Yale University. We began our initiative by scanning the Flora Fossilis Arctica, a 7-volume fossil leaf identification tool covering various geological areas, published between 1868 and 1883. This classic paleobotany resource was digitized, creating tiff, pdf, and searchable pdf files. We are now converting the searchable pdf files into ASCII text, enhancing the raw data with metadata elements, placing this material on the web for searching and display; and linking this material to an existing set of preserved leaf plates, a locally created index of annotated article clippings, an online leaf morphology tutorial, and the published online literature. Many decisions must be made in terms of host platforms, mark-up standards, search and linking options, and preservation documentation. This article will outline our decision process as we explore the post-digitization dataset handling, which may prove instructive for others attempting to create and link locally digitized materials

Search Me: Eastern Michigan University\u27s Journey through the Highs and Lows of Implementing the Summon Discovery Tool

In early 2011, Eastern Michigan University (EMU) began implementation of the Summon Web-scale discovery service from Serials Solutions. This case study will explore the challenges and successes of the implementation and launch process. Topics covered will include project management overview; integration of Summon with our ILS, link resolver, and Automated Retrieval Collection (ARC); mapping of the library\u27s print collection to the Summon interface; issues that arose with the ingest of our titles; incorporation into the library\u27s daily workflow; maintenance of e-resource holdings in two separate knowledge bases; and integration into public services reference and teaching

Proposal for an IMLS Collection Registry and Metadata Repository

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes to design, implement, and research a collection-level registry and item-level metadata repository service that will aggregate information about digital collections and items of digital content created using funds from Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants. This work will be a collaboration by the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. All extant digital collections initiated or augmented under IMLS aegis from 1998 through September 30, 2005 will be included in the proposed collection registry. Item-level metadata will be harvested from collections making such content available using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH). As part of this work, project personnel, in cooperation with IMLS staff and grantees, will define and document appropriate metadata schemas, help create and maintain collection-level metadata records, assist in implementing OAI compliant metadata provider services for dissemination of item-level metadata records, and research potential benefits and issues associated with these activities. The immediate outcomes of this work will be the practical demonstration of technologies that have the potential to enhance the visibility of IMLS funded online exhibits and digital library collections and improve discoverability of items contained in these resources. Experience gained and research conducted during this project will make clearer both the costs and the potential benefits associated with such services. Metadata provider and harvesting service implementations will be appropriately instrumented (e.g., customized anonymous transaction logs, online questionnaires for targeted user groups, performance monitors). At the conclusion of this project we will submit a final report that discusses tasks performed and lessons learned, presents business plans for sustaining registry and repository services, enumerates and summarizes potential benefits of these services, and makes recommendations regarding future implementations of these and related intermediary and end user interoperability services by IMLS projects.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Knowledge organization

Since Svenonius analyzed the research base in bibliographic control in 1990, the intervening years have seen major shifts in the focus of information organization in academic libraries. New technologies continue to reshape the nature and content of catalogs, stretch the boundaries of classification research, and provide new alternatives for the organization of information. Research studies have rigorously analyzed the structure of the Anglo- American Cataloguing Rules using entity-relationship modeling and expanded on the bibliographic and authority relationship research to develop new data models (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [FRBR] and Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records [FRANAR]). Applied research into the information organization process has led to the development of cataloguing tools and harvesting ap- plications for bibliographic data collection and automatic record creation. A growing international perspective focused research on multilingual subject access, transliteration problems in surrogate records, and user studies to improve Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) displays for large retrieval sets resulting from federated searches. The need to organize local and remote electronic resources led to metadata research that developed general and domain-specific metadata schemes. Ongoing research in this area focuses on record structures and architectural models to enable interoperability among the various schemes and differing application platforms. Research in the area of subject access and classification is strong, covering areas such as vocabulary mapping, automatic facet construction and deconstruction for Web resources, development of expert systems for automatic classifica- tion, dynamically altered classificatory structures linked to domain-specific thesauri, crosscultural conceptual structures in classification, identification of semantic relationships for vocabulary mapped to classification systems, and the expanded use of traditional classification systems as switching languages in the global Web environment. Finally, descriptive research into library and information science (LIS) education and curricula for knowl- edge organization continues. All of this research is applicable to knowledge organization in academic and research libraries. This chapter examines this body of research in depth, describes the research methodologies employed, and identifies areas of lacunae in need of further research

Electronic Journals : Access and Delivery Models

Several factors have been successfully pushing the conservative science publishers to accept the transition to e-journals. Some of the influancing factors are, the conveniences of web for access and browsing, the economics of Internet for delivery, the digital library revolution etc. The paper discusses the technological history of E-journals, access models, archiving, pricing and other several issues

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Interlinking related diverse media in a digital library

Digital libraries are widely used for organizing and presenting large collections of artifacts. However, as the digital libraries grow in size, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the user to find all the resources related to his topic of interest. It is labor intensive, time consuming and error prone to identify and link related materials manually. Thus it is important to develop automatic techniques to help the user discover and view the related resources that are available in the digital library. We have implemented an automatic interlinking mechanism for a music digital library system that spans across batch, online and on-demand phases. Since the task of generating the related links is resource and time intensive, distributing the whole process across these three phases significantly reduces the runtime overhead and improves the response time. This mechanism allows the system to display very large texts, with keywords identified and hyperlinked, with no perceivable delay to the user. Storing the artifacts in a structured manner and using the structural metadata to generate interlinkages allows us to create these links across diverse media like images, audio files, music scores, texts, etc. The implemented interlinking technique also scales well with a rapidly changing collection. The related links are displayed on demand, using AJAX technology. This allows the user to view these links without leaving the text, thus ensuring minimum disruption and continuity of action. We also have developed a generic interlinking framework which abstracts the domain independent logic for generating and displaying related links. This generic interlinking framework can be used by domain specific digital libraries to support interlinking of related resources