The design and implementation of an infrastructure for multimedia digital libraries

We develop an infrastructure for managing, indexing and serving multimedia content in digital libraries. This infrastructure follows the model of the Web, and thereby is distributed in nature. We discuss the design of the Librarian, the component that manages meta data about the content. The management of meta data has been separated from the media servers that manage the content itself. Also, the extraction of the meta data is largely independent of the Librarian. We introduce our extensible data model and the daemon paradigm that are the core pieces of this architecture. We evaluate our initial implementation using a relational database. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons we learned in building this system, and proposals for improving the flexibility, reliability, and performance of the syste

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

An introduction to learning technology in tertiary education in the UK.

Contents: 1. The Learning Technology Arena 2. The Learning Technology Community 3. Learning Technology Tools 4. Key issues and developments in the Learning Technology Field 5. Implementing Learning Technologies 6. Further Resource

An Experimental Digital Library Platform - A Demonstrator Prototype for the DigLib Project at SICS

Within the framework of the Digital Library project at SICS, this thesis describes the implementation of a demonstrator prototype of a digital library (DigLib); an experimental platform integrating several functions in one common interface. It includes descriptions of the structure and formats of the digital library collection, the tailoring of the search engine Dienst, the construction of a keyword extraction tool, and the design and development of the interface. The platform was realised through sicsDAIS, an agent interaction and presentation system, and is to be used for testing and evaluating various tools for information seeking. The platform supports various user interaction strategies by providing: search in bibliographic records (Dienst); an index of keywords (the Keyword Extraction Function (KEF)); and browsing through the hierarchical structure of the collection. KEF was developed for this thesis work, and extracts and presents keywords from Swedish documents. Although based on a comparatively simple algorithm, KEF contributes by supplying a long-felt want in the area of Information Retrieval. Evaluations of the tasks and the interface still remain to be done, but the digital library is very much up and running. By implementing the platform through sicsDAIS, DigLib can deploy additional tools and search engines without interfering with already running modules. If wanted, agents providing other services than SICS can supply, can be plugged in

Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: A Norwegian case study

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Emerald Group Publishing LimitedPurpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the organisational field. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway (NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL's organisation during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on technology issues. Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering in digital libraries must be examined. Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology engineering

Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1

Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences

The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work