Creating digital library collections with Greenstone

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information based on metadata and publishing ti on the Internet. This paper introduces Greenstone and explains how librarians use it to create and customize digital library collections. Through an end-user interface, they add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures

Creating and reading realistic electronic books

A digital library project aims to combine the look and feel of physical books with the advantages of online documents such as hyperlinks and multimedia. A lightweight open source implementation enables highly responsive page turning and works within standard Web browsers

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

Searching in a Book

Information has no value unless it is accessible. With physical books, most people rely on the table of contents and subject index to find what they want. But what if they are reading a book in a digital library and have access to a full-text search tool?. The paper describes a search interface to Realistic Books, and investigates the influence of document format and search result presentation on information finding. We compare searching in Realistic Books with searching in HTML and PDF files, and with physical books

Using compression to identify acronyms in text

Text mining is about looking for patterns in natural language text, and may be defined as the process of analyzing text to extract information from it for particular purposes. In previous work, we claimed that compression is a key technology for text mining, and backed this up with a study that showed how particular kinds of lexical tokens---names, dates, locations, etc.---can be identified and located in running text, using compression models to provide the leverage necessary to distinguish different token types (Witten et al., 1999)Comment: 10 pages. A short form published in DCC200

Searching digital music libraries

There has been a recent explosion of interest in digital music libraries. In particular, interactive melody retrieval is a striking example of a search paradigm that differs radically from the standard full-text search. Many different techniques have been proposed for melody matching, but the area lacks standard databases that allow them to be compared on common grounds––and copyright issues have stymied attempts to develop such a corpus. This paper focuses on methods for evaluating different symbolic music matching strategies, and describes a series of experiments that compare and contrast results obtained using three dominant paradigms. Combining two of these paradigms yields a hybrid approach which is shown to have the best overall combination of efficiency and effectiveness

Power to the people: end-user building of digital library collections

Naturally, digital library systems focus principally on the reader: th e consumer of the material that constitutes the library. In contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the user's own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. End users can easily build new collections styled after existing ones from material on the Web or from their local files-or both, and collections can be updated and new ones brought on-line at any time. The interface, which is intended for non-professional end users, is modeled after widely used commercial software installation packages. Lest one quail at the prospect of end users building their own collections on a shared system, we also describe an interface for the administrative user who is responsible for maintaining a digital library installation

Greenstone: open-source DL software

Greenstone is a comprehensive system for constructing and presenting collections of thousands or millions of documents, including text, images, audio, and video. Greenstone libraries contain many collections, individually organized, though they bear a strong family resemblance. Easily maintained, collections can be augmented and rebuilt automatically

Extending Greenstone for Institutional Repositories

We examine the problem of designing a generalized system for building institutional repositories. Widely used schemes such as DSpace are tailored to a particular set of requirements: fixed metadata set; standard view when searching and browsing; pre-determined sequence for depositing items; built-in workflow for vetting new items. In contrast, Fedora builds in flexibility: institutional repositories are just one possible instantiation—however generality incurs a high overhead and uptake has been sluggish. This paper shows how existing components of the Greenstone software can be repurposed to provide a generalized institutional repository that falls between these extremes

How to turn the page

Can digital libraries provide a reading experience that more closely resembles a real book than a scrolled or paginated electronic display? This paper describes a prototype page-turning system that realistically animates full three-dimensional page-turns. The dynamic behavior is generated by a mass-spring model defined on a rectangular grid of particles. The prototype takes a PDF or E-book file, renders it into a sequence of PNG images representing individual pages, and animates the pageturns under user control. The simulation behaves fairly naturally, although more computer graphics work is required to perfect it