Digital Preservation: Handling Large Collections Case Study: Digitizing Egyptian Press Archive at Centre for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation(CEDEJ)

Managing the digitization of large collections is quite a challenge not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of text and material quality, designing the workflow system which organizes the operations, and handling metadata. This has been the focus of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina during its partnership with the Centre for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ), to digitize more than 800,000 pages of press articles dating back to 1976. This triggered a need to design a workflow to manage such a massive collection proficiently. This required simultaneous intervention of four main aspects; data analysis, developing a digitization workflow , implementing and installing the necessary software tools for metadata entry, and publishing the digital archive. This paper demonstrates the workflow system implemented to manage this massive press collection, yielding more than 400,000 items to date. It illustrates the BA’s Digital Assets Factory (DAF); the nucleus of the digitization process ,and the tools and stages implemented for ingesting data into the system. The outflow is also discussed in terms of organizing and grouping multipart press clips, in addition to reviewing and validating the output. The paper also discusses the challenges of associating the accessible online archive with a powerful search engine supporting multidimensional search

Open Reduction and Internal Fixation with a Small T-plate for Volar Barton Fracture Management

Background: One-sixth of all fractures in the emergency room are distal radius fractures. It is very important to recognize and adequately treat volar Barton fractures to avoid complication of malunion and its adverse effects. Although various fixation techniques have been described, with the plate, the patient can begin early active wrist workouts performing stable reduction. Objective: Open reduction and small T-plate internal fixation of a distal radius volar Barton fracture were used to evaluate the functional outcomes for the fracture treatment. Patients and Methods: At Zagazig University Hospital, 30 patients with a volar Barton fracture were studied in prospective interventional research, the study was carried out through six months. Preoperative X-ray and CT were done and the patient was prepared for surgery. By adopting an FCR technique (flexor carpi radialis approach), the fracture was reduced, the plate was fixed, and the image intensification was utilized for confirming the results. Results: Mean operative time was 54.1±8.47 and of 30 patients operated upon, 16 patients were discharged one day after operation while the mean time lapse before surgery was 1.3±0.53. The mean time of bone union was 6.5±0.89 weeks (range 5-8 weeks). There was a significant improvement in wrist range of motion in all directions postoperatively. 2 patients (6.7%) had superficial infection, 1 patient (3.3%) had tourniquet paralysis, 1 patient had stiffness (3.3%) and another had mal-united fracture (3.3%). Conclusion: Volar distal buttressing with the Ellis T plate is easy and inexpensive, and it delivers good functional benefits. Simplistic and low-complication procedure provides precise anatomical reduction of the fracture and restoration of the wrist's shape and function

Effects of hospital facilities on patient outcomes after cancer surgery: an international, prospective, observational study

Background Early death after cancer surgery is higher in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) compared with in high-income countries, yet the impact of facility characteristics on early postoperative outcomes is unknown. The aim of this study was to examine the association between hospital infrastructure, resource availability, and processes on early outcomes after cancer surgery worldwide.Methods A multimethods analysis was performed as part of the GlobalSurg 3 study-a multicentre, international, prospective cohort study of patients who had surgery for breast, colorectal, or gastric cancer. The primary outcomes were 30-day mortality and 30-day major complication rates. Potentially beneficial hospital facilities were identified by variable selection to select those associated with 30-day mortality. Adjusted outcomes were determined using generalised estimating equations to account for patient characteristics and country-income group, with population stratification by hospital.Findings Between April 1, 2018, and April 23, 2019, facility-level data were collected for 9685 patients across 238 hospitals in 66 countries (91 hospitals in 20 high-income countries; 57 hospitals in 19 upper-middle-income countries; and 90 hospitals in 27 low-income to lower-middle-income countries). The availability of five hospital facilities was inversely associated with mortality: ultrasound, CT scanner, critical care unit, opioid analgesia, and oncologist. After adjustment for case-mix and country income group, hospitals with three or fewer of these facilities (62 hospitals, 1294 patients) had higher mortality compared with those with four or five (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 3.85 [95% CI 2.58-5.75]; p<0.0001), with excess mortality predominantly explained by a limited capacity to rescue following the development of major complications (63.0% vs 82.7%; OR 0.35 [0.23-0.53]; p<0.0001). Across LMICs, improvements in hospital facilities would prevent one to three deaths for every 100 patients undergoing surgery for cancer.Interpretation Hospitals with higher levels of infrastructure and resources have better outcomes after cancer surgery, independent of country income. Without urgent strengthening of hospital infrastructure and resources, the reductions in cancer-associated mortality associated with improved access will not be realised

Deduplicating Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Web Archive

Archiving web content is bound to produce datasets with duplication, either across time or across location. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has a web archive legacy spanning a period of 10 years and is continuing to expand the collection. Initial assessment of this very large store of data was conducted. Given a high enough rate of duplication, deduplication would lead to sizable savings in storage requirements. The BA worked through the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) to compile best practices for recording duplicates in ISO 28500, the WARC File Format. To deduplicate legacy web archives “after the fact,” the BA is implementing the WARCrefs deduplication tools. Following implementation and testing, the BA plans to put the tools to use to deduplicate its one petabyte of archived web content

Maintaining Causal Order in Large Scale Distributed Systems Using a Logical Hierarchy

The paper presents a simple and efficient protocol that supports exchange of messages among a set of nodes while preserving the causal ordering of message exchange. It is designed for a large scale replicated system where a message is sent to every replica in the network. The desirable characteristics of the protocol are that it imposes little space overhead appended to each message. This is achieved by using a propagation algorithm that is based on nodes organized in a logical hierarchy, where each node sends and receives messages from a few nodes only. Therefore, a node needs to keep track of messages received from those nodes and stamp messages with this information only in order to verify the causal ordering. This low cost of timestamp size results in reduced communication overhead and increased performance and scalability of the system. The protocol is fully asynchronous and the burden of propagation is evenly distributed among the nodes, which improves system performance. It can ..

DAR: A Modern Institutional Repository with a Scalability Twist

The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is an Institutional Repository developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to manage the full lifecycle of a digital asset: its creation and ingestion, its metadata management, storage and archival in addition to the necessary mechanisms for publishing and dissemination. DAR was designed with a focus on integrating DAR with different sources of digital objects and metadata in addition to integration with applications built on top of the repository. As a modern repository, the system architecture demonstrates a modular design relying on components that are best of the breed, a flexible content model for digital objects based on current standards and heavily relying on RDF triples to define relations. In this paper we will demonstrate the building blocks of DAR as an example of a modern repository, discussing how the system addresses the challenges that face an institution in consolidating its assets and a focus on solving scalability issues