Simple Cultural Heritage Preservation

Improve the ability to preserve both content and services in the long term.Software systems coupled with digitisation for the digital preservation of heritage have become the norm because of the opportunities for vastly better discovery and dissemination over traditional preservation techniques. However, these systems often are built on the premise that digitisation by itself will lead to preservation and little thought goes into the design of the software systems. It is proposed that the design of these software systems should be principle-based, where the core of such principles can be extracted from an analysis of successful preservation systems. Systems built on these principles will arguably provide the best platforms for digital preservation of heritage. Among these principles, the notion of simplicity is key. Recent and ongoing work provide many operational examples of how simplicity and related ideas can be incorporated into the design of systems to maintain or increase the level of functionality and, arguably, improve the ability to preserve both content and services in the long term

Usability of Digital Repository Software: A Study of DSpace Installation and Configuration

Abstract. Usability of the installation and configuration of digital repository software is a key factor for the implementation of digital repositories. Many universities, laboratories and companies want to place their collections online but the installation and configuration processes of digital repositories are sometimes time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated. This paper describes efforts to highlight usability issues while setting up and configuring DSpace. The focus of three studies that were performed was not end-user usability but usability of the administrative functionality. User evaluations performed on a recent version of DSpace were followed by participatory design of a tool to increase usability by abstracting away the lower-level details. Users agreed that such a tool would be suitably usable. Thus it was found that significant usability problems exist, but these problems may in fact be easily addressed

A component assembly approach to digital library systems

With the advent of the Internet came the promise of global information access. In keeping with this promise, Digital Libraries (DLs) began to emerge across the world as a method of providing structured information to their users. These DLs are often created using proprietary monolithic software that is usually difficult to customise and extend. The Open Digital Library (ODL) project was created to demonstrate that DLs can be built as a network of components instead of as monolithic systems. Although the ODL approach has largely been embraced by the DL community, it is not without a few shortcomings. This paper introduces a graphical user interface and its associated framework for creating DLs from distributed components, consequently addressing a number of the limitations of ODL-like systems, as well as presenting a novel and generic approach for creating component-based systems. This system was subject to a user-based evaluation to confirm its utility and provide insights into possible extensions

Flexible Design for Simple Digital Library Tools and Services

The design of Digital Library Systems (DLSes) has evolved over time, both in sophistication and complexity, to complement the complex nature and sheer size of digital content being curated. However, there is also a growing demand from content curators, with relatively small-size collections, for simpler and more manageable tools and services for managing content. The reasons for this particular need are driven by the assumption that simplicity and manageability might ultimately translate to lower costs of maintenance of such systems. This paper builds on previous work in order to assess the flexible nature of the proposed design approach ---the explicit adoption of a minimalistic approach to the overall design of DLSes. A two-axis evaluation strategy was used to assess this proposed solution: a developer-oriented survey assessed the flexibility and simplicity; and a series of performance benchmarks were conducted to assess the scalability. In general, the study outlined some possible implications of simplifying DLS design; specifically the results from the developer-oriented user study indicate that simplicity in the design of the DLS repository sub-layer does not severely impact the interaction between the service sub-layer and the repository sub-layer. Furthermore, the scalability experiments indicate that desirable performance results for small- and medium-sized collections are attainable

Repacking of Repository Software: Installing DSpace on Ubuntu using an installation tool

Usability of installation and configuration of digital repository software is one of the major issues for the implementation of digital repositories. There has been an increase in the need to share collections amongst institutes; however a problem still lies in the complexity of installation of the software. This paper highlights the complexity of installation of DSpace and a description of an installation tool that was developed and its underlying architecture. Experiments were carried out on the developed tool. The paper then gives a summary of the users, perceptions on the developed installation tool compared to their past experience of installing and configuring DSpace. The results showed that users viewed that installation and configuration made much simpler by the tool. Consequently this suggests that installation and configuration of digital repository tools could be much simpler

A lightweight Web interface to Grid scheduling systems

Grid computing is often out of reach for the very scientists who need these resources because of the complexity of popular middleware suites. Some effort has gone into abstracting away these complexities using graphical user interfaces, some of which have been Web-based. This paper presents a lightweight and portable interface for Grid management, that is made possible using recent advances in dynamic technologies for Web applications. Case studies are presented to demonstrate that this interface is both usable and useful. An analysis of usage then highlights some positive and negative aspects of this approach

Benchmarking a File-based Digital Library System Repository Architecture

Digital Library Systems (DLSes) have over the past few decades evolved into complex tools and services used to manage Digital Libraries (DLs). However, as the amount digitised and born digital content being generated increases, there is increasingly a growing need for much simpler tools for the storage, management and long term preservation of data. The simplification in the design of DLS components has obvious an implication of, among other things, adversely affecting overall performance of resulting tools and services. This paper builds on previous work, which resulted in a prototype simple repository design, by outlines experimental results from a series of performance benchmarks that were conducted on to determine the extent to which such a simple repository architecture would scale to provide acceptable response times. The designed experiments were executed on a dataset with 1,638,400 objects, and involved execution of common DL operations on linearly increasing workloads designed based on the simple architecture. In addition, the experimental setup was replicated on a commonly used DL software ---DSpace--- to provide comparative metrics. The results indicate that collection sizes with at most 25,600 objects yield desirable response times. Furthermore, performance degradation typically manifests in information discovery operations

Component-based Digital Library Scalability using Cluster Computing

Most institutions make use of digital library systems (DL) to deal with the information they use. DL systems allow them to provide information management services, including the ability to search through and browse the information they have made available. The current architecture of the systems however, does not scale well when the amount of information increases dramatically. A good example of a digital library would be a national collection of academic theses. Such a system provides anyone the service of searching, browsing and viewing the theses in its collection. These services allow users to effectively and efficiently locate and make use of the materials available. With an increase in the number of users and underlying information these systems degrade quite rapidly though. This research is therefore aimed at creating digital library systems using components or services with the ability to migrate and replicate themselves on a collection or cluster of computers. Component based systems have proven to be more extensible and maintainable than monolithic systems. Each component encapsulates the functionality it requires and can be tested, modified and used without affecting other parts of the system. The components in this experimental system consist of Web services and are mobile, in that they have the ability to move around the cluster. Migration allows services or components to move to different locations in order to maximally use available resources. Replication serves to improve performance by improving availability as well as creating duplicates of services as an increase in the need for them arises. These two service enhancements promote a dynamic architecture with a greater degree of system efficiency and reliability. Currently, routing and migration modules have been implemented for the proposed system. Initial performance tests have been conducted and the results from these are discussed and analysed

Issues of Adoption: Have E-Learning Management Systems Fulfilled their Potential in Developing Countries?

Despite the potential of learning management systems to support both blended learning and learning that is entirely delivered online, the majority of LMS-supported e-learning initiatives in developing countries do not fulfill their potential; they fail, either totally or partially. To identify the underlying causes of failure, a survey was conducted through interviews with key e-learning p ersonalities directly involved in e-learning initiatives in five universities in Africa. Some of the most probable causes of failure were identified as: high ICT illiteracy rates among the student community; low comfort levels with technology ; usability issues of learning management systems; poor marketing strategies; ineffective maintenance st rat egies and insufficient user/t echnical sup p ort . T he dimensions of these causes of failure are discussed, as are the probable interventions likely to avert some of them. The findings are intended to inform further research towards more successful dep loy ment of learning management systems in developing countries

Evaluating Health Information Systems for Developing Countries using Simulation

Digitization and networked computing in the healthcare sector have resulted in electronic patient records that are stored, managed and shared among different healthcare providers. In Developing Countries such systems are being considered to improve on healthcare service delivery, with the aim of nationally available patient records. To implement this, network architectures and data transfer solutions can be adapted from other contexts, such as centralised or peer-to-peer computing. However, it is not always clear that such solutions are most appropriate, especially given the unstable and limited resources of developing countries. This paper proposes that discrete event simulation can be used as the foundation of a tool to measure and evaluate the performance of algorithms and network architectures. The initial proof-of-concept tool is presented, along with how it can be used to evaluate a solution for sharing records between a group of facilities