Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) Initiative and iSchools' Focus on the Information Field

In this poster, we describe the similarities between the Living In the KnowlEdge Society (LIKES) project and iSchools – both focus on the information field. This might lead to future collaborations between the two. One of the LIKES objectives is to spread computational thinking, fundamental CS/IT paradigms, key computing concepts and ICT paradigms across the Knowledge Society. This is analogous to iSchools’ vision of education for thorough understanding of information, IT and their applications. In the previous three LIKES workshops, participants from various disciplines had an intense discussion about grand challenges to incorporate computing/IT in their disciplines. All iSchools have courses that teach computing and information-related topics. If those courses can be expanded for other non-computing disciplines on their campuses with support from experiences of LIKES, it would further empower professionals in the iField

Overview of Digital Library Components and Developments

Digital libraries are being built upon a firm foundation of prior work as the high-end information systems of the future. A component architecture approach is becoming popular, with well established support for key components like the repository, especially through the Open Archives Initiative. We consider digital objects, metadata, harvesting, indexing, searching, browsing, rights management, linking, and powerful interfaces. Flexible interaction will be possible through a variety of architectures, using buses, agents, and other technologies. The field as a whole is undergoing rapid growth, supported by advances in storage, processing, networking, algorithms, and interaction. There are many initiatives and developments, including those supporting education, and these will certainly be of benefit in Latin America

Source Book on Digital Libraries

This extensive report outlines the steps necessary to create a national, electronic Science, Engineering and Technology Library. Step one is for NSF to play a lead role in launching a concerted R&D program in the area. Step two involves partnerships, cooperative ventures, and production conversion of backarchives. ARPA, NASA, NIST, Library of Congress, NLM, NAI, and many other groups must become involved if we are to serve the broad base of users; it will only be successful if supported by top-quality research on information storage and retrieval, hypertext, document processing, human-computer interaction, scaling up of information systems, networking, multimedia systems, visualization, education, and training. NOTE: Because of its large size, this reports is not available in hard copy from the department. It can be obtained electronically through anonynous FTP to fox.cs.vt.edu (in directory /pub/DigitalLibrary). To obtain a hard copy, write to Mark Roope at University Printing Services; "Documents on Demand"; Virginia Tech; Blacksburg VA 24061-0243; or call (703) 231-6701

Overview of a Guide for Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This chapter provides an overview of a guide for electronic theses and dissertations that is being prepared as requested by UNESCO to help with the expansion of ETD activities around the world. It roughly follows the outline developed through discussions involving the many partners working on that guide, coordinated by Shalini Urs. It builds upon experiences related to the evolution of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, a federation of groups interested in ETD programs. It introduces key concepts, explains matters according to the interests of students and universities, highlights technical issues, recommends a scheme for expanding training, and suggests likely future activities

Welcome to the Journal of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (J-ETD)

On behalf of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD; see our website with multiple aliases: ndltd.org, theses.org, dissertations.org), I welcome you to the first volume of J-ETD. Now is the time to broadly share through an archival journal some of the most interesting discussions related to the global movement around ETDs. We hope you will find this journal to be of interest, and will spread the word that it is globally accessible as an open access archival forum empowering graduate student researchers and universities to broadly contribute to scholarship, knowledge, education, and understanding. We hope you and your associates will use the articles contained herein to help students, researchers, scholars, administrators, librarians, archivists, publishers, and diverse others to expand and improve learning and scholarly communication. We also encourage you and your colleagues to contribute your works and thoughts to this endeavor, or to offer your assistance in other ways, e.g., if you have interest and skill for reviewing or publicity

Building and Using Digital Libraries for ETDs

Despite the high value of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), the global collection has seen limited use. To extend such use, a new approach to building digital libraries (DLs) is needed. Fortunately, recent decades have seen that a vast amount of “gray literature” has become available through a diverse set of institutional repositories as well as regional and national libraries and archives. Most of the works in those collections include ETDs and are often freely available in keeping with the open-access movement, but such access is limited by the services of supporting information systems. As explained through a set of scenarios, ETDs can better meet the needs of diverse stakeholders if customer discovery methods are used to identify personas and user roles as well as their goals and tasks. Hence, DLs, with a rich collection of services, as well as newer, more advanced ones, can be organized so that those services, and expanded workflows building on them, can be adapted to meet personalized goals as well as traditional ones, such as discovery and exploration

Beyond Harvesting: Digital Library Components as OAI Extensions

Reusability always has been a controversial topic in Digital Library (DL) design. While componentization has gained momentum in software engineering in general, there has not yet been broad DL standardization in component interfaces. Recently, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has begun to address this by creating a standard protocol for accessing metadata archives. It is proposed that this protocol be extended to act as the glue that binds together various components of a typical DL. In order to test the feasibility of this approach, a set of protocol extensions was created, implemented, and integrated as components of production and research DLs. The performance of these components was analyzed from the perspective of execution speed, network traffic, and data consistency. On the whole, this work has simultaneously revealed the feasibility of such OAI extensions for component interaction, and has identified aspects of the OAI protocol that constrain such extensions

Crawling on the World Wide Web

As the World Wide Web grows rapidly, a web search engine is needed for people to search through the Web. The crawler is an important module of a web search engine. The quality of a crawler directly affects the searching quality of such web search engines. Given some seed URLs, the crawler should retrieve the web pages of those URLs, parse the HTML files, add new URLs into its buffer and go back to the first phase of this cycle. The crawler also can retrieve some other information from the HTML files as it is parsing them to get the new URLs. This paper describes the design, implementation, and some considerations of a new crawler programmed as an learning exercise and for possible use for experimental studies