Simple Digital Libraries

The design of Digital Library Systems (DLSes) has evolved overtime, 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 to manage their 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 research proposes and advocates for a minimalist and simplistic approach to the overall design of DLSes. It is hypothesised that Digital Library (DL) tools and services based on such designs could potentially be easy to use and manage. A meta-analysis of existing DL and non-DL tools was conducted to aid the derivation of design principles for simple DLSes. The desig n principles were then mapped to design decisions applied to the design of a prototype simple repository. In order to assess the effectiveness of the simple repository design, two real-world case study collections were implemented based on the design. In addition, a developer-oriented study was conducted using one of the case study collections to evaluate the simplicity and ease of use of the prototype system. Furthermore, performance experiments were conducted to establish the extent to which such a simple design approach would scale and also establish comparative advantages to existing designs. 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. The practical implication of the proposed design approach is two-fold: firstly the minimalistic design has the potential to be used to design simple and yet easy to use tools with comparable features to those exhibited by well-established DL tools; and secondly, the principled design approach has the potential to be applied to the design of non-DL application domains

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

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

Peer Tutoring Orchestration: Streamlined Technology-driven Orchestration for Peer Tutoring

Peer tutoring models that involve senior students teaching junior students is a well established practice in most large universities. While there are a range of teaching activities performed by tutors, these are often done in an ad hoc manner. We propose to leverage organised orchestration in order to make peer tutoring more effective. A prototype tutoring platform, aimed at facilitating face-to-face tutoring sessions, was implemented in order to facilitate orchestration of activities in peer tutoring sessions. The tool was evaluated by 24 tutors for first year Computer Science courses at a large university. The NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and Perceived Usefulness and Ease of Use (PUEU) instruments were used to measure the orchestration load and usability of the tool, respectively. The overall workload falls within acceptable limits. This initial result confirms the feasibility of the early stage tools to implement organised orchestration for peer tutoring

Bonolo: A General Digital Library System for File-based Collections

There is an ever-increasing amount of digital content being generated that needs to be well-organised, preserved and made accessible. The majority of generic repository software tools that currently exist are, arguably, overly complex, thus making collections dicult to manage and maintain in resource constrained environments. A possible solution to this problem would, in part, require designing digital library tools and services that are simple and easy to manage. This paper describes a digital library system that is based on a set of design decisions aimed at simplifying repository software architectures. The proposed system makes use of a hierarchical file-store for storage of digital objects. Evaluation of the system by means of a user experience study was conducted to investigate the usefulness of the system, its relative ease of use and what effect, if any, the architecture would have on the user experience. Experimental results showed that users found the system useful, effective and easy to use and that the architecture did not appear to negatively in uence the user experience