Functional adaptivity for digital library services in e-infrastructures: the gCube approach

We consider the problem of e-Infrastructures that wish to reconcile the generality of their services with the bespoke requirements of diverse user communities. We motivate the requirement of functional adaptivity in the context of gCube, a service-based system that integrates Grid and Digital Library technologies to deploy, operate, and monitor Virtual Research Environments defined over infrastructural resources. We argue that adaptivity requires mapping service interfaces onto multiple implementations, truly alternative interpretations of the same functionality. We then analyse two design solutions in which the alternative implementations are, respectively, full-fledged services and local components of a single service. We associate the latter with lower development costs and increased binding flexibility, and outline a strategy to deploy them dynamically as the payload of service plugins. The result is an infrastructure in which services exhibit multiple behaviours, know how to select the most appropriate behaviour, and can seamlessly learn new behaviours

Towards the disintermediation of creative music search: Analysing queries to determine important facets

Purpose: Creative professionals search for music to accompany moving images in films, advertising, television. Some larger music rights holders (record companies and music publishers) organise their catalogues to allow online searching. These digital libraries are organised by various subjective musical facets as well as by artist and title metadata. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of written queries relating to creative music search, contextualised and discussed within the findings of text analyses of a larger research project whose aim is to investigate meaning making in this search process. Method: A facet analysis of a collection of written music queries is discussed in relation to the organisation of the music in a selection of bespoke search engines. Results: Subjective facets, in particular Mood, are found to be highly important in query formation. Unusually, detailed Music Structural aspects are also key. Conclusions: These findings are discussed in relation to disintermediation of this process. It is suggested that there are barriers to this, both in terms of classification and also commercial / legal factors

The DiSCmap project : overview and first results

Traditionally, digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage material for use by the scholarly community has been led by supply rather than demand. The DiSCmap project commissioned by JISC in 2008, aimed to study what refocussing of digitisation efforts will suit best the users of digitised materials, especially in the context of the research and teaching in the higher education institutions in the UK. The paper presents some of its initial outcomes based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 945 special collections nominated for digitisation by intermediary users (librarians, archivist and museum curators), as well as end users' study involving a combination of online survey, focus groups and in-depth interviews. The criteria for prioritising digitisation advanced by intermediaries and end users were analysed and cross-mapped to a range of existing digitisation frameworks. A user-driven prioritisation framework which synthesises the findings of the project is presented

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