Archive for the ‘Digital Library’ Category

Interpreting the knowledge map of digital library research (1990–2010)

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013

Interpreting the knowledge map of digital library research (1990–2010) by Son Hoang Nguyen and Gobinda Chowdhury. (Nguyen, S. H. and Chowdhury, G. (2013), Interpreting the knowledge map of digital library research (1990–2010). J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 64: 1235–1258. doi: 10.1002/asi.22830)

Abstract:

A knowledge map of digital library (DL) research shows the semantic organization of DL research topics and also the evolution of the field. The research reported in this article aims to find the core topics and subtopics of DL research in order to build a knowledge map of the DL domain. The methodology is comprised of a four-step research process, and two knowledge organization methods (classification and thesaurus building) were used. A knowledge map covering 21 core topics and 1,015 subtopics of DL research was created and provides a systematic overview of DL research during the last two decades (1990–2010). We argue that the map can work as a knowledge platform to guide, evaluate, and improve the activities of DL research, education, and practices. Moreover, it can be transformed into a DL ontology for various applications. The research methodology can be used to map any human knowledge domain; it is a novel and scientific method for producing comprehensive and systematic knowledge maps based on literary warrant.

This is a an impressive piece of work and likely to be read by librarians, particularly digital librarians.

That restricted readership is unfortunate because anyone building a knowledge (topic) map will benefit from the research methodology detailed in this article.

Posted in Digital Library, Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Map | No Comments »

… Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement

Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

From the webpage:

In a rapidly changing technological environment, the difficult task of ensuring long-term access to digital information is increasingly important. The Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement presents over 130 English-language articles, books, and technical reports published in 2012 that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. This selective bibliography covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., media, e-journals, research data), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns.

It is a supplement to the Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, which covers over 650 works published from 2000 through 2011. All included works are in English. The bibliography does not cover conference papers, digital media works (such as MP3 files), editorials, e-mail messages, letters to the editor, presentation slides or transcripts, unpublished e-prints, or weblog postings.

The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. If such versions are unavailable, italicized links to the publishers' descriptions are provided.

Links, even to publisher versions and versions in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, are subject to change. URLs may alter without warning (or automatic forwarding) or they may disappear altogether. Inclusion of links to works on authors' personal websites is highly selective. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

The bibliography is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Supplement to “the” starting point for research on digital curation.

Posted in Archives, Bibliography, Curation, Data Preservation, Digital Library, Librarian/Expert Searchers | No Comments »

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)

Monday, February 18th, 2013

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL)

Valletta, Malta, September 22-26, 2013. I thought that would get your attention. Details follow.

Dates:

Full and Short papers, Posters, Panels, and Demonstrations deadline: March 23, 2013

Workshops and Tutorials proposals deadline: March 4, 2013

Doctoral Consortium papers submission deadline: June 2, 2013

Notification of acceptance for Papers, Posters, and Demonstrations: May 20, 2013

Notification of acceptance for Panels, Workshops and Tutorials: April 22, 2013

Doctoral Consortium acceptance notification: June 24, 2013

Camera ready versions: June 9, 2013

End of early registration: July 31, 2013

Conference dates: September 22-26, 2013

The general theme of the conference is “Sharing meaningful information,” a theme reflected in the topics for conference submissions:

General areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following topics, organized in four categories, according to a conceptualization that coincides with the four arms of the Maltese Cross:

Foundations

  • Information models
  • Digital library conceptual models and formal issues
  • Digital library 2.0
  • Digital library education curricula
  • Economic and legal aspects (e.g. rights management) landscape for digital libraries
  • Theoretical models of information interaction and organization
  • Information policies
  • Studies of human factors in networked information
  • Scholarly primitives
  • Novel research tools and methods with emphasis on digital humanities
  • User behavior analysis and modeling
  • Social-technical perspectives of digital information

Infrastructures

  • Digital library architectures
  • Cloud and grid deployments
  • Federation of repositories
  • Collaborative and participatory information environments
  • Data storage and indexing
  • Big data management
  • e-science, e-government, e-learning, cultural heritage infrastructures
  • Semi structured data
  • Semantic web issues in digital libraries
  • Ontologies and knowledge organization systems
  • Linked Data and its applications

Content

  • Metadata schemas with emphasis to metadata for composite content (Multimedia, geographical, statistical data and other special content formats)
  • Interoperability and Information integration
  • Digital Curation and related workflows
  • Preservation, authenticity and provenance
  • Web archiving
  • Social media and dynamically generated content for particular uses/communities (education, science, public, etc.)
  • Crowdsourcing
  • 3D models indexing and retrieval
  • Authority management issues

Services

  • Information Retrieval and browsing
  • Multilingual and Multimedia Information Retrieval
  • Personalization in digital libraries
  • Context awareness in information access
  • Semantic aware services
  • Technologies for delivering/accessing digital libraries, e.g. mobile devices
  • Visualization of large-scale information environments
  • Evaluation of online information environments
  • Quality metrics
  • Interfaces to digital libraries
  • Data mining/extraction of structure from networked information
  • Social networks analysis and virtual organizations
  • Traditional and alternative metrics of scholarly communication
  • Mashups of resources

Do you know if there are plans for recording presentations?

Given the location and diminishing travel funding, an efficient way to increase the impact of the presentations.

Posted in Conferences, Digital Library, Librarian/Expert Searchers, Library | No Comments »

D-Lib

Monday, November 19th, 2012

D-Lib

From the about page:

D-Lib Magazine is an electronic publication with a focus on digital library research and development, including new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. D-Lib Magazine appeals to a broad technical and professional audience. The primary goal of the magazine is timely and efficient information exchange for the digital library community to help digital libraries be a broad interdisciplinary field, and not a set of specialties that know little of each other.

I am about to post concerning an article in D-Lib and realized I don’t have a blog entry on D-Lib!

Not that it is topic map specific but it is digital library specific, with all the issues that entails. Remarkably similar to the issues any topic map author or software will face.

D-Lib has proven what many of us suspected:

The quality of content is not related to the medium of delivery.

Enjoy!

Posted in Archives, Digital Library, Library | No Comments »

….Comparing Digital Preservation Glossaries [Why Do We Need Common Vocabularies?]

Friday, August 10th, 2012

From AIP to Zettabyte: Comparing Digital Preservation Glossaries

Emily Reynolds (2012 Junior Fellow) writes:

As we mentioned in our introductory post last month, the OSI Junior Fellows are working on a project involving a draft digital preservation policy framework. One component of our work is revising a glossary that accompanies the framework. We’ve spent the last two weeks poring through more than two dozen glossaries relating to digital preservation concepts to locate and refine definitions to fit the terms used in the document.

We looked at dictionaries from well-established archival entities like the Society of American Archivists, as well as more strictly technical organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force. While some glossaries take a traditional archival approach, others were more technical; we consulted documents primarily focusing on electronic records, archives, digital storage and other relevant fields. Because of influential frameworks like the OAIS Reference Model, some terms were defined similarly across the glossaries that we looked at. But the variety in the definitions for other terms points to the range of practitioners discussing digital preservation issues, and highlights the need for a common vocabulary. Based on what we found, that vocabulary will have to be broadly drawn and flexible to meet different kinds of requirements.

OSI = Office of Strategic Initiatives (Library of Congress)

Not to be overly critical, but I stumble over:

Because of influential frameworks like the OAIS Reference Model, some terms were defined similarly across the glossaries that we looked at. But the variety in the definitions for other terms points to the range of practitioners discussing digital preservation issues, and highlights the need for a common vocabulary.

Why does a “variety in the definitions for other terms…highlight[s] the need for a common vocabulary?”

I take it as a given that we have diverse vocabularies.

And that attempts at “common” vocabularies succeed in creating yet another “diverse” vocabulary.

So, why would anyone looking at “diverse” vocabularies jump to the conclusion that a “common” vocabulary is required?

Perhaps what is missing is the definition of the problem presented by “diverse” vocabularies.

Hard to solve a problem if you don’t know it is. (Hasn’t stopped some people that I know but that is a story for another day.)

I put it to you (and in your absence I will answer, so answer quickly):

What is the problem (or problems) presented by diverse vocabularies? (Feel free to use examples.)

Or if you prefer, Why do we need common vocabularies?

Posted in Archives, Digital Library, Glossary, Preservation | No Comments »

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities…

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes by JackAmmerman, Vika Zafrin, Dan Benedetti, Garth W. Green.

Abstract:

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.

Truly remarkable piece of work!

Just to entice you into reading the entire paper, the authors challenge the assumption that knowledge is analogue. Successfully in my view but I already held that position so I was an easy sell.

BTW, if you are in my topic maps class, this paper is required reading. Summarize what you think are the strong/weak points of the paper in 2 to 3 pages.

Posted in Classification, Digital Culture, Digital Library, Humanities, Tagging | No Comments »

MONK

Friday, August 19th, 2011

MONK

From the Introduction:

The MONK Project provides access to the digitized texts described above along with tools to enable literary research through the discovery, exploration, and visualization of patterns. Users typically start a project with one of the toolsets that has been predefined by the MONK team. Each toolset is made up of individual tools (e.g. a search tool, a browsing tool, a rating tool, and a visualization), and these tools are applied to worksets of texts selected by the user from the MONK datastore. Worksets and results can be saved for later use or modification, and results can be exported in some standard formats (e.g., CSV files).

The public data set:

This instance of the MONK Project includes approximately 525 works of American literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, and 37 plays and 5 works of poetry by William Shakespeare provided by the scholars and libraries at Northwestern University, Indiana University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Virginia. These texts are available to all users, regardless of institutional affiliation.

Digging a bit further:

Each of these texts is normalized (using Abbot, a complex XSL stylesheet) to a TEI schema designed for analytic purposes (TEI-A), and each text has been “adorned” (using Morphadorner) with tokenization, sentence boundaries, standard spellings, parts of speech and lemmata, before being ingested (using Prior) into a database that provides Java access methods for extracting data for many purposes, including searching for objects; direct presentation in end-user applications as tables, lists, concordances, or visualizations; getting feature counts and frequencies for analysis by data-mining and other analytic procedures; and getting tokenized streams of text for working with n-gram and other colocation analyses, repetition analyses, and corpus query-language pattern-matching operations. Finally, MONK’s quantitative analytics (naive Bayesian analysis, support vector machines, Dunnings log likelihood, and raw frequency comparisons), are run through the SEASR environment.

Here’s my topic maps question: So, how do I reliably combine the results from a subfield that uses a different vocabulary than my own? For that matter, how do I discover it in the first place?

I think the MONK project is quite remarkable but lament the impending repetition of research across such a vast archive simply because it is unknown or expressed a “foreign” tongue.

Posted in Data Mining, Digital Library, Semantics, Text Analytics | No Comments »

Bridging the Gulf:…

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

Bridging the Gulf: Communication and Information in Society, Technology, and Work

October 9-13, 2011, New Orleans, Louisiana

From the website:

The ASIST Annual Meeting is the main venue for disseminating research centered on advances in the information sciences and related applications of information technology.

ASIST 2011 builds on the success of the 2010 conference structure and will have the integrated program that is an ASIST strength. This will be achieved using the six reviewing tracks pioneered in 2010, each with its own committee of respected reviewers to ensure that the conference meets your high expectations for standards and quality. These reviewers, experts in their fields, will assist with a rigorous peer-review process.

Important Dates:

  1. Papers, Panels, Workshops & Tutorials
    • Deadline for submissions: May 31
    • Notification to authors: June 28
    • Final copy: July 15
  2. Posters, Demos & Videos:
    • Deadline for submissions: July 1
    • Notification to authors: July 20
    • Final copy: July 27

One of the premier technical conferences for librarians and information professionals in the United States.

The track listings are:

  • Track 1 – Information Behaviour
  • Track 2 – Knowledge Organization
  • Track 3 – Interactive Information & Design
  • Track 4 – Information and Knowledge Management
  • Track 5 – Information Use
  • Track 6 – Economic, Social, and Political Issues

A number of opportunities for topic map based presentations.

The conference being located in New Orleans is yet another reason to attend! The food, music, and street life has to be experienced to be believed. No description would be adequate.

Posted in Conferences, Digital Library, Information Retrieval | No Comments »

Semantic Digital Archives

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives

Berlin, 29.09.2011

From the website:

The Semantic Digital Archives Workshop will be an exciting opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization between the digital libraries, the digital archives and the semantic web community. Naturally, digital archiving is a heavily interdisciplinary topic. Semantic Digital Archives shall bring digital archives to a new level of interoperability by focussing on knowlede representation and knowledge management issues around digital archiving. We intend to have a discussion about all aspects concerning Semantic Digital Archives at the Workshop.

Since decades, the amount of content created digitally is increasing and its life cycle tends to remain digital. A selection of this content is expected to be of value for the future and can thus be considered being part of our cultural heritage. For example, a huge amount of digital publications that have to be stored and kept accessible within a digital library today will become obsolete some day and will not be accessed as frequently anymore. Then, it has to be decided which content will be of value in the future and shall therefore be archived and kept accessible for requests by information professionals like historians and journalists but possibly also for the general public.

Digital Archives provide a long-term curation perspective for the content residing in Digital Libraries and any other kind of data or knowledge base. Having to deal with any kind of data breeds an issue of huge complexity. However, even digital publications tend to become more and more complex, embedding different kinds of multimedia, data in arbitrary formats and software and challenge already current Digital Library systems. As soon as these digital publications become obsolete, but are still deemed to be of value in the future, they have to be transferred into an appropriate Archival Information System (AIS) where they need to be kept accessible possibly forever. AIS must face the challenge to provide sustainable (usually indefinite) long-term digital preservation.

Important Dates:

  • 01. June 2011 – System will be open for Submissions
  • 30. June 2011 – Deadline for Submissions
  • 30. July 2011 – Acceptance Notification
  • 20. August 2011 – Camera-ready papers due
  • 20. September 2011 – Presentations due
  • 29. September 2011 – Workshop to be held in Berlin

The semantics by which materials are accessed evolve and change over time. Topic maps are in a unique position to use present semantics and at the same time allow for the evolution of semantics.

Each new generation of researchers will have their unique views of archived materials. Without topic maps we will either deny them the right to their own views or lose the views of prior researchers. Either seems like a poor choice to me.

While you are in Berlin, be sure to visit the Pergamon Museum. The reconstruction of the Istar Gate from Babylon is an amazing sight.

The Ishtar Gate dates from about the mid-point of the written record of civilization. Preservation of semantics over historic time isn’t even approached by current proposals. Although I think topic maps should be in the running for ideas to consider.

Posted in Conferences, Digital Library, Metadata | No Comments »

Journal of Digital Information

Friday, March 25th, 2011

Journal of Digital Information

Publishing papers on the management, presentation and uses of information in digital environments, JoDI is a peer-reviewed Web journal supported by Texas A&M University Libraries.

First publishing papers in 1997, the Journal of Digital Information is an electronic-only, peer-reviewed journal covering the broad topics related to digital libraries, hypertext and hypermedia systems, and the issues of digital information. JoDI is supported by the Texas A&M University Libraries through the Digital Initiatives, Research and Technology group, and hosted by the Texas Digital Library.

Looks like an interesting venue to explore for material on digital libraries.

Posted in Digital Library | No Comments »

ACM Digital Library for Computing Professionals

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

ACM Digital Library for Computing Professionals

The ACM has released a new version of it digital library, and, is offering a free three-month trial of it.

From the announcement:

  • Reorganized author profile pages that present a snapshot of author contributions and metrics of author influence by monitoring publication and citation counts and download usage volume
  • Broadened citation pages for individual articles with tabs for metadata and links to facilitate exploration and discovery of the depth of content in the DL
  • Enhanced interactivity tools such as RSS feeds, bibliographic exports, and social network channels to retrieve data, promote user engagement, and introduce user content
  • Redesigned binders for creating personal, annotatable collections of bibliographies or reading lists, and sharing them with ACM and non-ACM members, or exporting them into standard authoring tools like self-generated virtual PDF publications
  • Expanded table-of-contents opt-in service for all publications in the DL—from ACM and other publishers—that alerts users via email and RSS feeds to new issues of journals, magazines, newsletters, and proceedings.

I mention it here for a couple of reasons:

1) For resources on computing, whether contemporary or older materials, I can’t think of a better starting place for research. I am here more often than not.

2) It sets a benchmark for what is available in terms of digital libraries. If you are going to use topic maps to build a digital library, what would you do better?

Posted in Computer Science, Digital Library, Library | No Comments »

CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic, and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval)

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic, and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval).

From the website:

CASPAR methodological and technological solution:

  • is compliant to the OAIS Reference Model – the main standard of reference in digital preservation
  • is technology-neutral: the preservation environment could be implemented using any kind of emerging technology
  • adopts a distributed, asynchronous, loosely coupled architecture and each key component is self-contained and portable: it may be deployed without dependencies on different platform and framework
  • is domain independent: it could be applied with low additional effort to multiple domains/contexts.
  • preserves knowledge and intelligibility, not just the “bits”
  • guarantees the integrity and identity of the information preserved as well as the protection of digital rights

FYI: OAIS Reference Model

As a librarian, you will be confronted with claims similar to these in vendor literature, grant applications and other marketing materials.

Questions:

  1. Pick one of these claims. What documentation/software produced by the project would you review to evaluate the claim you have chosen?
  2. What other materials do you think would be relevant to your review?
  3. Perform the actual review (10 – 15 pages, with citations, project)

Posted in Cataloging, Digital Library, Information Retrieval, Preservation | No Comments »

Union Catalogs of Learning Objects: Why Not?

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Union Catalogs of Learning Objects: Why Not? Author(s): Ana M.B. Pavani Keywords: Metadata – Learning Objects – Digital Libraries – Union Catalogs – Open Archives Inititative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Abstract:

This work presents a combined view of digital libraries, union catalogs and digital learning materials; union catalogs of metadata of ETD – Electronic Theses and Dissertations are shown as a paradigm. From this integrated view, and based on the existing ETD solution, it suggests that union catalogs of learning objects (digital learning materials with independent identities) be implemented with the participation of institutions worldwide. Open and free software solutions, and training are part of the overall proposed strategy.

More of a call to action than a specific proposal.

Worth reading to be reminded how important it is to share resources.

Even if, like the first cataloging venture in the 13th century, the work of sharing will never be done.

Posted in Digital Library | No Comments »