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Improving the Usability of a Digital Library
No full textThe Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS) was introduced in 1994 and after more than 7 years of operation the service is still up and running. Articles published on the server are categorized in several ways (e.g. in the ACM Classification Scheme) to simplify browsing and finding articles again. Nevertheless users wants to create their own view on the material and their own categories. Traditionally a user creates some categories on the clientside in a bookmark-structure and stores the URIs of the according papers in this structure. But the use of bookmarks binds the user to a specific client on one single machine and so it is not possible to take full advantage of the restructured view. This is just one reason why it is helpful for the user to manage his personal view of the articles on the server-side. In this paper we introduce a personal workspace for registered users of the Journal of Universal Computer Science. It is possible to create and modify a personal view, add some personal and/or public comments of the articles and use the workspace as personal repository of published articles. We also show other advantages like personalized search scope, customization of the order of articles and some other useful features of the system
Introducing electronic books at G?teborg University
No full textGoteborg University Library has signed a contract with netLibrary providing users on the University\u27s network access to 500 copyrighted electronic books. These electronic books represent "the third wave" at our Digital Library- the earlier waves of resource networking were bibliographic databases and electronic journals. The project is funded by the university board and was started in 2001 after testing and preparations during the fall of 2000. The only realistic alternative for the library was found to be netLibrary. The process started with a collection evaluation resulting in the creation of a list of titles appropriate for acquisition. Negotiations with netlibrary followed and a contract was signed in February 2001. The service was launched over the University\u27s network in March 2001. After the local introduction of the netLibrary electronic books at the library the project work will continue with forming a eBook consortium. A study of other c-book alternatives will also be carried through. The current project will be evaluated on the basis of end-user experience
Embracing the Museum Publication
No full textThis paper deals with a document management application which is being devoloped for and implemented in the Industrial Museum of Saxony. Whereas most of the common museum documentation projects focus on the issue of collection management, this project is content-centered. It intends to establish an XML-based visitor-information-system, which enables the museum to provide on- sreen visitor information \u27on-the-floor\u27 and in the internet as well as print-output (PoD) automatically from the same data source. The paper will sketch the system\u27s architecture and take a closer look at the con- ception and development of the document models, meta-data and stylesheets, which allow to create rich and diverse multimedia presentations. The discussion will outline some key demands of a publication system which is tailored to the needs and expectations of museum visitors as well as the museum staff
A year without print at Princeton, and what we plan next
No full textPrinceton has begun to receive some major titles as electronic only, beginning with the 2000 subscription year. We are doing this in appropriate cases where we have confidence in the stability, archiving, and performance of the publisher, and where the financial advantage is significant. Not only have there been no complaints, but there have been almost no comments. Apparently users now look for current journal articles online , using the paper versions only if online is not available
Navigating a corpus of journal papers using Handles
No full textFor some years now the Internet and World Wide Web communities have envisaged moving to a \u27next generation\u27 of Web technologies by promoting a globally unique, and persistent, identifier for identifying and locating many forms of \u27published objects\u27. These identifiers are called Universal Resource Names (URNs) and they hold out the prospect of being able to refer to an object by what it is (signified by its URN), rather than by where it is (the current URL technology). One early implementation of URN ideas is the Unicode-based Handle technology, developed at CNRI in Reston Virginia. The Digital Object Identifier (DOl) is a specific URN naming convention proposed just over 5 years ago and is now administered by the International DOl organisation, founded by a consortium of publishers and based in Washington DC. The DOl is being promoted for managing electronic content and for intellectual rights management of it, either using the published work itself, or, increasingly via meradata descriptors for the work in question. This paper describes the use of the CNRI handle parser to navigate a corpus of papers for the Electronic Publishing journal. These papers are in PDF format and based on our server in Nottingham. For each paper in the corpus a metadata descriptor is prepared for every citation appearing in the References Section. The important factor is that the underlying handle is resolved locally in the first instance. In some cases (e.g. cross-citations within the corpus itself and links to known resources elsewhere) the handle can be handed over to CNRI for further resolution. This work shows the encouraging prospect of being able to use persistent URNs not only for intellectual property negotiations but also for search and discovery. In the test domain of this experiment every single resource, referred to within a given paper, can be resolved, at least to the level of metadata about the referred object. If the Web were to become more fully URN aware then a vast directed graph of linked resources could be accessed, via persistent names. Moreover, if these names delivered embedded metadata when resolved, the way would be open for a new generation of vastly more accurate and intelligent Web search engines
Training in Electronic Publishing for Cultural Heritage Specialists: The Bulgarian Experience
No full textThe issue at the heart of this article is an analysis of the actual condition of the publishing sector in Bulgaria and some predictions about the expected directions for its\u27 future development in electronic environment. As the fourth great technique of writing, electronic text becomes unique medium for limitless exchange of human knowledge not only in the old continent, but in the world-wide scale. Background The c-publishing in Bulgaria is not widely spread and most publishers believe that the basic reason for this is financial. In spite of this many publishers show an interest in publishing in the new multimedia, recognising it as a priority type of publishing or intend to produce c-products in the future. What are the facts ? Most Bulgarian publishers (84%) produce only printed materials. 11% - both printed and electronic, and 1% - only electronic products. The book sector in Bulgaria survives with incredible difficulties in spite of increasing amount of private publishers (1.800 in 1998). The first Bulgarian c-publications were on display at the Sofia Book Fair in 1998, but the most of them were produced with foreign participation. Since then private companies showed growing interest in investing in this field and the tendency for future development is positive
Converting heterogenous cultural catalogues and documents to XML -strategies and solutions of the COVAX project
No full textCOVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML) is an 1ST (Information Society Technology) funded project, launched as part of the 1ST first call, corresponding to key action 3 (Multimedia content and tools: cultural heritage and digital content) in the action line 111.2.3 (Access to scientific and cultural heritage) under the European Community Fifth Framework for research and development. The main objective of COVAX is to test the use of XML to combine document descriptions and digitised surrogates of cultural documents to build a global system for search and retrieval, increasing accessibility via the Internet to electronic resources, regardless of their location. The project duration is 24 months. It started in January 2000 and the partners include content owners (memory institutions) and technological partners (developers: public RTD centres and private companies). CO VAX\u27s approach to achieving its objectives is based on the conversion of existing records to homogeneously-encoded document descriptions of bibliographic records, archive finding aids, museum records and catalogues, and electronic texts and on the application of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and the various Document Type Definitions (DTDs) currently being used for library resource descriptions (MARC DTD), archives finding aids (EAD), museum materials (AMICO DTD) and electronic versions of cultural texts (TEllite). COVAX is designed to form a network of XML repositories as a distributed database. This will be accessed as a single database and will act as a mets-search engine, offering access to book references, finding aids, facsimile images, museum items, and other resources. COVAX is constructing a multilingual user interface to access such data. The project does not intend to create standards but to rely on the adoption of existing standards and concepts (XML, DTDs already in use, http...), using the Z39.50 protocol as a conceptual basis for communication between the multilingual user interface and the meta-search engine and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set elements as cross-domain access points. The conversion process has proved to be a crucial one in the CO VAX-project and we therefore try to concentrate, in this article, on questions concerning our experiences of converting mainly library catalogues of different MARC or proprietary formats to XML
CABRef: Cross-Referencing into an Abstracts Database
No full textThis paper describes a prototype system, CABRef, which provides seamless linking from a citation in the bibliography of an electronic journal article to a detailed abstract of the cited work, within a particular research domain. Publishers of journal articles will query CABRef to determine the URL links to embed in their article bibliographies which enable end-user cross-reference navigation. The abstracts within CABRef, and their discovery metadata, are encoded in XML and processed with X.M.L-aware software. The CABRef XML abstracts database is updated using data exported from the CABI abstracts production database on a regular basis when abstracts are \u27published\u27, involving a simple extra step in the CABI abstracts production process
Print to Electronic: Measuring the Operational and Economic Implications of an Electronic Journal Collection
No full textAs digital libraries move from demonstration projects to the real world of working libraries, it is critical to assess and to document the impact of the shift. This paper reports the methodology and initial results of an Institute for Library and Information Studies (IMLS) funded research study of the operational and economic impact of an academic library\u27s migration to an all-electronic journal collection. Drexel Library\u27s entire print and electronic journal collections and associated staff are the test bed to study three key research questions: (1) What is the impact on library staffing needs? (2) How have library costs been reduced, increased and/or re-allocated? (3) What other library resources have been affected? We are using quantitative and qualitative methods to answer the research questions operationalized in the following tasks: (1) Measure the staff time, subscriptions costs and other costs related to each activity required to acquire and maintain print and electronic journals. (2) Compute the per-volume, per-title, and per-use costs of acquiring and maintaining print and electronic subscriptions. (3) Study all impacted library services, including changes in reference service, document delivery, and instructional programs. Initial results of measuring staff time indicate Information Services and Systems Operation departments constitute the majority of personnel costs for electronic journals. Technical Services and Circulation account for the majority of staff costs for print journals. Per title subscription costs appear to be substantially lower for electronic titles obtained through aggregator collections
Improving Information Retrieval Performance by Experience Reuse
No full textThe goal to build a knowledge base, making "permanent" the user evaluations experiences on search results, constitutes the main motivation of this paper. In information retrieval systems, an experience is a search instance, represented by a search context and a set of evaluated document results. In this paper, we propose a search context model, characterized by the user\u27s profile and query. Similarity functions between users\u27 profiles and search contexts are defined, on the basis of the proposed model. The reuse process consists in expanding the initial user query by the documents terms contained in the similar instances. In contrast with the Rocchio method, these documents are those validated beforehand by users, having "similar" profiles as the current user, and being in a "similar" search situation. Our proposition enables to reduce system interactions with the user during his/her search session. These features were carried out in the COSYDOR (Cooperative System for Document Retrieval) project, based on Inrermedia (Oracle 8i). Tests and evaluations are carried out using the test corpus of TREC (Text Retrieval Conference). The results show, for first search iterations, a significant improvement of performance compared to that of Internsedia. This work is carried out within the framework of a regional project, in which the sight deficient users constitute our application case. This research represents a considerable contribution for these users, considering their use difficulties of current information retrieval systems (too interactive systems, accessibility problems, etc)