Discover Digital Libraries. Theory and Practice

369 Pages·2016·20.238 MB·English

by  Iris Xie, Krystyna Matusiak

Discover Digital Libraries
Theory and Practice
Iris Xie, PhD
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, United States
Krystyna K. Matusiak, PhD
University of Denver, Denver, CO, United States
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Biography
Dr. Xie is a Professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
She has been actively involved in the teaching and research of digital library design and evaluation for
about 15 years. Her research interests and expertise focus on digital libraries, interactive information
retrieval, human-computer interaction, as well as user needs and user studies. She has received several
research grants from research grant programs for the study of digital libraries. She is the principal
investigator for the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants “Creating
Digital Library Design Guidelines on Accessibility, Usability and Utility for Blind and Visually Im-
paired Users” and “Designing Interactive Help Mechanisms for Novice Users of Digital Libraries”. She
is also the principal investigator for the Online Computer Library Center/the Association for Library
and Information Science Education grant “Universal Accessibility of Digital Libraries: Design of Help
Mechanisms for Blind Users.” In addition, she is one of the senior personnel on the National Science
Foundation Grant “The Internet Research Ethics Digital Library, Interactive Resource Center and Ad-
visory Center.” Her research projects consist of the identification of types of sighted users and blind
users’ help-seeking situations in interacting with digital libraries as well as implications for interface
design, digital library evaluation criteria and measures from different stakeholders of digital libraries,
and social media applications in digital libraries. She has a strong publishing record in the field of li-
brary and information science. This book project is a natural progression in the active focus of Dr. Xie’s
research, as she has conducted a series of highly cited studies on digital libraries, published numerous
papers in top-ranking journals, and presented at several national and international conferences. Her
book Interactive Information Retrieval in Digital Environments was published in 2008, and the subject
of digital libraries is one of the main topics covered in the book.
Dr. Matusiak is an Assistant Professor in the Library & Information Science Program at the University
of Denver. Her research interests focus on the digitization of cultural heritage materials, indexing and
retrieval of digital images, information behavior, use of digital libraries, and research methods. She
combines practical experience in digitization and digital collections with research interests in use and
evaluation of digital libraries. She has been involved in the digitization of cultural heritage materi-
als since 2001. Prior to accepting her position at the University of Denver, she worked as a Digital
Collections Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she planned and designed over
20 distinct digital collections. She served as a coinvestigator of the digitization project, funded by
the National Endowment for Humanities, “Saving and Sharing the American Geographical Society
Library’s Historic Nitrate Negative Images.” She also served as a digitization consultant for projects
funded by the Endangered Archive Programme at the British Library and assisted digital library proj-
ects at the Press Institute of Mongolia in Ulan Baatar, Mongolia and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in
East Jerusalem. Her research projects include studies of information seeking behavior in digital col-
lections, use of image and multimedia resources, and user interaction with large-scale digital libraries.
She has published a number of articles on those topics and presented at national and international
conferences. Dr. Matusiak contributes to this book her expertise in digitization, audiovisual materials,
metadata, digital preservation, digital library management systems as well as her practical knowledge
in building and managing digital collections.
xi
Foreword
The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his
projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an
exact replica
H.G. Wells, 1938. (p. 77).
The above quote from H. G. Wells, which also appears in the first chapter of the book, is appropriate
because it foresees digital libraries, even without mentioning them by name. In addition, in 2016, when
this book was published, we celebrate 150 years since Wells’ birth and mourn 70 years since his death.
This book identifies the challenges, current trends, and future directions of digital library develop-
ment, use, and evaluation. The coverage of the book is comprehensive, as can be easily determined by
each chapter and the accompanying bibliographies.
This Foreword has a hazier aim—I am trying to examine the complex relations and connections
between research and practice in the area of digital libraries:
• Does digital library research inform digital library practice? And vice versa?
• To what extents are they connected now, nearly two decades after they began?
“Digital library research” refers to various research projects funded historically by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States and by European Union programs in Europe, as well
as research reports presented at various digital library conferences to this day. “Digital library prac-
tice” includes working digital libraries found on the Web, reflecting any practical, operational library-
oriented achievements. “Inform” refers here to a visible connection based on evidence either (1) in the
sites of research projects and/or in the research literature that points to any consideration of or link to
an operational digital library project, or (2) in digital library practice showing any consideration of or
link to research projects found in the literature. In other words, concentration here is solely on visible
or “surface” evidence.
In many fields, research and practice have a complex relationship or connection. In an ideal para-
digm, (some) research, particularly toward the applied end, informs and even transforms practice and
(some) practice informs research, especially in the selection of problems. In an ideal world, research
and practice converge. However, in reality, it rarely works exactly that way. The links between re-
search and practice are neither always linear nor are they often easy to discern. Their connections may
be serendipitous or vague, even weak or nonexistent. Time and social context play a significant role
as well. Transfer of ideas is complex. There are further considerations. Research often raises expecta-
tions, and, by definition, it neither promises nor produces predictable outcomes. Practice may advance,
and in many areas has done so, without direct input of research. The area of digital libraries is not an
exception to any of these points.
Historically, in the United States, the original agenda for digital library research was set and conducted
through the multiagency Digital Library Initiatives (DLIs) lead by the National Science Foundation
(NSF). DLI 1 (1994–98) involved six awards and $25 million; DLI 2 (1999–2003) involved 34 awards
and $48 million (Griffin, 2005). It may be of interest to note that the origins of Google were acknowl-
edged as being supported by a DLI 1 grant at Stanford University (National Science Foundation, 2004).
xiii
xiv Foreword
While the agendas for both DLIs were relatively broad, their base rested firmly in technology. Levy
(2000) describes this early conclusion regarding DLI projects as reported in the research literature or
at various library conferences:
“The current digital library agenda has largely been set by the computer science community, and
clearly bears the imprint of this community’s interests and vision. But there are other constituencies
whose voices need to be heard.”
That indeed there are different viewpoints about digital libraries was also recognized half a decade later
by Arms (2005). Both conclusions still hold today.
Since the end of DLI 2, NSF no longer supports research in digital libraries. All federal US support
is now channelled through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), established by law
in 1996 combining the Institute of Museum Services and the Library Program Office from Department
of Education. The very name (including museums) shows a shift and broadening in the coverage of the
area of support. The majority of grants are for pragmatic operational projects—some involving digital
libraries—as is clearly visible in the enumeration of their past grants (https://www.imls.gov/grants/
awarded-grants).
Again historically, in Europe, digital library research was supported by the European Union in two
programs: DELOS: Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (2004–07, at a cost of 950,000 EUR)
and DL.org: Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations (2008–11,
at a cost of 1,200,000 EUR). Both projects involved a large number of participants and workshops
across Europe. Crowning achievements for both projects were two landmark publications: The DELOS
Manifesto (Candela et al., 2007) and The Digital Library Reference Model (DL.org, 2010). The
Manifesto lays out basic definitions and structure of digital libraries. The Reference Model provides
detailed descriptions of concepts involved, together with models of various applications and domains
of digital libraries. Both documents consider digital libraries as “the meeting point of many disciplines
and fields, including data management, information retrieval, library sciences, document management,
information systems, the web, image processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction,
and digital curation.” (Candela et al., 2007).
The US DLI projects were primarily oriented toward development of applications—testbed/pro-
totype building. The European digital libraries projects were primarily oriented toward conceptual
definitions and Europe-wide cooperation among researchers. However, government support for digital
library research has ended in both the US and European Union.
Digital library practice is institutionally/organizationally based and oriented toward a given commu-
nity, pragmatic development, and practical operations. As expected, the aims are toward the pragmatic
problems at hand. Typical examples—rather than exhaustive enumerations—involve the following:
• Digitizing and providing access to specialized and historic materials by the Library of Congress
through the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress (launched in 1990, first on CD-
ROM and then in 1996 on the Web) (https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html).
• Incorporating digital dimensions and providing access to electronic collections and resources,
with a variety of associated services (ie, creating and managing hybrid libraries—incorporating
both traditional and digital materials and services) by thousands of academic, research, public,
Foreword xv
and special libraries, such as the University of California Berkeley Library (http://www.lib.
berkeley.edu/node).
• Building digital libraries by professional and other organizations, such as the subscription-based
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ACM Digital Library (launched in 1998) (http://
dl.acm.org/).
• Developing digital collections in specific domains, such as the Perseus Digital Library, covering
digitized materials from antiquity to the Renaissance (launched on CD-ROM in 1987—four years
before the advent of the Web; it was later established on the Web in 1995) (http://www.perseus.
tufts.edu/hopper/).
• Developing and building huge continent- or nation-wide portals that act as an interface to many
cultural institutions, providing millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects, archival
records, and music and sounds that have been digitized. Examples include: (1) Europeana
(launched in 2008), under a subtitle “think culture” calls to “explore 48,738,306 artworks,
artifacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe.” (2) Digital Public Library of America
(DPLA) (launched in 2013), under a subtitle “a Wealth of Knowledge” calls to “explore
11,425,950 items from libraries, archives, and museums.” (Quotes with given numbers from both
sites are as of Jan. 2016) (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/) (http://dp.la/).
These are just a very few examples of digital and hybrid libraries. They represent only a sliver of an
explosive growth that resulted in a multitude of practical digital libraries worldwide.
Practical efforts in digital libraries share a common characteristic. Agendas were set at grassroots—
by individual libraries, academic departments, professional organizations, museums, publishers—
often driven by enthusiastic individuals. Pioneering projects from the early 1990s, such as those at
the Library of Congress mentioned above, served as examples for a great many institutions to follow.
Development of digital collections, management and preservation of digital resources, user-oriented
services, electronic publishing—with myriad issues and challenges beyond technology—are also a part
of these pragmatic efforts.
As mentioned at the beginning of this Foreword, evidence analyzed here is based either in (1) sites
of research projects that show a direct connection to practice or in (2) practical sites of digital libraries
that show a direct connection to research; in other words, it is based solely on evidence that is directly
visible or on “surface” evidence.
Here is a sample of the literature on digital libraries. Communication of the ACM (CACM) is the
flagship journal of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). CACM had three special issues
devoted to digital libraries [CACM vol. 38 (4) 1995; vol. 41 (4) 1998; and vol. 44 (5) 2001]. In the most
recent special issue on digital libraries, the article “The ACM Digital Library” stated:
“ACM distinguished itself in its advanced planning for its digital library by paying close attention
to three such issues: changing patterns in scholarly behavior; the functioning of copyright law in a
networked environment; and the development of a business model” (Rous, 2001, p. 90).
No research project was mentioned or cited in the article, even though this and other two CACM spe-
cial issues on digital libraries contained other articles about DLI projects that involved specific digital
libraries.
xvi Foreword
An article by Candela et al. (2007) about the Digital Library Manifesto has 17 references; none of
them cite an operational digital library project. In turn, (as of Jan. 2016) the article is cited in Scopus
(the largest bibliographic database covering over 22,000 titles) 31 times. A cursory examination of ti-
tles and references in those citations did not find a connection to any operational digital library project.
In contrast, the article by Bearman (2007) (among the best, if not even the best review of digital
library literature up to that time) has 311 references, many of which refer to practical digital libraries.
In a section devoted to practical systems, Bearman classifies them as to “Discipline- and Subject-Based
Digital Libraries; Genre- and Format-Based Digital Libraries; Institutional Repositories; and Mission-
and Audience-Directed Digital Libraries.” The last one included children’s digital libraries. This is the
only article found that had descriptions of and references to practical digital libraries.
There are numerous international conferences devoted to digital libraries:
• Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL); since 2001 cosponsored by ACM and Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Computer Society (IEEE-CS), thus “joint” in the title—
before 2001 they were separate.
• International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL); started in 1997 as
the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology on Digital Libraries (ECDL).
• International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL).
• In addition, many other—including regional—conferences are listed in each issue of D-Lib
Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/groups.html).
In other words, conferencing on digital libraries is a rich, international tradition and venue. All the
major conferences publish conference proceedings, of which only two Proceedings of the Joint Confer-
ence on Digital Libraries (JCDL) are examined here in some detail: the first one that was jointly held
in 2001, and the most recent one held in 2015.
Papers and presentations in JCDL 2001 are simply listed without a particular categorization. The
first paper was entitled “Integrating automatic genre analysis into digital libraries,” and the last was
“The virtual naval hospital: the digital library as knowledge management tool for nomadic patrons.”
Over 80 contributions are listed; a good number are only one page long, consisting only of an abstract
and references with no actual paper included.
Papers and presentations in JCDL 2015 are divided into categories labeled by sessions: “People
and Their Books; Information Extraction; Big Data, Big Resources; Working the Crowd; User Issues;
Ontologies and Semantics; Non-text Collections; Temporality; and Archiving, Repositories, and Con-
tent.” There were 18 full and 30 short research reports. Numerous examples of applications were given,
such as a papers with the title: “No More 404s: Predicting Referenced Link Rot in Scholarly Articles
for Pro-Active Archiving;” or “iCrawl: Improving the Freshness of Web Collections by Integrating
Social Web and Focused Web Crawling.”
A random examination of papers in both JCDL conferences, particularly as to their citations, yielded no
reference to a practical digital library. However, a large proportion made specific and practical suggestion
how to handle digitally given objects (eg, sounds) or did research examining a process (eg, digital reading).
In sum, papers at these conferences represent an impressive diversity of efforts in digital libraries.
As for authors, these conferences mainly represent efforts coming out of the computer science commu-
nity and provide a minimal connection to efforts involving broader communities. While the proportion
of authors outside computer science is rising, less than 20% of all authors during these years comes
from outside the discipline.
Foreword xvii
Time for conclusion. A brief answer posed by questions at the outset is this:
As it stands now, I believe that digital library research on the one hand, and digital library practice
on the other, reside in parallel universes with little visible contact and intersection, as demonstrated
by the diffusion channels examined here. I think that, while they are both about digital libraries,
there is a digital divide between them. At present, the two communities disseminate ideas in
detached formal networks of communication that are more or less self-referential. However, things
and connections may change.
In other words, I believe that presently, digital library research and digital library practice are
conducted mostly independent of each other, minimally informing each other, and having slight or
no connection.
Furthermore, I also concur with David Levy’s conclusion, quoted above, that the research
agenda largely bears the imprint of the computer science community’s interests and vision.
However, since both research and practice are in progress and the diffusion process is a function of
time, we may expect changes. The approach and method adopted has obvious limitations—I took the in-
formation provided “as is” and did not pursue any deeper analysis of connections, if any, below the sur-
face. Here are a few more limitations. It is well known that technology transfer may take place through
informal as well as formal channels and records. This indeed has been common in the digital library
field, a fact that cannot be ignored. Many people that are designing and developing digital libraries have
attended digital library conferences and learned of research work. Likewise, a good percentage of those
attending digital library conferences are practitioners who bring back to their libraries and projects what
they have learned from research presentations. Further, invited talks, panel discussions, short papers,
posters, and workshops are key parts of conferences where technology transfer takes place in both direc-
tions, and these have been ignored in the present analysis. Thus, conclusions here can easily be ques-
tions. Still, the subject in the leading questions should be raised.
This book covers large issues facing digital libraries. It incorporates current research perspectives
on the development and evaluation of digital libraries, as well as an overview of best practices and
standards for high performance. This combination of research and up-to-date practical guidelines is a
unique strength of this book.
T. Saracevic
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States
REFERENCES
Arms, W.Y., 2005. A viewpoint analysis of the digital library. D-Lib Mag. 11(7–8). Available from: http://dlib.
org/dlib/july05/arms/07arms.html.
Bearman, D., 2007. Digital libraries. Ann. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol. 41 (1), 223–272.
Candela, L., Castelli, D., Pagano, P., Thanos, C., Ioannidis, Y., Koutrika, G., Ross, S., Schek, H.-J., Schuldt, H.,
2007. Setting the foundations of digital libraries: The DELOS manifesto. D-Lib Mag. 13(3–4). Available
from: http://dlib.org/dlib/march07/castelli/03castelli.html.
xviii Foreword
DL.org., 2010. The Digital Library Reference Model. (Also contains the DELOS Manifesto). Available from:
http://www.dlorg.eu/uploads/DL%20Reference%20Models/The%20Digital%20Library%20Reference%20
Model_v1.0.pdf.
Griffin, S.M., 2005. Funding for digital libraries research: past and present. D-Lib Mag. 11(7/8). Available from:
http://dlib.org/dlib/july05/griffin/07griffin.html.
Levy, D.A., 2000. Digital libraries and the problem of purpose. D-Lib Mag. 6(1). Available from: National Science
Foundation. (2004). On the origins of Google. Available from: http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.
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disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660&org=IIS.
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Preface
CONTEXT OF THE BOOK
The emergence of digital libraries provides an unprecedented opportunity for broader and easier ac-
cess to a variety of information resources and new potential for their use. Just like there are different
definitions in terms of what constitutes a digital library, different approaches have been applied to the
development of the main components of digital libraries—the collection, digitalization, organization,
design, preservation, retrieval, and evaluation of digital libraries. The field of digital libraries is con-
stantly changing with the introduction of new formats, standards, technologies, best practices, and the
evolving concepts of digital library design, evaluation, preservation, and digital curation. There is a
strong need for a new book that addresses the changes that have taken place in the past five years in the
field of digital libraries and that presents current research and developments in the world of practice.
Existing books on digital libraries contribute greatly to the research and practice of the field; how-
ever, they are often out of date and leave many unanswered questions. The limitations of current digital
library-related books can be summarized as follows:
• Fail to cover all the key components of digital library development
• Focus only on either the theory component of digital library research or the practical aspects of
digital library development
• Fail to include new technology development and applications in digital libraries
This book is written to address the need for updated and multifaceted scholarship and practice in
the area of digital libraries.
OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK
The objective of the book is to present a comprehensive overview of different approaches and tools
for each component of digital library development, as well as to discuss the social and legal issues as-
sociated with digital libraries and the application of new technologies and standards. In particular, the
authors incorporate a thorough discussion of new formats, standards, technologies, best practices, and
the evolving concepts of digital library design, use, evaluation, preservation, and digital curation into
the book. The book integrates current research and best practices in digitization and construction of
digital collections and provides both the United States and international perspectives on the develop-
ment of digital libraries.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
This book consists of the following four parts:
Part I (Chapter 1) offers an overview of digital libraries and the conceptual and practical under-
standing of digital libraries. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the evolution of digital libraries, as well
as key concepts, frameworks, major developments, and projects of digital libraries. The benefits and
challenges of each period of digital library development are reviewed.
xix