scholarly journals Towards a Sustainable Infrastructure for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Digital Scholarship

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter X. Zhou

AbstractThe digital lifecycle encompasses definitive processes for data curation and management, long-term preservation, and dissemination, all of which are key building blocks in the development of a digital library. Maintaining a complete digital lifecycle workflow is vital to the preservation of digital cultural heritage and digital scholarship. This paper considers digital lifecycle programs for digital libraries, noting similarities between the digital and print lifecycles and referring to the example of the Digital Dunhuang project. Only through a systematic and sustainable digital lifecycle program can platforms for cross-disciplinary research and repositories for large aggregations of digital content be built. Moreover, advancing digital lifecycle development will ensure that knowledge and scholarship created in the digital age will have the same chances for survival that print-and-paper scholarship has had for centuries. It will also ensure that digital library users will have effective access to aggregated content across different domains and platforms.

Author(s):  
Micah Altman

Digital libraries are collections of digital content and services selected by a curator for use by a particular user community. Digital libraries offer direct access to the content of a wide variety of intellectual works, including text, audio, video, and data; and may offer a variety of services supporting search, access, and collaboration. In the last decade digital libraries have rapidly become ubiquitous because they offer convenience, expanded access, and search capabilities not present in traditional libraries. This has greatly altered how library users find and access information, and has put pressure on traditional libraries to take on new roles. However, information professionals have raised compelling concerns regarding the sizeable gaps in the holdings of digital libraries, about the preservation of existing holdings, and about sustainable economic models. This chapter presents an overview of the history, advantages, disadvantages, and design principles relating to digital libraries, and highlights important controversies and trends. For an excellent comprehensive discussion of the use, cost and benefits of digital libraries see Lesk (2005), for further discussion of architectural and design issues see Arms (2000), and see Witten and Bainbridge (2002) for a detailed example of the mechanics of implementing a digital library.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mohammed Ammari ◽  
Dalila Chiadmi

Traditional libraries will evolve to digital libraries which are clearly superior at: Dissemination, sharing, linking, storing, and information variety. Therefore, one can say that electronic libraries have specific needs in terms of content, services and long-term preservation. In contrast, digital libraries suffer from several inherent constraints: storage limitation, performance, relevancy, decentralization, lack of semantic, fault tolerance, scalability. The main intention of this paper is to present a design of an integrated digital library system based on peer-to-peer data mining. This article aims also to prove that peer-to-peer mining, an emerging branch of distributed data mining, is a hot research area well suited to overcome intrinsic problems of digital libraries.


Author(s):  
Christine L. Borgman ◽  
Edie Rasmussen

Usability is a critical issue for digital libraries, complicated by the fact that users have varying levels of knowledge of library systems and subject knowledge and may be novices or experts and frequent or occasional users of specific digital libraries. Usability is further complicated by multicultural issues, as digital library users may come from many cultures and nations, or it may be necessary to orient a digital library toward the needs of users from one or more specific localities or cultures. Usability evaluation may be formative, summative, iterative or comparative and is usually specific to a particular digital library context. The four papers in this section, illustrating formative, iterative and summative approaches, cover a variety of contexts—education, music, cultural heritage and a national digital library.


Author(s):  
Faeizah Salim ◽  
Bavani Saigar ◽  
Pravin Kumar Armoham ◽  
Sarasvathy Gobalakrishnan ◽  
Michelle Yen Pin Jap ◽  
...  

The purpose of this research is to examine students' information-seeking intention regarding academic digital library services guiding by the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Data was collected among students in a public higher learning institution in Federal Territory of Labuan Malaysia. The empirical result of the hierarchical regression had confirmed that students' intention to seek for information in digital library was influenced mainly by their attitude, implying that, in predicting the information-seeking intention in an academic digital library with TPB was much better than TRA. The findings of the research provide broader insights for the academic digital libraries to be more aware of the important factors that influence library users in seeking for information and fulfil their requirement. A new motion can be developed by using the result of this research, which improve the knowledge from previous studies via the assessment from TPB.


Author(s):  
James Macharia Tutu

Intellectual property poses a major challenge to digital libraries. This is because access to information in digital libraries is limited by laws, licenses and technology adopted by intellectual property owners. Similarly, intellectual property renders it difficult for digital libraries to make orphan works discoverable and accessible. Furthermore, intellectual property fragments copyright ownership, making it difficult for digital libraries to obtain the right clearance on content. To cope with these challenges, digital libraries have embraced the open access movement which allows reading, copying, downloading and sharing of digital content as long as the creators of the works are cited and acknowledged. Besides, digital libraries offer access to digital works produced under creative commons licenses. These licenses give the copyright owners the liberty to modify the copyright of their works to give room for sharing, use, and building upon the work.


2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (6) ◽  
pp. 970-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Goodale ◽  
Paul David Clough ◽  
Samuel Fernando ◽  
Nigel Ford ◽  
Mark Stevenson

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of cognitive style on navigating a large digital library of cultural heritage information; specifically, the paper focus on the wholist/analytic dimension as experienced in the field of educational informatics. The hypothesis is that wholist and analytic users have characteristically different approaches when they explore, search and interact with digital libraries, which may have implications for system design. Design/methodology/approach – A detailed interactive IR evaluation of a large cultural heritage digital library was undertaken, along with the Riding CSA test. Participants carried out a range of information tasks, and the authors analysed their task performance, interactions and attitudes. Findings – The hypothesis on the differences in performance and behaviour between wholist and analytic users is supported. However, the authors also find that user attitudes towards the system are opposite to expectations and that users give positive feedback for functionality that supports activities in which they are cognitively weaker. Research limitations/implications – There is scope for testing results in a larger scale study, and/or with different systems. In particular, the findings on user attitudes warrant further investigation. Practical implications – Findings on user attitudes suggest that systems which support areas of weakness in users’ cognitive abilities are valued, indicating an opportunity to offer diverse functionality to support different cognitive weaknesses. Originality/value – A model is proposed suggesting a converse relationship between behaviour and attitudes; to support individual users displaying search/navigation behaviour mapped onto the strengths of their cognitive style, but placing greater value on interface features that support aspects in which they are weaker.


2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 622-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarandis Mitropoulos ◽  
George Dimitrios Baltasis ◽  
Michalis Rodios ◽  
Christos Douligeris

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the SociaLib system, which is a collaborative digital library system. The system uses Drupal content management system to implement Web 2.0 functionalities and facilitate collaboration and cooperation between its users. It offers a variety of functions, like wikis, forums and it is also accessible from microbrowsers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper starts with a reference to collaboration in Digital Libraries and states related work. Then, it introduces the SociaLib system, including implementation and functionalities. There is also an example of how such a system can be used in a real-world situation. Ideas for future work are also included. Findings – The system was evaluated using a usability questionnaire on a subject of 50 people. The results were promising, showing user acceptance and satisfaction. Originality/value – This paper offer collaborative solutions to Digital Library users, helping them communicate and cooperate with colleagues on their research. The system uses Web 2.0 functions that enable the user to be more productive and also work mobile if he wishes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-34
Author(s):  
Michael J. O’Grady ◽  
Gregory M.P. O’Hare

Conventional digital libraries increasingly support remote access from mobile devices. However, the archetypical mobile user differs from the conventional user in a number of aspects; of these the most important is context. Synonymous with mobile computing is the context concept, and factoring the availability of select contextual elements into the design of digital libraries offers significant opportunities for adapting and personalising services for the mobile computing community. This paper proposes the Ambient Digital Library as a construct for integrating digital content, contextual parameters, and user models. In this way, a digital library may be made more accessible to a broader category of mobile user.


Author(s):  
F. Boochs ◽  
A. Trémeau ◽  
O. Murphy ◽  
M. Gerke ◽  
J.L. Lerma ◽  
...  

This paper documents the formulation of an international, interdisciplinary study, on a concerted European level, to prepare an innovative, reliable, independent and global knowledge base facilitating the use of today’s and future optical measuring techniques for the documentation of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage professionals, color engineers and scientists share similar goals for the documentation, curation, long-term preservation and representation of cultural heritage artifacts. Their focus is on accuracy in the digital capture and remediation of artefacts through a range of temporal, spatial and technical constraints. A shared vocabulary to interrogate these shared concerns will transform mutual understanding and facilitate an agreed movement forward in cultural heritage documentation here proposed in the work of the COST Action Color and Space in Cultural Heritage (COSCH). The goal is a model that captures the shared concerns of professionals for a standards-based solution with an organic Linked Data model. The knowledge representation proposed here invokes a GUI interface for non-expert users of capture technologies, facilitates, and formulates their engagement with key questions for the field.


Author(s):  
Mercedes Martínez-González

Digital libraries are systems that contain organized collections of objects, serving in their most basic functions as a mirror of the traditional library that contains paper documents. Most of the information contained in the collections of a digital library consists of documents, which can evolve with time. That is, a document can be modified to obtain a new document, and digital library users may want access to any of those versions. This introduces in digital libraries the problem of versioning, a problem that has also been considered in a related community, the hypertext community(hypermedia in its most extensive acception).Some domains in which document evolution is very important are the legislative domain (Arnold-Moore, 2000; Martínez-González, 2001; Vitali, 1999), the management of errata made to scientific articles (Poworotznek, 2003) and software construction (Conradi & Westfechtel, 1998).


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