Reengineering The Portal to Texas HistorySM

This case study reports the activities, findings, and lessons learned during a project that replaced the legacy Digital Asset Management (DAM) system of The Portal to Texas History? at the University of North Texas Libraries with an open source system. This unique system decouples the application development framework from the backend infrastructure, effectively relieving the development and growth constraints inherent in the legacy system. In a novel approach for an academic library, genealogists participated in the user-centered, iterative approach used to prototype, develop, and test the user interface. The resulting system promoted productivity gains by enabling programming staff to work in parallel from specialized areas of expertise. A post-project review process identified a number of lessons learned, including the importance of representing the requirements and priorities of internal and external stakeholders. The review process also informed an application development model that may be useful to other digital libraries.

Enterprise 2.0 in a Digital Library

The chapter presents the concept of Enterprise 2.0 in a library environment. This concept describes the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by organizations in order to foster internal functions, e.g. communication, collaboration, innovativeness. Various aspects of this concept are tackled including implementation of Web 2.0 technologies for business purposes in a library. Importance of intrapreneurship for implementation of Enterprise 2.0 is suggested. Short theoretical reviews on both intrapreneusrhip and Enterprise 2.0 are followed by some general conclusions on the relationship between these two concepts based on the research results gathered in libraries in Serbia. Results from the ongoing European study on awareness and implementation of Enterprise 2.0 are also presented. The chapter is a valuable companion for anyone interested in the practical aspects of Enterprise 2.0 implementation in a library and presents an addition to librarianship theory by introducing a new idea on the relation between Enterprise 2.0 implementation and intrapreneurship.

Creating an Online Image Database

The concept of experiential learning is particularly useful when students are required to create database entries as part of an ongoing, real-life, online experience. A METRO grant in 2005 resulted in an opportunity to use students to create a CONTENTdm database, which, with the continued software support from METRO, has continued and evolved until the present. This case study chapter describes the experience of both faculty and students in the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies course entitled “Introduction to Digital Imaging.” Sections include a review of related literature, the background, technical issues, and implications for teaching, project procedures and workflow, successes and lessons learned, challenges, next steps, and emerging trends. Of particular interest is the use of out of copyright postcards and the metadata that has resulted from intensive student study and evaluation of the data contained on these cards. Those contemplating a digitization project of their own will be able to learn much about best practices, project planning, management, and the advantages/disadvantages of the CONTENTdm software.

Building for Success?

In the cultural heritage field, heterogeneous materials and multicultural, multilingual user groups and their varying needs pose a challenge for information system design and its evaluation alike. Cultural heritage information systems can be evaluated from a system-centric or a user-centric perspective. This chapter discusses evaluation methods in digital libraries with a particular focus on cultural heritage collections and their distinctive features, interaction patterns, and challenges. It describes state-of-the-art evaluation methods illustrating them with examples from Europeana, the European portal for access to digital library, museum, and archive collections, and other projects from within the cultural heritage domain.

Listening to Images

This chapter explores a pilot project investigating the development of audio descriptions to accompany an academic library’s digital image collection. The project was introduced in selected classes and directly involved faculty and students in the creation and delivery of audio descriptions. The collaborative project initiated by the art librarian was in answer to a legislative act requiring accessibility for vision-impaired users. The discussion will specifically examine developing descriptions for images from Illinois State University’s International Collection of Child Art a resource that presents a fascinating challenge to use language to broaden access to the content and construct a compelling representation with the spoken word for individuals with print disabilities such as vision impairment.

Information Analysis in Digital Library Environments

This chapter addresses the question of how the analysis of results retrieved from online bibliographic information systems changed over the last 32 years as digital libraries have evolved. It demonstrates that Digital Libraries of the future will enable knowledge discovery by providing direct access to the semantic content of documents through the implementation of text mining tools. To achieve this research with IR systems and text-mining tools, pipeline pilot (Bandy, et al., 2009), I2E (Vellay, 2009), and BioText will need to be conducted by experts in information retrieval not just subject scientific specialists.

Content Analysis of CONTENTdm Item Level Records and Their Aggregated Metadata in WorldCat

This study examines the content in CONTENTdm item level records and their aggregated metadata in WorldCat. The research ascertains some amount of loss of contextualization in semantic meaning of digitized primary resources. Data was collected from non-probability sampling of CONTENTdm item records selected randomly from CONTENTdm’s Collection of Collections Web page. The same aggregated digitized resources were retrieved in WorldCat, and the data was recorded and analyzed against the CONTENTdm records. Evidence shows that the value of the metadata is altered or ambiguous when the local field name is divorced from the descriptive metadata. Contextual meaning is lost when metadata is shared. In fact, the study reveals that the de-contextualization problem is two-fold: some inconsistent mapping from aggregated metadata and lack of clarity in the metadata itself.

Infrastructure-Based Research Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries have evolved from a digital counterpart of traditional libraries to highly dynamic environments conceived to provide a community with the data and services needed to accomplish its tasks. This trend is particularly frequent in the context of scientific research communities, whose members are scattered among multiple organizations across the world, with requirements that are very large, multi-disciplinary, and evolving with innovation. The realization of such Research Digital Libraries calls for innovative approaches, capable of handling the inherent complexity of such systems while keeping their realization and maintenance costs under sustainable thresholds. Digital Library Infrastructures have been recently proposed as suitable candidates for the realization of Research Digital Libraries. They build on service-oriented infrastructure technologies to offer an environment where organizations can share and exchange their data and service resources to grow in synergy, exploiting an economy of scale approach. This chapter describes the peculiar challenges that designers, developers, and administrators have to face when realizing Research Digital Libraries, and presents the concepts and technologies of Digital Library Infrastructure as possible solutions to these issues.

Evaluation Constructs and Criteria for Digital Libraries

The intent of this chapter is to identify constructs and criteria for Digital Library (DL) evaluation based on document analysis. Eighty-five relevant articles and five websites were reviewed to generate the evaluation constructs and criteria. The findings consist of ten constructs, including collection, information organization, interface design, system performance, effects on users, user engagement, services, preservation, sustainability/administration, and context of use with associated criteria for each dimension. In addition, this chapter discusses challenges in DL evaluation research and practices.

Wrestling with Mosasaurs

The purpose of the Sternberg Museum-Forsyth Library Fossil Digitization Pilot Project was to determine the feasibility of conducting a large-scale fossil digitization program at Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas. Conducted in early 2011, the pilot examined such aspects as fossil digitization techniques, metadata development and best practices, scope and timelines, and overall digitization goals. This chapter focuses on the digitization landscape of the natural sciences, including an overview of major fossil digitization projects and analyses of issues related to these projects. Conclusions from the Sternberg-Forsyth pilot are also recounted and discussed. Also included is an appendix outlining costs and time needed for the recommended small-scale digitization project that will begin in late 2011 or early 2012.