Digital Libraries Overview and Globalization

Library digitization on a global basis is essential in the twenty-first century. The digital library development initiatives in most countries depend substantially on their national libraries. This chapter focuses on an overview of how national libraries of 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region are involved in digital library initiatives. Most libraries participate in the collaborative efforts to build digital libraries with support from their government. Some focus on digitization and preservation activities, while others concentrate on digitization standards. Requirements for digital library implementation from a global perspective are essential. With the understanding of the current situation in Asia Pacific, we can understand the readiness of national libraries aiming for globalization in this part of the world, and action can be taken to achieve the aim. The globalization of digital libraries is what the world should be heading towards as we enter the next century.

The European Approach Towards Digital Library Education

Triggered by a rapid diffusion of ICT within the last two decades, libraries have undergone a (r)evolutionary change in both mission and services. Step by step, libraries diversified their mission from a media holding institution towards a multimedia content provider in a physical and digital environment. To run a library in this way, highly qualified staff with LIS background is brought into focus. The article deals with the situation in European LIS institutions and its programs, particularly with regard to digital library. The crucial question will be: what kind of paradigm, if at all, exists with regard to the digital library phenomenon? Furthermore, some trends in libraries services and conceptions are presented.

Development of Digital Libraries in Pakistan

This chapter aims to discuss the development of digital libraries in Pakistan. It gives an account of the digital transformation taking place in the country and reviews a few digital library initiatives. It discusses a number of issues associated with the development of digital libraries with specific reference to Pakistan. The major issues appear are as follows: misconception about digital libraries; lack of technological applications; lack of human resources with needed skills; copyright and publishing; cultural divide; digital divide, and insufficient financial support. The authors believe that understanding the underlying issues will not only accelerate the development of DL in Pakistan, but also in other developing countries with more or less common environment.

Software Process Asset Libraries Using Knowledge Repositories

This paper establishes the incorporation of knowledge management techniques as a means to improve actual software process asset libraries. It presents how knowledge management contributes to the creation of a new generation of process libraries as repositories of knowledge as well as the mechanisms to allow the acquisition, storage, collaborating, sharing and distribution of knowledge related to the software development processes. It exposes aspects about organization and structure of this kind of digital libraries oriented to software process engineering, defining a lifecycle of the software process assets and a set of services and functions for its effective use in small and medium software development enterprises.

Digital Libraries as a Foundation of Spatial Data Infrastructures

This chapter introduces Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and establishes their strong conceptual and technical relationships with geographic digital libraries (geolibraries). The authors describe the origin of SDIs and highlight their role as geographic resources providers. Then, they give several examples of the use of techniques and tools taken from the digital libraries world in the development of SDIs. The purpose of this chapter is establishing a solid foundation for those aspects of SDIs that can make profit from the knowledge and tools provided by the digital library community. It will also point the key differences between SDIs and geolibraries in order to provide a broader view of these infrastructures.

User-Adapted Information Services

This chapter describes personalization strategies adopted in digital libraries. Personalization and individualization are introduced as means to improve the usability of digital library services. The goal of personalization for digital libraries is mainly the presentation of individual results to the user. This can be modelled based on a user interest model which is applied during the search process. Two users with the same query can receive different results based on their interest profile maintained by the system. Typical approaches and systems for individualizing the results of information retrieval systems are presented. The retrieval process is described. Knowledge sources and common knowledge representation for personalization are elaborated. Most common, the search history and documents accessed in the past are exploited for modelling the user interest. Finally, the chapter mentions drawbacks and success factors for personalization and individualization systems.

The CGIAR Virtual Library Bridging the Gap Between Agricultural Research and Worldwide Users

This chapter introduces the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Virtual Library as a tool for linking researchers and agricultural research results. The CGIAR is a strategic alliance of countries, international and regional organizations, and private foundations supporting 15 international agricultural centers that work in partnership with national agricultural research institutions and societies. The research results generated are numerous and cover a wide range of subject fields. While these are properly documented, locating relevant and timely information across the system’s 15 centers is a long and tedious process as individual databases have to be searched. The CGIAR virtual library (CGVLibrary) project of the CGIAR Libraries and Information Services Consortium (CGIARLISC) was created in 2005 to address the difficulty of information retrieval across the various centers. It is now available via the WWW (http://vlibrary.cgiar.org/) and knowledge generated by the CGIAR can now be retrieved with a few mouse clicks.

Metadata and Metaphors in Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries

This chapter introduces a new category of digital library user interfaces called metadata-enhanced visual interfaces. Drawing on the earlier information retrieval visual interfaces that have made use of thesauri, this chapter will review and analyze metadata-enhanced visual interfaces to digital libraries based on two key variables, namely metadata elements used for visualization purposes and visual metaphors incorporated into the user interfaces. The aim of this study is to inform the design of visual interfaces for digital libraries through bringing together issues that have roots in such communities as information retrieval, digital libraries, human-computer interaction, and metadata. The findings of this study provide design ideas and implications for digital library interface design in terms of the various metadata-based information search and retrieval features for visualization purposes.

User Profiles for Personalizing Digital Libraries

Exploring digital collections to find information relevant to a user’s interests is a challenging task. Information preferences vary greatly across users; therefore, filtering systems must be highly personalized to serve the individual interests of the user. Algorithms designed to solve this problem base their relevance computations on user profiles in which representations of the users’ interests are maintained. The main focus of this chapter is the adoption of machine learning to build user profiles that capture user interests from documents. Profiles are used for intelligent document filtering in digital libraries. This work suggests the exploiting of knowledge stored in machine-readable dictionaries to obtain accurate user profiles that describe user interests by referring to concepts in those dictionaries. The main aim of the proposed approach is to show a real-world scenario in which the combination of machine learning techniques and linguistic knowledge is helpful to achieve intelligent document filtering.

Effective and Efficient Browsing of Large Image Databases

As image databases are growing, efficient and effective methods for managing such large collections are highly sought after. Content-based approaches have shown large potential in this area as they do not require textual annotation of images. However, while for image databases the query-by-example concept is at the moment the most commonly adopted retrieval method, it is only of limited practical use. Techniques which allow human-centred navigation and visualization of complete image collections therefore provide an interesting alternative. In this chapter we present an effective and efficient approach for user-centred navigation of large image databases. Image thumbnails are projected onto a spherical surface so that images that are visually similar are located close to each other in the visualization space. To avoid overlapping and occlusion effects images are placed on a regular grid structure while large databases are handled through a clustering technique paired with a hierarchical tree structure which allows for intuitive real-time browsing experience.