Software for Digital Libraries

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Software for Digital Libraries
T.B. RajashekarNational Centre for Science
InformationIndian Institute of ScienceBangalore
560 012 (E-Mail raja_at_ncsi.iisc.ernet.in) 9th
March 2004
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Agenda

• What and why of DL?
• Key processes in a DL 1
• Key processes in a DL 2
• DL Software Features
• Open source software for DLs

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What and Why of DLs

• What is a DL?
• A Working definition
• A digital library is an organized and focused
  collection of digital objects, including text,
  images, video and audio, along with methods for
  access and retrieval, and for selection,
  creation, organization, and maintenance of the
  collection.

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What and Why of DLs

• Why DL?
• Go beyond library catalogue, bibliographic,
  surrogate
• Deal with content
• Full text documents with associated images,
  images, audio and video (e-documents)
• Goals Improved access, preservation
• Application environment
• Library school, college, university, public,
  RD, corporate, etc.
• KM, Publishing, Preservation, E-Governance, etc.

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What and Why of DLs

• Which DL?
• DL developed by someone else
• E-Journals, E-Books, E-Prints, Theses, etc.
• Local hosting, remote access
• Licensing, access management, etc.
• Develop our own DL
• Collections produced and/or owned by the
  institution

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Processes in a DL - 1

• Selection of source documents
• Digitization/ acquisition
• Organization
• Metadata, full-text tagging
• Publishing
• Quality control, Loading
• Indexing and storage (repository)
• Access and delivery (services)

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Selection
Acquisition
Organization
Publishing
Indexing Storage DL Content Search Retrieval
DL Repository
Access Delivery
User
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(Sun Micro Systems)
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Are we happy with this functionality? What other
features could be important?
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Processes in a DL - 2

• Preservation
• Long term access
• Access/ rights management
• Who can access? What? How much? Usage
  restrictions
• Interoperability
• OPAC, local holdings, integration with other DLs
  (Z39.50, OAI)
• Usage/ performance monitoring
• Who is using? How much? Uptime? Response time?
  Recall/ Precision? Failures?
• Multilingual support

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What does this mean in terms of specific features
we may expect of DL software?
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DL Software Features

• Different logical document types (genre) and
  levels
• Book/ chapter, conference/paper, journal/ paper,
  lecture, project report, photographs, etc.
• Associate metadata with document types
• Different document formats
• Word, PDF, HTML, PS, etc.
• Non-Latin scripts
• Document acquisition/ publishing
• Online/ offline
• Central/ distributed
• Quality control

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DL Software Features

• Indexing and storage
• Automatic metadata extraction
• Data compression
• Access and delivery
• Structured search, browse, object searching,
  hierarchical browsing, fine-grained search
• CD-ROM distribution
• Personalization, customization

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DL Software Features

• Access/ rights management
• Usage monitoring and reporting
• Preservation
• Link checks, persistent object identification,
  content refreshing
• Interoperability
• OAI, Z39.50 compliance, local holdings/OPAC
• Standards compliance
• XML, Dublin Core, Unicode
• Scaling up for large collections

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DL Software - Alternatives

• Commercial very expensive
• Integrated Library Systems
• E.g. Virtua of VTLS, Aleph of ExLibris
• India SLIM, Libsys, etc.
• DL software
• E.g. MuseSearch, Insight
• India Acado
• Open source software
• Freely available, under license
• Source code

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DL Software Open Source

• Greenstone Digital Library software
• New Zealand Digital Library Project, University
  of Waikato
• http//www.greenstone.org/
• ARNO
• Academic Research in the Netherlands Online,
  Tilburg University, The Netherlands
• http//www.uba.uva.nl/arno
• CDSware
• CERN Document Server Software (CDSware), CERN,
  Geneva, Switzerland
• http//cdsware.cern.ch

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DL Software Open Source

• DSpace
• MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA USA
• http//www.dspace.org/
• Eprints
• University of Southampton, U.K.
• http//software.eprints.org/
• Fedora digital object repository management
  system
• University of Virginia, USA
• http//www.fedora.info/

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DL Software Open Source

• i-Tor
• Tools and technologies for Open Repositories
• Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information
  Services
• http//www.i-tor.org/en/toon
• MyCoRe
• Essen University Library, University of
  Duisburg-Essen,Germany
• http//www.mycore.de/engl/index.html