Digital library technology trends

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Digital library technology trends

• Prof. Dr. Kalyankumar Datta
• Professor, Electrical Engineering Dept
• Coordinator, Centre for Digital Library and
  Documentation
• Jadavpur Univeristy

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Introduction

• Current age is an age of lifelong learning
• The library, historically a cornerstone of
  scholarly endeavour, is expanding itself to cope
  with the newer demands using the technological
  development in communication technology
• Library is not limited to a building where
  printed books are stored but evolving into an
  electronic portal to a growing global collection
  of digital Content.
• The library is now accessible 24 x 7 from
  anywhere.

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Laws of Library Science (Ranganathan
1931)

• Books are for use
• Books are for all
• Save the time of the reader
• Library is a growing mechanism

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New Laws of Library Science (Crawford and
Gorman 1995)

• Libraries serve humanity
• Respect all forms by which knowledge in
  communicated.
• Free access to knowledge
• Use technology intelligently to enhance service
• Honor the past and create the future.

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Library as an Information Ecology

• System of people, practices, values, technologies
  within an environment
• Information accessible to all
• Respond to changes in environment

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Digital Library Definition (Wikipedia August
2005)

• A digital library comprises digital collections,
  services and infrastructure to support lifelong
  learning, research, scholarly communication and
  preservation.

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Library, the changing scenario

• Technological progress has changed how libraries
  do their work not why. But technology will not
  substantially alter the business of librarians
  connecting people with information
• Librarians may discover that Libraries without
  walls are actually only libraries with new walls
  technologically bounded, legally restricted and
  administratively hamstrung.

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Digital Library

• Supports full cycle of information
• Creation, dissemination, use and preservation
• Access to evolving collection
• Evaluated and organized information
• Personalized systems
• Library services
• Melding of activitiescollection,services and
  people

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Library User Categorization

• Difficult to categorize
• Subject Interest variation
• Variation in Technical abilities
• Different cognitive styles
• Different personalities
• Different cultural background

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Library Today

• Todays library includes tools with which the
  user can

• Gain access to the holdings of libraries
  worldwide through automated catalogues.
• Locate both physical and digital versions of
  scholarly articles and books.
• Optimize searches, simultaneously search the
  Internet, Commercial databases and library
  collections.
• Save search results and conduct additional
  processing to narrow or qualify results.
• From search results, click through to access the
  digitized content or locate additional terms of
  interest.
• Customize his/her information request so that the
  search results reflect individual needs and
  preferences.

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Digital Library today (cont.)

• Digital Library is not just a multimedia
  information repository.
• Digital library components must be tailored to
  capture, encode and deliver information according
  to the standard practices adopted by the library
  industry.

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New role of Digital Library

• Economic, social and cultural pressures are
  forcing educational/Research institutes to
  transform themselves to become a Knowledge
  enterprise to satisfy the expectations of the
  users.
• Growth of Communication Technology made possible
  to integrate Web enabled education with digital
  library and made it available to distance
  education students. This has opened a new era of
  teaching learning mechanism.

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Digital Library Technology

• Digital library delivers media components through
  web-services matching media content to user
  context in a way that provides a customized,
  personalized experience. Media content includes
  elements of interactivity. Context includes such
  information as the identity and location of the
  user.
• Several key technologies must interact to allow
  Web Services to work. Extensible Markup Language
  (XML) and Standard General Markup Language (SGML)
  are important standards influencing our ability
  to create broadly interoperable Web-based
  applications.

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Standards

• The primary standards powering Web-services are
  XML based. These include

• Simple object Access Protocol (SOAP)
• Universal Description, Discovery Integration
  (UDDI)
• Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
• Electronic Business XML (ebXML)

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Building Digital Library

• Building Digital library involves many challenges
  in organizing, managing and maintaining the
  digital library environment.
• Custom development has been predominant means of
  constructing digital libraries because
  offtheself solution is either not available or
  may not directly fit the requirement of the user.
  
• Custom development provides
• High degree of assurance that the design system
  will closely fit the specific user requirements
  facility for future development. It is completely
  controllable and predictable.
• The cost of development and maintenance is high.

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Packaged Solutions for Digital Library

• Endeavour Information System has introduced its
  digital library offering EN Compass (March 2001).
  
• Ex Libris introduced by Digitool (October 2001)
• Sirsi has a digital library offering called
  Hyperion Digital Media Archive.
• VTLS developed Virta integrated Library System
• Artesia Technologies is a generalized multimedia
  management system vendor targeting the Library
  Market. Artesias TEAMS is used by Standford
  University.
• Dspace
• Greenstone
• Fedora
• Koha

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Digital Library Development

• First guiding principle for development of
  digital libraries in higher education is to
  create scholarly value by exploring the
  distinctive features of the technology.
• Create collections of coherence and integrity
• Protect and foster an intellectual commons for
  scholarly and educational uses.
• Be realistic about costs, especially the cost of
  distributing content and sustaining on-going
  operations.

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Principles for building Digital Libraries

• Expect change
• Know your content
• Involve right people
• Design usable systems
• Be aware of data rights
• Automate whenever possible
• Adopt and adhere to standards
• Ensure quality
• Be concerned about persistence

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Information Exploration

• Our ability to generate and collect digital
  information continues to grow faster than our
  means to organize, manage, and effectively use
  it.
• The effective use of data and information
  resources must scale with their ever-increasing
  abundance and variety.

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Technological Challenges

• Major progress has been made in indexing,
  searching, streaming, analyzing, summarizing and
  interpreting multimedia data but still more
  remains to be done.
• Information Retrieval in Indian Language
• Systems for information access, delivery and
  presentation are in continual state of catch up
  as they scale to the ever increasing generative
  capabilities of sensor networks and related
  information sources.

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Technological Challenges II

• Increasing demands are being placed on knowledge
  access, creation, use and discovery across
  disciplines and on content interpretation across
  linguistic, cultural and geographical boundaries.
  
• The real challenge is to build systems supporting
  scholarly inquiry and communication that yield
  new capabilities and capacities so effectively
  and efficiently that they were intuitive and
  transparent in their operation.

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Digital Library in Future

• As data, information and knowledge play
  increasingly central roles in personal,
  organizational and social practices the next
  phase of digital library research should focus on
  
• Increasing the scope and scale of information
  resources and services.
• Employing context at the individual, community
  and social levels to improve performance.
• Developing algorithms and strategies for
  transforming data into actionable information
• Demonstrating the integration of information
  spaces into every day life.
• Improving availability, accessibility and thereby
  productivity.
• Use of Indian Languages for Information Retrieval.

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Digital Library in Future II

• Key to achieving productivity gains is reducing
  the human overhead required to obtain and use
  information.
• DL offers unparallel access to information for a
  far broader range of users than prior physical
  and organizational arrangements.
• Gathering, organizing, utilizing and sharing
  these information resources requires a scalable,
  interoperable infrastructure that includes
  embedded knowledge about services, storage
  repositories and content and is able to bridge
  context, culture and language.

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An appropriate infrastructure programme

• It will provide sustainability of digital
  knowledge resources along five dimensions

• Acquisition of new information resources
• Effective access mechanisms that span media type,
  mode and language.
• Facilities to leverage the utilization of
  humanitarians knowledge resources.
• Assured stewardship over humanity's scholarly and
  cultural legacy.
• Efficient and accountable management of systems
  services and resources.

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The representational model of Information Space

• It is composed of processes that mediate a
  continuous relationship between the itinerant
  user and ubiquitous information store to deliver
  the right information at the right time in the
  right format and language and within the
  appropriate context and at the right level of
  complexity and comprehensiveness.

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Representational Model
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Interdisciplinary Digital Library Research
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• Where is the wisdom
• we have lost in Knowledge ?
• Where is the knowledge
• we have lost information?
• T. S. Elliot

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Digital library technology trends

• Prof. Dr. Kalyankumar Datta
• Professor, Electrical Engineering Dept
• Coordinator, Centre for Digital Library and
  Documentation
• Jadavpur Univeristy