The User and the Digital Library

The Objectives of this module is to i) introduce basic concepts and characteristics of digital libraries to the learners; ii) define digital libraries and highlight important differences between digital libraries and its precursors and technologies such as traditional library, information retrieval systems, virtual libraries, Internet search engines, etc.; and iv) introduce terminologies that are associated with digital library. II. Learning Outcomes After going through this lesson, the learner would gain knowledge about basic concepts and characteristics of digital libraries and different terminologies that are associated with it and are used interchangeably to refer to digital libraries. The learner would have gained knowledge about different types of digital libraries and technologies behind it.

As the Internet and the World Wide Web expanded so fast, digital libraries has become a very hot topic. Since 1992 a lot of studies have been done and some achievements have been made. This chapter is a survey of these studies. We first discuss designing digital libraries, including definition of digital libraries, infrastructure requirements for digital libraries, research issues related to digital libraries, and the architecture of digital libraries. Then a project, Digital Library Initiative, is introduced as an example of implementing digital libraries.

2004

Digital Libraries have been the subject of more than a decade of attention by researchers and developers, and yet in all this time the implementations have not matched the promises. By far the majority of systems have concentrated on content and provided limited or basic functions for users. In this article we offer a new look at what can be expected from a digital library system based on contemporary developments in Information and Communications Systems and Technology. First, we sketch out the basic functions which are provided to support finding and accessing material by a reader. Next we explain some extended functions which support the use and re-use of documents-links and annotations-and the need to support learners in addition to readers and writers. Finally, we present our visions for a modern digital library and e-Learning portal system which includes for example intelligent and conceptual search support including results visualization, white lists, and adaptive user interfaces.

1999

This paper briefly describes both organizational and technical issues and approaches involved in creating an operational digital library at the University of Crete, found at . We investigate and describe our approaches and experiences, the last few years, on setting in operation a Digital Library with many collections. We had to analyze the library goals and user needs, to select appropriate software, to make flexible design for the additional functionality needed, to adapt and extend the selected software to make it applicable to the current demands, to install and configure the software, to improve it using feedback, and to interact with document authors and librarians to make the digital library friendly, usable and easily maintainable, and even to collect and digitize the library material. The final system is operated by current library personnel. The main technical issues are related to the design, implementation and application of features of digital libraries, such as multilingual storage and interface, generalization of the software to permit searching on heterogeneous collections, adding support for the Z39.50 protocol and tools that simplify the configuration, administration and data insertion to the digital library, as well as tools to input or modify the metadata and to upload data, when submitting new documents in the digital library.

Rapid development of information communication technologies (ICTs) has made an environment globally to the growth of digital libraries. Digital libraries (DL) are facilitating researchers, scholars, learners, information professionals to access their information in variety of formats and learning support at their desktops without any geographical barrier. They are providing electronic based (e-based) information delivery to its users crossing the boundaries of time, space and location. DL users can be reached remotest corners of the world to fill their thrust of information. It makes a gateway to the users for retrieving and browsing of desired information from its huge resources like one stop shopping of big shopping mall. It provides extra services of 24X7 hour uninterrupted access through Internet to the users at their desktop. . It supports teaching, learning and research while reaching unreachable without walls. Greater revolution has occurred in the libraries recent past converting paper-based libraries to electronic based ones. With the emergence of WWW and availability of national and global networks, libraries have turned their attention to digital collections rather than building printed-based collection. In this way, librarian's role dramatically changed and is responsible for what digital repositories available for their users and how users can access to the available information within the physical walls of the library or elsewhere.

Programming and Computer Software, 2002

Digital Libraries Initiative declared in the USA in the autumn of 1993 aroused interest to information systems of this class in many countries all over the world. Today, numerous research teams are involved in activities related to such systems. A significant number of digital libraries for diverse purposes are already in operation, and various research prototypes have been created. This subject has been discussed at international conferences dedicated specifically to digital libraries and conferences on fundamental directions of information system technologies, such as database technologies, Web technologies, textual search, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Programming and Computer Software already addressed the problems arising in relation to digital libraries. This issue of the journal further explores the subject.

Aslib Proceedings, 2006

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to review the nature of, and rationale for, user expectations in the digital library setting, and ways in which they may best be met and/or managed. Design/methodology/approach -An analysis of the literature, focusing on empirical studies, and bringing out main themes and issues. Findings -User expectations of digital libraries are often unrealistic, usually unrealistically high, mainly due to the ubiquity of the web search engine as an information environment. Expectations differ between user groups. Both meeting and managing expectations have been promoted as a solution; it is likely that a mix of the two will be most effective. More empirical and conceptual studies are needed. Ways of making the nature of digital library collections and their organisation "visible", embedded in a natural way within their interfaces, are desirable. Originality/value -This is the first paper to review the literature of this topic.

Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries - DL '00, 2000

A preliminary study was conducted to help understand the purpose of digital libraries (DLs) and to investigate whether meaningful results could be obtained from small user studies of digital libraries. Results stress the importance of mental models, and of "traditional" library support.

2003

Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction...

Beginning with an introduction and justifications for the need of user-centred digital library development, this paper outlines the architecture, the basic components and functionalities of a Digital Work Environment (DWE) that forms the basis of a usercentred digital library development at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The information resources include full-text articles, online and other forms of databases, collections of theses and dissertations, library OPAC, union catalogues, and so on, that are scattered across the Internet, university's intranet, NTU Library's Gateway to Electronic Media Services (GEMS) and Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) system. The user-centred DWE design aims to provide a systematic access to these resources by organising them using a task-based approach. With this, users are able to browse through a hierarchy of tasks and sub-tasks and identify appropriate resources. In order to support added search and information retrieval variety, DWE also supports browsing of an alphabetical list of all resources, searching of individual information resource attributes of intranet documents, GEMS and OPAC, user-selected Internet search engines, and a combined search of these various options through a single unified query. Based on the experience of a continued research on the design and development of the DWE, a set of generic guidelines for the design of a user-centred digital library system is provided.