Differentiated digital library evaluation in a hierarchical model stemming from its operational scope and complexity

Digital libraries are complex systems and this brings difficulties for their evaluation. This paper proposes a hierarchical model to solve this problem, and puts the entangled matters into a clear-layered structure. Firstly, digital libraries(DLs thereafter)are classified into 5 groups in ascending gradations, i.e. mini DLs, small DLs, medium DLs,large DLs, and huge DLs by their scope of operation. Then, according to the characteristics of DLs at different operational scope and level of sophistication, they are further grouped into unitary DLs, union DLs and hybrid DLs accordingly. Based on this simulated structure,a hierarchical model for digital library evaluation is introduced, which evaluates DLs differentiatingly within a hierarchical scheme by using varying criteria based on their specific level of operational complexity such as at the micro-level, medium-level, and/or at the macro-level. Based on our careful examination and analysis of the current literature about DL evaluation system, an experiment is conducted by using the DL evaluation model along with its criteria for unitary DLs at micro-level. The main contents resulting from this evaluation experimentation and also those evaluation indicators and relevant issues of major concerns for DLs at medium-level and macro-level are also to be presented at some length.

General review of National Digital Library development in the National Library of China

As an important part of National Digital Library(NDL),the National Digital Library Project(NDLP),which was launched in 2005,has attracted wide attention of the society in general.This paper introduces the general situation of the project from the following aspects,namely,the characteristics,objectives and contents.It also expounds on the basic ideas and the overall structure of the project and gives an introduction to the design of its basic platform,its application platform,its business management system and its standardization control system.In this paper,the digital resources construction and service delivery of the National Library of China(NLC)are introduced to cover both its present operation as well as those in conjunction with the opening of its new library building during its second-phase of library development.Finally,the most important and difficult point in the construction of the National Digital Library Project is analyzed from the following four perspectives:1)The long-term preservation of digital resources;2)the construction of knowledge organization system;3)the organic integration of the digital library and the traditional library;and 4)the risk of project management and system integration.

An experiment on digital library based on the method of TQM system

The principles and methods of TQM (total quality management) were applied to digital library management. TQM puts emphasis on process control and continual improvement. The TQM theories and measures explained clearly in this paper were the scientific tools used in the experiment in the Wenzhou University Digital Library. This paper deals with a very broad range of subjects related to a digital library: system model of TQM for digital library, organization structure, and tasks of Wenzhou University Digital Library, task flow chart of electronic reading room, cause and effect of electronic reading room quality man- agement, systematic model of enhancing electronic information acquisition rate, quality comparison of electronic reading room service, etc.

A text to speech interface for Universal Digital Library

The objective of Universal Digital Library (UDL) is to capture all books in digital format. A text to speech (TTS) interface for UDL portal would enable access to the digital content in voice mode, and also provide access to the digital content for illiterate and vision-impaired people. Our work focuses on design and implementation of text to speech interface for UDL portal primarily for Indian languages. This paper is aimed at identifying the issues involved in integrating text to speech system into UDL portal and describes the development process of Hindi, Telugu and Tamil voices under Festvox framework using unit selection techniques. We demonstrate the quality of the Tamil and Telugu voices and lay out the plan for integrating the TTS into the UDL portal.

Structural Indexing for 3D Solid Digital Library

In a very large digital library that support computer aided collaborative design, an indexing process is crucial whenever the retrieval process has to select among many possible designs. In this paper, we address the problem of retrieving important design and engineering information by structural indexing. A design is represented by a model dependency graph, therefor, the indexing problem is to determine whether a graph is present or absent in a database of model dependency graphs. we present a novel graph indexing method using polynomial characterization of a model dependency graph and on hashing. Such an approach is able to create an high efficient 3D solid digital library for retrieving and extracting solid geometric model and engineering information.

Digitizing Dunhuang Cultural Heritage:A User Evaluation of Mogao Cave Panorama Digital Library

Purpose： This study is a user evaluation on the usability of the Mogao Cave Panorama Digital Library （DL）, aiming to measure its effectiveness from the users＇ perspective and to propose suggestions for improvement. Design/methodology/approach： Usability tests were conducted based on a framework of evaluation criteria and a set of information seeking tasks designed for the Dunhuang cultural heritage, and interviews were conducted for soliciting in-depth opinions from participants. Findings： The results of the usability tests indicate that the DL was more efficient in supporting simple information seeking tasks than those of higher-complexity levels. Statistical tests reveal that there were correlations among dimensions of usability criteria and user effectiveness measures. Moreover, interview discourses exposed specific usability issues of the DL. Research limitations： This research is based on a relatively small sample size, resulting in a limited representativeness of user diversity. A larger sample size is needed for a systematic cross group comparison. Practical implications： This study evaluated the usability of the Mogao Cave Panorama DL and proposed suggestions for its improvement for better experience. The results also provide a reference to other cultural heritage DLs with panorama functions. Originality/value： This study is one of the first evaluating cultural heritage DLs from the perspective of user experience. It provides methodological references for relevant studies： the evaluation framework, the designed information seeking tasks, and the interview questions can be adopted or adapted in evaluating other visually centric DLs of cultural heritage.

Universal Digital Library—Future research directions

This paper starts with a description of the present status of the Digital Library of India Initiative. As part of this initiative large corpus of scanned text is available in many Indian languages and has stimulated a vast amount of research in Indian language technology briefly described in this paper. Other than the Digital Library of India Initiative which is part of the Million Books to the Web Project initiated by Prof Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University, there are a few more initiatives in India towards taking the heritage of the country to the Web. This paper presents the future directions for the Digital Library of India Initiative both in terms of growing collection and the technical challenges in managing such large collection poses.

A Full Text Retrieval System in a Digital Library Environment

The volume of information being created, generated and stored is huge. Without adequate knowledge of Information Retrieval (IR) methods, the retrieval process for information would be cumbersome and frustrating. Studies have further revealed that IR methods are essential in information centres (for example, Digital Library environment) for storage and retrieval of information. Therefore, with more than one billion people accessing the Internet, and millions of queries being issued on a daily basis, modern Web search engines are facing a problem of daunting scale. The main problem associated with the existing search engines is how to avoid irrelevant information retrieval and to retrieve the relevant ones. In this study, the existing system of library retrieval was studied. Problems associated with them were analyzed in order to address this problem. The concept of existing information retrieval models was studied, and the knowledge gained was used to design a digital library information retrieval system. It was successfully implemented using a real life data. The need for a continuous evaluation of the IR methods for effective and efficient full text retrieval system was recommended.

Establishing an academic digital library& information system in China: The case of CADLIS

China Academic Digital Library & Information System(CADLIS) was established as a public service system in 1996. Its mission is to improve the resource sharing for China's higher education. The framework of CADLIS is constructed to allow easy interconnection and interoperability. This paper presents an introduction to the portal,academic resources, bibliographic system, service network, digital library technical platform,standards and criteria of CADLIS as well.

Towards a multilingual, multimedia and multimodal digital library platform

The China-US Million Book Digital Library Project （Million Book Project） is an intemational cooperation program between China and the US. However, one million digitized books are considered not to be the ultimate goal of the project, but a first step towards universal access to human knowledge. In particular, there are four challenges about the new way to analyze, process, operate, visualize and interact with digital media resource in this library. To tackle these challenges, North China Centre of Million Book Project （in Chinese Academy of Sciences） has initiated several innovative research projects in areas such as multimedia content analysis and retrieval, bilingual services, multimodal information presentation, and knowledge-based organization and services. In this keynote speech, we simply review our work in these areas, and argue that by technological cooperation with these innovation research topics, the project will develop a top-level digital library platform for the million book library.

An integrated framework for discovering digital library collections

Information seekers are generally on their own to discover and use a research library’s growing array of digital col- lections, and coordination of these collections’ development and maintenance is often not optimal. The frequent lack of a con- scious design for how collections fit together is of equal concern because it means that research libraries are not making the most of the substantial investments they are making in digital initiatives. This paper proposes a framework for a research library’s digital collections that offers integrated discovery and a set of best practices to underpin collection building, federated access, and sus- tainability. The framework’s purpose is to give information seekers a powerful and easy way to search across existing and future collections and to retrieve integrated sets of results. The paper and its recommendations are based upon research undertaken by the author and a team of librarians and technologists at Cornell University Library. The team conducted structured interviews of forty-five library staff members involved in digital collection building at Cornell, studied an inventory of the library’s more than fifty digital collections, and evaluated seven existing Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and federated search production or prototype systems. The author will discuss her team’s research and the rationale for their recommendations to: present a cohesive view of the library’s digital collections for both browsing and searching at the object level; take a programmatic (rather than project-based) approach to digital collection building; require that all new digital collections conform to library-developed and agreed-upon OAI best practices for data providers; and implement organizational structures to sustain the library’s digital collections over the long term.

Metropolitan digital library services evaluation: Measures and approaches

This paper reviews the evaluation model and measurements according to metropolitan digital library activities. Through literature review and historical research, the authors argue that the evaluation of the digital library(DL) is still in a research stage and not yet of value to the real achievement of the DL in operation. Because of the variety of the understandings of the digital library and the complexity of the technical factors, we can put forward a set of reference models, measurements and approaches to combine with the various researches on the evaluation theory and practice in the digital library area. The authors primarily discuss and conclude with a digital library evaluation model and measurement index system according to the requirements of the world metropolitan libraries.

A study of user experience in Tsinghua Wireless and Mobile Digital Library System(TWIMS)

Tsinghua University Library recently launched Tsinghua Wireless and Mobile Digital Library System(TWIMS) to meet users’ need for wireless access to library services.A survey of user experience about TWIMS was carried out for the purpose of studying its users’ behavior and their level of satisfaction about the system design and its various performance indicators. Based on our research findings, we concluded our research paper with a set of evaluative comments and suggestions. Those remarks are aimed at furthering the TWIMS’ functionality and reconstructing a more sensible questionnaire survey appertaining to the system users’ experience as well in the next phase of our extended research.

Mobile Agent Based Framework for Integrating Digital Library System

Few of the current approaches to achieve the integration of digital library system have considered the influence of network factors on quality of service for the integration system of digital libraries. For this reason, a mobile agent based framework for integrating digital library system is proposed. Based on this framework, a prototype system is implemented and the key technique for it are described. Compared with the current approaches, using mobile agent technique to achieve the integration of digital library system can not only avoid transmitting a lot of data on the network, lower the dependence on network bandwidth for the system, but also improve the quality of service for the integration system of digital libraries in intermitted or unreliable network connection settings.

Contrastive analysis in China and abroad on the Evolution of hot topics in the field of digital library based on LDA model

Revealing and comparing the evolution process of hot topics in the field of Digital Library in China and abroad.[Methods]:Taking data in the field of Digital Library from core journals in CKNI and Web of Science from 1990 s to 2020,topics are extracted by LDA model and hot topics are selected based on life cycle theory.Topic evolution paths are generated to contrast evolution of hot topics between home and abroad which are grouped into dimensions of technology and application.It fails to analyze the lagging performance and reasons of research hot topics in the field of Digital Library at home and abroad.In technological dimension of Digital Library,the research content in China lags behind that at abroad.In terms of application dimension,Chinese application tends to focus on social sciences,while application at abroad tends to focus on natural sciences.The evolution of overall research focus is U-shaped,which gradually shifted from technological research to application research,and now turn back to technological dimension.Nowadays,there are also many emerging topics combined with big data technology.

数字人文视域下缩微资料的保护与新生--以Digital Cicognara Library为例

选择Digital Cicognara Library这一基于传统缩微资料开展的数字人文项目作为研究案例,对其项目概况、架构组成进行介绍,并选择国内同类型的“徽州文书”主题数字人文项目进行对比分析,探讨Digital Cicognara Library项目的优势所在,进而总结其成功经验,以期为我国相关组织机构开展高质量的数字人文实践提供参考。

A preliminary study on criteria weights for a library's digital resource selection:From the viewpoints of both users and librarians

Through investigating both users' and librarians' perceptions of the relative importance of the major criteria governing the selection of digital resources, we attempted to develop a criterion weight framework for a library's selection of digital resources, which can meet both the users' requirements and the library's goal of developing digital collections. The respective weight of each specific criterion is decided through the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP) Method. The findings of this study indicate that, when assigning weights to the selection criteria, it is important to consult the opinions of a wide crosssection of people, especially the views of different users. As a result, the digital resource selection system characterized by the criteria weights can reflect more comprehensively the users' requirements, and meanwhile it enables librarians' more rational selection of digital resources.

Ontology-based framework for personalized recommendation in digital libraries

To promote information service ability of digital libraries, a browsing and searching personalized recommendation framework based on the use of ontology is described, where the advantages of ontology are exploited in different parts of the retrieval cycle including query-based relevance measures, semantic user preference representation and automatic update, and personalized result ranking. Both the usage and information resources can be exploited to extract useful knowledge from the way users interact with a digital library. Through combination and mapping between the extracted knowledge and domain ontology, semantic content retrieval between queries and documents can be utilized. Furthermore, ontology-based conceptual vector of user preference can be applied in personalized recommendation feedback.

APPLICATION OF NONLINEAR WATERMARK TECHNIQUES IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES

A digital watermark is an invisible mark embedded in a digital image that may be used for a number of different purposes including copyright protection. Due to the urgent need for protecting the copyright of digital products in digital library, digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution to this problem. This letter describes potential situations that nonlinear theory can be used to enhance robustness and security of the watermark in digital library. Some nonlinear watermark techniques have been enumerated. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is superior to the general watermark scheme both in security and robustness in digital library.

A study on service quality evaluation of digital libraries in China based on tetra-class model

Purpose: This study intends to evaluate the service quality of academic digital libraries(DLs)in China. By utilizing tetra-class model which concentrates on categorizing services according to their contributions to user satisfaction, this paper attempts to visually categorize the specific DL service elements to reveal their present performances, and then further explain the categorizing variations among different groups of users to discover the user preference.Design/methodology/approach: This paper carries out a survey to evaluate user experience on 27 typical DL services summarized from our investigations of representative Chinese university DLs. Based on the five-point Likert-type scale evaluation, the users’ attitudes toward specific service element are divided into negative and positive dimensions. Afterwards,a correspondence analysis is applied to calculate the contributions to satisfaction and dissatisfaction of each service element based on tetra-class model. As a result, the DL service elements of Chinese academic libraries are classified into four categories(i.e. Basic, Secondary,Plus, and Key). Finally, we compared the categorizing variations.Findings: The results show that the DL service elements of Chinese academic libraries are all distributed in Basic and Key services regarding information retrieval and informationorganizing; 80% of the interaction services elements are Plus services, while 50% of the Secondary services are information-providing services. The results also reveal that service categorization is obviously influenced by the users’ education background, especially their disciplines. Furthermore, the users who are older, more highly-educated, or studying in higher reputation universities are more likely to evaluate DL services as either critical or useless.Research limitations: Tetra-class model cannot reveal the interplay among the DL service elements. In addition, the user segmentation in our studies is limited to the sample structure.Practical implications: This empirical study focuses on the evaluation of DL services of academic libraries in China, the analyses of their current performances could provide useful reference for the assessment of other types of Chinese DLs. Moreover, the consideration of user characteristics(gender, age, and education background, etc.) in the DL evaluation would help librarians improve DL services to meet the users’ various needs in teaching and doing scientific research.Originality/value: Different from the frequently-used factor analysis which focuses on the relationship among factors and user satisfaction, this paper tries to use and compare element distributions of different user segments while focusing on various service objectives. Factor analysis shows some flaws as used to measure the element with selected indicators, for it ignores the fact that the indicators which measure the same factor would have different degrees of impacts on user satisfaction. However, the tetra-class model can better visually analyze the performance of each DL service element from its contributions to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, which would help librarians to better understand users’ need and offer DL services more efficiently.