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.

Review on status of groundwater database and application prospect in deep-time digital earth plan

Groundwater is an important water resource.The total amount of active groundwater in a hydrological cycle is about 3.5 times that of the total amount of surface water.The information in the deep groundwater records the material exchange and dynamics in the earth’s evolution,which is an important aspect of the Deep-Time Digital Earth(DDE)plan.In recent years,scientists have discussed the distribution of transboundary aquifers and the environmental significance of groundwater resources through groundwater databases established by international organizations,such as the Global Groundwater Information System and the chronicles consortium,and national institutes,such as national geological surveys.The application of the groundwater database in the DDE plan,however,has been limited by the management,interactivity,and monitoring method of the groundwater data.The ability to further integrate data that are private and scattered across research institutions and individuals,while establishing an open,unified,and shared groundwater data platform,is essential to enhance our understanding of groundwater,ranging from shallow to deep water,which is a goal of the DDE plan.In this study,we introduced the current situation of groundwater database operations in domestic and international research and provided frontier research with groundwater big data.Considering the related objectives of the DDE plan and the limitations of existing groundwater databases,we proposed an improvement plan and new prospects for applying groundwater databases in the research of the deep earth.

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.

“Personal Digital Library”与“MyLibrary”辨析

学术界一些研究者认为"Personal Digital Library"与"MyLibrary"均可指个人数字图书馆。然而,两者是不同概念、特征及功能的事物。论文对两者的概念、研究现状及趋势作了详细的论述,旨在揭示这两种事物,为后续研究者提供借鉴。

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.

Digital Library辨析

学科背景、图书馆学流派以及中、英语言不同等因素均可造成“ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ ｌｉｂｒａｒｙ”与“数字图书馆”之间的涵义差别。本文围绕图书馆的基本定义，从传统图书馆在新的电子信息环境中其资源和功能得到延伸与补充的角度来界定数字图书馆，并在此基础上探讨了中、英相关术语的关系以及目前已遇到的一些概念易混淆的问题。

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.

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.

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.

Status quo, problems and suggestions on the self built database in the domestic library consortia

Through the online survey of 100 samples of the domestic library consortia, this paper analyzes and compares the number of the self-built databases of the library consortia, the standards and specifications of building the databases, the contents of the databases, the sharing principles, the management mechanisms and the effectiveness of the result displaying, and points out the problems existing in the self-built databases of the domestic library consortia and puts forward the countermeasures.

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.

Research on methods of designing and building digital seabed database

With a review of the recent development in digitalization and application of seabed data, this paper systematically proposed methods for integrating seabed data by analyzing its feature based on ORACLE database management system and advanced techniques of spatial data management. We did research on storage structure of seabed data, distributed-integrated database system, standardized spatial database and seabed metadata management system in order to effectively manage and use these seabed information in practical application. Finally, we applied the methods researched and proposed in this paper to build the Bohai Sea engineering geology database that stores engineering geology data and other seabed information from the Bohai Sea area. As a result, the Bohai Sea engineering geology database can effectively integrate huge amount of distributed and complicated seabed data to meet the practical requisition of Bohai Sea en-gineering geology environment exploration and exploitation.

Digital Library Service Initiative of the Hong Kong Institute of Education Library

This paper presented the philosophy and the design concepts of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) Library Digital Library Service Initiative, focusing on two in house developed digital library components, EdIS and EdVideo, around its core digital library components of the INNOPAC Integrated Library System, Library Website, electronic resources from vendors. Description on the development of these systems was made.

Management Communication in University’s Digital Library

Digital library is a process of exploiting more scientific methods to construct a social knowledge network. It represents an “extension” from a traditional library. The core and essence is to build a favorable surroundings for knowledge accumulation, knowledge transfer and knowledge communication. Management communication covers information transfer and organization cooperation. Compared with traditional library, the management communication in digital library shoulders the commitment to support knowledge innovation. On the basis of analysis of the connotation of digital library, this paper analysed the aspects of management communication, including communicators, communication styles, contents, channels and outer communication, all of which tries to construct an integrated model of management communication in a digital library and turns a library into an actual “knowledge fountain”.