Global Memory Net and the development of digital image information management system: Experience and practice

Global Memory Net (GMNet) is intended to be an effective gateway to the world cultural, historical, and heritage image collections from selected academic educational and research partners in the world. Much of these unique collections of great value to education and research are not currently accessible due to distance, form, and technical barriers. This project is to find new ways to enable users to access and exploit these significant research collections via global network. As GMNet is ending its first 5-year phase in October 2005, it has contributed substantially to the community building in digital library development by ac- commodating numerous collaborators and technical staff from various parts of the world to spend 3 to 5 months as a full-member of the GMNet team in Boston. They have come from different parts of China—such as Sichuan, Hainan, Shanghai and Xi’an; Croatia; and Hanoi, Vietnam. In addition to contribute to the overall system development and enhancement of system function- alities, they have brought valuable sample image collections of their own institutions/countries, and actually developed prototype collections as a part of GMNet. This paper describes the exciting and productive experience of the first of this visiting research group in developing the GMNet’s Version 2.0 PHP-based system under Prof. Chen’s overall supervision. It also describes both the system’s technical level structure—user/Web-based application/data, and complex functionalities with multi-collection, multi-lingual, multi-modal searching capabilities; system management capabilities; as well as provisions for user uploads and retrieval for our own projects. This Version 2.0 system is built on the Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL platform. What is described in this paper is an actual case which has formed a base for further new development by others in the research group. It demonstrates fully the value of the synergistic collaboration among global partners for universal digital library development. More information can be found in http://www.memorynet.org/.

Provenance Description of Metadata Vocabularies for the Long-term Maintenance of Metadata

Purpose： The purpose of this paper is to discuss provenance description of metadata terms and metadata vocabularies as a set of metadata terms. Provenance is crucial information to keep track of changes of metadata terms and metadata vocabularies for their consistent maintenance. Design/methodology/approach： The W3C PROV standard for general provenance description and Resource Description Framework（RDF） are adopted as the base models to formally define provenance description for metadata vocabularies.Findings： This paper defines a few primitive change types of metadata terms, and a provenance description model of the metadata terms based on the primitive change types. We also provide examples of provenance description in RDF graphs to show the proposed model.Research limitations： The model proposed in this paper is defined based on a few primitive relationships（e.g. addition, deletion, and replacement） between pre-version and post-version of a metadata term. The model is simplified and the practical changes of metadata terms can be more complicated than the primitive relationships discussed in the model. Practical implications： Formal provenance description of metadata vocabularies can improve maintainability of metadata vocabularies over time. Conventional maintenance of metadata terms is the maintenance of documents of terms. The proposed model enables effective and automated tracking of change history of metadata vocabularies using simple formal description scheme defined based on widely-used standards.Originality/value： Changes in metadata vocabularies may cause inconsistencies in the longterm use of metadata. This paper proposes a simple and formal scheme of provenance description of metadata vocabularies. The proposed model works as the basis of automated maintenance of metadata terms and their vocabularies and is applicable to various types of changes.

Social networks, social capital,and the use of information technology in the urban village:A study of community groups in Manchester, England

Underresourced or socially excluded communities in Manchester, England demonstrate active use of information technologies despite continuing digital inequalities.A systematic look at 31 grassroots community groups, at how they use IT and who helps them, reveals possible mechanisms towards a more inclusive network society. Social network and social capital theories help make apparent how people are self-organizing with respect to information technology in ways that reach across ethnicity, class, gender, and generations for skilled help, yet stay close to their strong-tie, bonding-social-capital networks, relying largely on people in their own communities. Based on 25 measures of IT use, the groups fall into three progressively more extensive categories: Downloaders(using computers and the Internet, particularly e-mails), uploaders(maintaining a group web presence), and cyberorganizers(helping others to become uploaders or downloaders). These categories align with each individual group's purpose.

New mode of universal access and Global Memory Net

In this digital era, we have witness the exciting convergence of content, technology, and global collaboration in the development of digital libraries. The mode of universal access for information seeking and knowledge acquisition differs greatly fi＇om the traditional ways. From the information resources point of views, the old model of“owning” a collection has given way to “sharing,” and the new emphases have shifted fi＇om possessing large “physical libraries” to “virtual libraries” digitally distributed all over the world. “Universal access” has taken on a very different meaning when one has the ability to share invaluable resources through the use of cutting edge technologies. The author has experienced much of these transformations through her own R＆D activities-from the creation of interactive videodisc and multimedia CD on the First Emperor of China＇s terracotta warriors and horses in the 1980s and 1990s to leading a current international digital library project, Global Memory Net （GMNet）, supported by the US National Science Foundation. In presenting her vision for linking world digital resources together for universal access, she will share with the audience the latest development of Global Memory Net.

建立网络社区主题通道的核心主题词表(英文)

网络社区收藏的资源往往倾向于满足日常信息需要,涉及的主题范围比较专指,而传统的图书馆分类主题词表则倾向于学术性和综合性,不适于网络社区用户的需要,因此需要建立适于这些特定用户群的分类主题词表。本文作者曾经参与了一些数字化图书馆的项目,设计开发过一些专门用于这些目的的小型核心词表。这篇文章介绍了作者们在开发过程中遇到的一些问题以及解决这些问题的方法和策略。小型“核心”主题词表可以定义为为网络社区资源专用的主题分类表。通过对元数据记录中的主题词频统计分析,作者确定哪些是核心词,然后再将这些核心词分成网络、图书馆、机构组织和设施、图书馆类型、组织名称和服务、地名、一般主题词、和参考工具等8个大类。在这8个大类下再进一步细分到三级类目。本文展示了三个图书馆的实例,它们主要是为公共图书馆的用户设计的。通过解释他们在这三个项目中的做法,作者讨论了在开发过程中的技术和成本以及在维护方面的问题,并且比较了一些类似的词表。

A sustainable development OCR system in CADAL application

This paper briefly introduces the main ideas of a sustainable development OCR system based on open architecture techniques and then describes the construction of an optical character recognition (OCR) center built on computer clusters, for the purpose of dynamically improving the recognition precision of the digitized texts of a million volumes of books produced by the China-US Million Books Digital Library (CADAL) Project. The practice of this center will provide helpful reference for other digital library projects.