Digital Libraries Technological Advances and Social Impacts Presented

Digital Libraries: Technological Advances and Social Impacts Presented by Jozsef Vass Multimedia Communications and Visualization Laboratory Department of Computer Engineering & Computer Science University of Missouri-Columbia, MO 65211

Overview z B. Schatz and H. Chen, “Digital Libraries: Technological Advances and Social Impacts, ” IEEE Computer, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 45 -50, Feb. 1999. z z z Digital Libraries Digital Library Requirements Digital Library Testbed Digital Library Initiative - Phase 1 Digital Library Initiative - Phase 2 International Activities

Digital Libraries z World Wide Web (WWW): Everyday Use z Exponential growth of WWW increases the importance of digital libraries z Lot of information but search is unchanged since 1960 s z Natural outcome of earlier federal funding of high-end computing systems and high performance networks z Collection of all kinds must be indexed efficiently y Different media type (text, image, video) y Different collection sizes y Different languages

Digital Libraries - Requirements z Federated repositories: Present distributed repositories as a coherent virtual collection z Scalability: Efficient categorization, indexing, summarizing, and extraction as the size increases z Interoperability: Interoperability among heterogeneous repositories across networks z Collaboration: Teamwork sharing knowledge, experience, and resources z Testbed: Provide stable, accessible collections to researchers z Communications: Timely dissemination of research results

Testbed Development z Accepted methodology to evaluate networked systems z Testbed: A prototype system with real collections and real users but supported as a research rather than commercial product z Evaluate the usefulness of information system features

Digital Library Initiative - Phase 1 z Best way to evaluate: Develop real-time testbeds z US Government Digital Library Initiative (1994 -1998) y Participants: NSF, DARPA, and NASA z Large amount of heterogeneous information can be coherently organized that can be searched and manipulated to yield useful knowledge z More information: http: //dli. grainger. uiuc. edu

Digital Library Initiative - Phase 1 z Six projects are supported: y University of California at Berkeley: Environmental Planning and Geographic Information Systems y University of California at Santa Barbara: The Alexandria Project: Spatially-Referenced Map Information y Carnegie Mellon University: Informedia Digital Video Library y University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Federating Repositories of Scientific Literature y University of Michigan: Intelligent Agents for Information Location y Stanford University: Interoperation Mechanisms Among Heterogeneous Services

Digital Library Initiative - Phase 2 z Motivated by the success of Phase 1 z Participants: NSF, DARPA, NLM, Library of Congress, and National Endowment for the Humanities z Treat digital libraries as human-centered systems z Bridge political and language boundaries z Objectives y Smaller projects as well y Medicine and Humanities y Emphasize more on testbeds z More information: http: //www. dli 2. nsf. gov

Digital Library Initiative - Phase 2 z Special emphasis on health-related professionals z Variety of locations and multiple formats (print, image, graphics, video) z NLM offering two resources for DLI-2 y Unified Medical Language System y Visible Human Project

International Activities z Europe: National and EU funding z NSF-EU specify five working groups y Interoperability y Metadata y Intellectual Property Rights y Resource Indexing y Multilingual Information Access z Global connections: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions y 1995: Libraries from 70 countries are connected y 1998: Libraries from 100 countries are connected z Challenges: Connectivity & Training