Digital Library Collections & Services

1. Digital Library Collections & Services Roy Tennant California Digital Library

2. Questions, Questions, Questions • You will leave with more questions than answers • If I do my job right, they will be the right questions • Feel free to ask questions as we go along

3. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

4. The Common Perception

5. The Reality • Too many information sources • A lack of human assistance • Not enough ways to filter, sort, and narrow in on what is needed • Access is limited to what is free, or what has been purchased or rented on behalf of a clientele • Many useful resources are only available in print

6. The Most Commonly Proposed Solution The Digital Library

7. Digital Library Myths • Having everything in digital form will solve our information access problems • Soon (or eventually) everything will be digital • Any collection of digital objects can be a digital library • Everyone agrees about what comprises a “digital library” and how to build one

8. A Digital Library Is… • A collection of digital objects and/or information that is: • Selected • Organized • Made Accessible • Preserved • A set of services that help you to find and use those objects and information • Often supported by a physical collection and always by professional staff

9. Outline • Digital Library Collections • Licensing or Buying Collections • Digitizing Collections • Publishing • Providing Access to Remote Collections • Digital Library Services • Library Catalogs • Metasearching • Online Reference

10. Digital Library Collections • Licensing or Buying Collections • Digitizing Collections • Publishing

11. Licensing or Buying • Licensing more common than buying (but what do you have in the end?) • Libraries are increasingly demanding ownership, and/or content held in escrow • “The time to advocate change is before you sign” - Beverlee French, CDL

13. Digitizing Collections • Start and end with your users and the services you wish to provide • Review what others have done • Digitize at the highest quality that you can, and save an unprocessed copy • Capture as much metadata as you can, in highly granular fields, and store it in a form from which you can extract it without loss

14. Metadata • “Cataloging by those paid better than librarians” • Structured information about an object or collection of objects • Types: • Descriptive • Administrative • Structural • Preservation

15. Core Metadata Standards • Dublin Core: a set of basic fields primarily for systems interoperability • MODS: a MARC-like bibliographic format • METS: a structural standard for encapsulating a digital object or set of digital objects, including one or more segments of descriptive and/or administrative metadata

17. Publishing • Libraries are increasingly becoming involved with publishing activities • University libraries are capturing scholarship before it leaves campus, and making it freely available to all • Two examples: • Repositories • Book publishing

18. Repositories • Two flavors: • Institutional (e.g., MIT) • Topic (e.g., Physics) • Characteristics: • Often author-maintained; therefore metadata may be of uneven quality/quantity • Usually compliant with the Open Archives Initiative harvesting protocol • Benefits: • Captures a grey literature not always collected by libraries • If OAI-compliant, can be “crawled” and indexed

19. http://arxiv.org/

20. Dspace screen shot http://dspace.org/ http://dspace.mit.edu/

21. http://repositories.cdlib.org/

23. Books & Journals • Academic libraries, faculty, and university presses are teaming up: • Faculty write and edit • Libraries provide technical expertise, online access, persistence, professional collection management • University presses provide editing, print publication, imprimatur, marketing • Case Study: University of California

27. XML • A method of creating and using tags to identify the structure and contents of a document — not how it should be displayed • The tags used can be arbitrary or can come from a specification • XML is instrumental for sharing information between applications

28. Transforming XML • XML Stylesheet Language — Transformations (XSLT) • A markup language and programming syntax for processing XML • Used to transform XML to another format (e.g., to HTML for delivery to standard web clients) or from one set of tags to another • An XML parser • A method to bring all the pieces together if serving to the web (e.g., CGI program, Java servlet, etc.)

29. Transformation XSLT Stylesheet Information Presentation Bookencodedin XML XHTML Document (no displaymarkup)* Web Server HTML Stylesheet (CSS) * Dynamic document

31. XML & XSLT Demonstration

32. Library Catalogs • We seem to be unable to provide an easy and effective information locating tool • Keep in mind that only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find • We are even failing at things we have explicitly tried to do • Let’s take a look at the evidence…

39. Typical Searches • Known Item • “A Few Good Things” • Comprehensive

40. Typical Searches: Known Item • The good: searches can be limited to a particular field: author, title, etc. • The bad: limiting to a particular field doesn’t always act the way you expect

43. Typical Searches:“A Few Good Things” • The one type of search we have so far ignored in library system design • A type of search that we can do something about today • Bring Google-style relevance to library catalogs (e.g., for union catalogs, sort by number of holding libraries)

44. Typical Searches: Comprehensive • Most library catalogs hide many things available via regional cooperative or ILL • It is difficult to search all appropriate journal databases • Most libraries do not provide good access to gray literature and web sites • Subject headings are often unintuitive, and catalogs give no guidance

48. The Rescue of Print • Many library users want only that which is convenient (read digital) • Print resources are, therefore, increasingly overlooked (I call this the “convenience catastrophe”) • We must fight this trend by enriching our catalog records with tables of contents, indexes, book covers, etc. to entice users to print books

50. Metasearching • Prevents the user from having to: • know which database to search • search each database individually • know the particular commands to search in each database • An incredibly complex problem that will likely take years to come close to solving well