Libraries worldwide face significant challenges in coping with the increasing amounts of digital material that they must acquire from external sources, either digital publishers or material produced by their institution (e.g. by the faculty and researchers of an academic institutions). These materials require new methods for long-term stewardship and preservation in addition to those that have evolved for print and other analog material.Libraries must consider how these materials will be acquired, either from publishers or faculty, and deposited into library repositories, as well as their long-term storage, management, and preservation. They must arrange for an array of managed digital services including storage, transformation and transcoding, indexing, search, and access. Institutions need digital repository solutions that span these needs, allowing them to offer services for digital resources in the same way that they have in the past offered services for physical resources.
(http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/resources/overview.html) This proposed research lies at the intersection of three problem domains. Much progress has been made to date in each area. This proposal defines a research collaboration at the intersection of these three domains, through which we believe we can demonstrate stronger results than we could through independent research conducted in isolation. The problem domains are:
...libraries find themselves under growing pressure to support more flexible and powerful information seeking activities...
- Libraries and Institutional Information Management (ala DSpace, MIT Libraries)
- Personal and Collaborative Information Management (ala Haystack, David Karger)
- The Semantic Web (ala Worldwide Web Consortium, Eric Miller)
...managers of information collections that were never well served by traditional library standards are becoming empowered to find better solutions for describing and searching their information through constant technological improvements. This is a very useful development for users of this type of previously “unserved” information, but is leading to the creation of metadata gulags that are isolated from mainstream library-based search systems thus hiding them from many potential information seekers.The need to be able to support a wide variety of metadata schemas, to integrate them, and to expose them all to simple, flexible search and retrieval mechanisms has become a major challenge for libraries in the Web era... libraries are the lead users of institutional information solutions that are being developed locally in advance of ready-made market solutions.
...The Haystack project aims to make a digital IR system that is less like a library and more like a personal bookshelf. Fundamentally, this means building a system that adapts to its user, instead of forcing its user to adapt to the limitations of the system...
(http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/resources/proposal-2002-04/research-context.htm) ...domain-based metadata changes rapidly and this should be supported since it allows metadata to reflect the real thinking of the domain rather than arbitrary abstractions of it.
...it is becoming increasingly true that metadata is generated from beyond libraries: either by authors themselves or by service bureaus such as publishers or production labs. This is especially true for technical metadata about digital objects, and this metadata should be kept and used if at all possible.
...Ever increasing amounts of digital content being sourced from diverse constituents in diverse communities means that libraries must manage multiple kinds of content.
...In the digital domain, libraries can explore increasingly adaptive, interactive, and collaborative techniques to accomplish its missions of selection, collection, organization, access, and preservation. In addition to simply serving resources, libraries might become data sources themselves, offering recommender systems based on individual and/or collective patterns of use and interest.(http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/resources/proposal-2002-04/challenges-opportunities.htm)