continuing Digital Libraries log

Winter 2004
I have several other pages tracking my materials on and closely related to digital libraries, but it seems sensible to start a new one to summarize and provide better entrée, since I expect to be more involved in this realm in the coming years. This continues 2001-2002 log

9 May 2003
Continuing to gather materials in the general realm, with an eye toward the ACS workshop in June. See also my notes on image databases for various links to metadata and crosswalks and so on

Digital Libraries in a Box

The Fedora Project -- An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System (Staples et al., the UVa project)

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

First Monday on sustaining digital resources (from FosBlog)

30 May
A collection of .pdfs, formerly in the /digilib/ directory and now in /mypdfs/:

Managing, Mapping and Manipulationg Conceptual Knowledge (Canas, Leake and Wilson)
Architectures for Context (Terry Winograd)
The Event Heap: A Coordination Infrastructure for Interactive Workspaces (Johanson and Fox)
E-Journal Archive DTD Feasibility Study (Harvard Libraries)
How Much Information? (Lyman and Varian)
LIVING ONTOLOGIES: Collaborative Knowledge Structuring on the Internet by Jenifer Tennison, BSc
Metadata Visualization for Digital Libraries: Interactive Timeline Editing and Review (Kumar, Furuta and Allen)
Patron-Augmented Digital Libraries (Goh and Leggett)
Structuring Discourse for Collective Interpretation (Shum and Selvin)
Visualization Components for Persistent Conversations (Smith and Fiore)
Building Quality into a Digital Library (Suleman, Fox and Abrams)

7 February 2004
With the prospect of another ACS workshop on digital collections in June, I wrote down some essentials:

Collections
consist of
items
and the earmarks/metadata
that make them
retrievableCreating and managing
the earmarks
poses many challenges
to creators,
their institutions,
and their infrastructural
support.

Accessibility
via the Web
necessitates
adherence to
standards and protocols.

Necessities:
easily-learned
user interfaces
that connect to
robust backend
databases;
flexible
metadata creation;
vetting/validation procedures.

There's a vast array of specialized acronyms and other vocabulary, much of it unnecessary for end users to wrestle with... METS, OAI, XML, Xpath, RSS... etc. And the array of 'collections' has widened... environments like wikis and blogs are more salient than they were a year ago, and several of the experiments have progressed quite far. Raymond Yee's recent changes is one handy window into the work of one person who is monitoring all this.

We (that's the grand-scale 'we') need to

...and the ideal is a system that works for all three levels.

8 February
Classification and Metadata Resources page prepared for ACS Summer Workshop, "Planning Digital Collections for Education and Research", Southwestern University 19-21 June 2003... which needs considerable revision...

28 February
METS home page and Cover Page on METS from 2002 ("online resource for markup language technologies")

Knowledge management: A guide to resources on the Internet C&RL News, February 2004 Vol. 65, No. 2 by Michael M. Smith