How to Build a Digital Library / Edition 2

by Ian H. Witten, David Bainbridge, David M. Nichols

Overview

How to Build a Digital Library reviews knowledge and tools to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. A resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries.

The Second Edition reflects developments in the field as well as in the Greenstone Digital Library open source software. In Part I, the authors have added an entire new chapter on user groups, user support, collaborative browsing, user contributions, and so on. There is also new material on content-based queries, map-based queries, cross-media queries. There is an increased emphasis placed on multimedia by adding a "digitizing" section to each major media type. A new chapter has also been added on "internationalization," which will address Unicode standards, multi-language interfaces and collections, and issues with non-European languages (Chinese, Hindi, etc.).

Part II, the software tools section, has been completely rewritten to reflect the new developments in Greenstone Digital Library Software, an internationally popular open source software tool with a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780123748577
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	10/07/2009
Series:	Morgan Kaufmann Series in Multimedia Information and Systems (Paperback)
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography.

David Bainbridge is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Optical Music Recognition from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand where he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar. Since moving to Waikato in 1996 he has continued to broadened his interest in digital media, while retaining a particular emphasis on music. An active member of the New Zealand Digital Library project, he manages the group's digital music library, Meldex, and has collaborated with several United Nations Agencies, the BBC and various public libraries. David has also worked as a research engineer for Thorn EMI in the area of photo-realistic imaging and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1991 as the class medalist in Computer Science.

Is a senior lecturer, specializes in the areas of human-computer interaction, open source software and digital library education.

Table of Contents

Part I Building a Digital Library

Chapter 1 Orientation: The world of digital libraries

Chapter 2 People in digital libraries

Chapter 3 Presentation: User interfaces

Chapter 4 Textual documents: The raw material

Chapter 5 Multimedia: More raw material

Chapter 6 Metadata: Elements of organization

Chapter 7 Interoperability: Protocols and services

Chapter 8 Internationalization: the global challenge

Chapter 9 Visions: Future, past, and present

PART II GREENSTONE DIGITAL LIBRARY SOFTWARE

Chapter 10 Building collections

Chapter 11 Operating and interoperating

Chapter 12 Design patterns for advanced user interfaces

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is the ONLY book you need to develop the knowledge and tools necessary to build and maintain a digital library regardless of size or purpose!

Editorial Reviews

"This book provides broad coverage of related work in the field. That is handy, since there is a large international community working on DLs."— Edward A. Fox, Director, Digital Library Research Laboratory, Blacksburg, VA

"These chapters (along with the others) are well written and fully illustrated by screen shots and other examples, making the presentation of the technical content very effective.... [T]his is a very worthwhile addition to the literature of digital libraries"— Thomas D. Wilson, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Visiting Professor at Leeds University Business School, Visiting Professor at the University of Boras, Sweden. http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs409.html

From the Publisher

Although this somewhat technical work is aimed primarily at software developers who will be writing the programs to encompass digital information, the authors never lose sight of the importance of the role that librarians play in the selection and collection of information that will form digital libraries. [The authors, both computer science faculty members at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, are involved with the New Zealand Digital Library research project; Witten is the director.] Anyone who has ever done an Internet search will benefit from understanding some of the concepts underlying the structures of search engines. The section titled "Presentation: User Interfaces" is particularly enlightening in its descriptions of how various search engines can treat the same search differently. For example, this section contains easily understandable explanations of the importance of language stemming using morphological reduction and of case folding. For librarians wanting to try their hands at creating a digital library that can stand alone or be accessible via the Internet, the authors suggest the freely available Greenstone software (www.greenstone.org), for Windows or UNIX operating systems. Librarians, particularly those who envision building their own full-text digital libraries, will find useful information here.-Margaret Sylvia, St. Mary's Univ. Lib., San Antonio

Library Journal