Putting it all together

1. Putting it all together A summary and opportunity to explore an existing project critically

2. But first … • Organizing who will present on each week (Note, all must be present and active attendees for all presentations) • December 7 • December 14

3. Course outline • What and Why of Digital Libraries • The 5S model of digital libraries • Content – gathering, classifying, describing • Google books – an especially large collection • Access control and encryption • Quality issues in digital libraries • User interfaces and Usability • Interoperability – OAI and other protocols • Online information seeking behaviors • Introduction to Drupal (Guest instructor)

4. What and Why • Do you know more about libraries, and digital ones in particular, than you did before? • What are the necessary components of a digital library? • Redo the concept map experience, based on the semester’s input • Use the cmap tool found on your computer system • Work in groups of 2 or 3 • 15 minutes • Open discussion to follow

5. Before 5 S • As we may think • Vannevar Bush, 1945, The Atlantic • The vision • Everything you saw or read, readily available for you to retrieve and use again. • Desk image (what would he think of iPhone?) • The essential elements are there • Storage • Indexing • Retrieval • Viewing

6. The 5 S model • A language for discussing key aspects of a digital library • A check list for making sure all relevant aspects are addressed in your DL design • The terms: • Streams • Structures • Scenarios • Societies • Spaces

7. The 5 S terms expanded • Stream • what types of data? gif, jpg, avi? • Structure • How are the elements organized? Is there a hierarchy? Are there multiple structures? • Spaces • How will we index the items? How will we divide them into related groups • Scenarios • What services will we provide? What information do we need to provide those services? • Societies • Who is the library intended to serve? Remember to include agents and other processes as well as users.

8. Content • The actual material and its description • Example: The archeology DL • A digital library is not limited to textual materials • Part of the challenge is deciding how best to represent the content that you want to share. • Standard descriptions for use in information exchange • Dublin core • Specialized terms for use by a particular community. • The important thing is that the vocabulary be known and accepted by all who will exchange descriptors

9. Access control • Two components • An appropriate policy that respects the intellectual property rights associated with each item. • Technical implementation to keep the policy in effect • Digital signatures and encryption as tools for ensuring limited access to resources that have distribution limitations

10. Google Books • An example of a very large DL project that has all the challenges of our smaller projects, greatly magnified • Both by the scale of the project and by the visibility of anything Google does • The project has inspired other projects and has raised issues about digital rights management and about preservation issues • See also the Internet Archive. • www.archive.org • Dedicated to preserving digital material from the web and other sources.

11. Quality • Points of interest • Accessibility • Pertinence • Preservability • Relevance • Significance • Timeliness • Accuracy • Completeness • Consistency • Composability • Efficiencey • Effecteveness • Extensibility • Reusability • Reliability • Measures of quality applied to • Data objects • Metadata • Collection • Catalog • Respository • Services • Which terms go with which items? • Which are most critical? • Which are easy to measure and which are hard? • Where does the data come from to test each one?

12. User Interfaces and Usability • User centered design • Start with a clear image of the user and design to satisfy the user’s needs and interests • Make the interface as self-evident as possible. No instructions should be necessary for web-based systems. • Evaluation • Formative and summative • Know your user! • The usual suspects: • Wording, consistency, graphic layout and organization, user’s model of the system • Digital libraries add • Browsing, filtering, searching, new item submission

13. Your Ensemble review • I showed the original layout (that may be the only remaining copy of that layout) and the proposed changes. • Your input was instrumental in making changes in the version that was deployed last week • More about that later.

14. Special needs • Video • Different types of attributes • Different needs for viewing, for scanning, for selecting segments • Common features • Most systems use a textual querying interface and few systems provide any form of visual query interface, probably indicating the need for further development in this area; • Most systems use keyframe(s) as their video browsing method; • Playback is provided in all listed systems, indicating that playback is regarded as a most important interface feature; • Whereas most systems provide more than one video browsing method (often transcript + playback and/or keyframe + playback), browsing aids such as synchronization between different browsing methods are not often facilitated.

15. Interoperability • Digital libraries rarely stand alone • They provide feeds to other libraries • They harvest from other libraries • The interconnectedness of the world of digital libraries enhances the user’s opportunity to find a curated collection entry to suit a particular need • Basic Standard: Open Archives Interconnection • Vocabulary of messages • Standardized meaning and expected responses

16. Online information seeking behaviors • Digital libraries are nearly always web-based information resources • Knowing how users seek and use information in other web-based situations helps to inform the design of a digital library. • Subject of the new field of personal information management (PIM)

17. Information seeking • People’s expectations are changing • Where there previously was wonder and amazement, now there is growing expectation for perfect results instantly provided. • Where a desktop or good laptop was previously the medium for obtaining information, more and more people are expecting results suitably formatted for cell phones and similar small devices. • Where people previously were glad to know where to find the answers, more and more they are expecting the answers to be presented directly. • Changing expectations apply to digital libraries, perhaps even more than to the web in general.

18. Providing information from the Web • Gather (web crawlers) • Extract information • Index the information • Process the query • Rank results of query • Present the results in useful and convenient form.

19. Using information obtained • Serve immediate need • Keep for later? • If so, how to organize so it can be found later • If not, how to decide to discard? Remember how to find it again? • How is kept information organized?

20. Drupal • I don’t have slides. Did Dr. Siegfried use slides? (If so, I will get them onto our site.) • What did you learn about Drupal? • What do you think of it? • How do you see it relating to digital libraries?

21. The Ensemble Launch • Most of you know that I have been fairly well consumed by the launch of our digital library for computing education during this semester. • Last Wednesday, we presented the Alpha version to the representatives of NSF and to the other NSDL pathway projects. • I think you might like to see that presentation and I will ask your informed opinion of how well we are doing.