Daniel Gelaw Alemneh

Development of a portal to Texas history

Purpose – To help information professionals learn about issues and considerations in portal building.Design/methodology/approach – The University of North Texas Libraries’ Portal to Texas History provides long‐term storage and access to digital copies of important original materials illuminating Texass past. This paper describes the development of the Portal technology and content – presenting objectives, processes, and future plans – and defines the larger goal of facilitating collaboration among resource‐holding institutions.Findings – Practical aspects of creating and populating the portal include development of specifications and standards, construction of an application framework, selection of content, production of metadata, and refinement of user interfaces. Planned future enhancements to the Portal will augment sustainability and provide added value for users. The portal project may also serve as a catalyst for wider collaborative efforts in digitization.Originality/value – The Portal to Texas Hi...

Building a Framework of Metadata Change to Support Knowledge Management

Evolving user needs and relevance require continuous change and reform. A good digital collection has mechanisms to accommodate the differing uses being made of the digital library system. In a metadata management context, change could mean to transform, substitute, or make the content of a metadata record different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone. In light of the evolving compliance requirements, this paper analyses the three most common types of change within metadata records as well as their subcategories and discusses the possible implications of such changes within and beyond the metadata records.

Maintaining Quality Metadata: Toward Effective Digital Resource Lifecycle Management

Book chapter on maintaining quality metadata and effective digital resource lifecycle management.

Indexing quality and effectiveness: an exploratory analysis of electronic theses and dissertations representation

Theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by graduate students in masters and doctoral programs in the degree‐seeking process. Considering the multi‐disciplinarity and interdiciplinarity characteristics of ETDs, often several subjects and indexing terms need to be supplied to adequately represent ETDs for efficient access.

Enhancing Content Visibility in Institutional Repositories: Overview of Factors that Affect Digital Resources Discoverability

Poster presented at the 2013 International iConference. This poster discusses factors that affect digital resource discoverability and digital curation activities that enhance the visibility of an institutional repository (IR) in an ever-changing digital landscape.

The Lifecycle Management of ETDs Project: Multi Stakeholders National Partnership

Paper accompanying a poster presentation for the 2013 International iConference. This paper discusses the Lifecycle Management of ETDs project.

Empowering digital libraries users through combining taxonomies with folksonomies

The increase in the number and heterogeneity of digital resources has led cultural heritage institutions to develop tools, workflows, and quality assurance mechanisms that allow effective digital resource management. This poster assesses the current landscape in digital libraries as well as best practices and identifies emerging trends in information indexing. It also explores the potentials of and controversies surrounding user supplied tags or keywords in terms of complementing established controlled vocabularies in a diverse and collaborative environment.

Exploration of adoption of preservation metadata in cultural heritage institutions: case of PREMIS

Paper presented at the 2010 ASIS&T Annual Meeting. This paper discusses preservation metadata and its role in the challenges of long-term access.

Metadata quality assessment: A phased approach to ensuring long-term access to digital resources.

Maintaining usable and sustainable digital collections necessitates maintaining high-quality metadata about those digital objects. The two aspects of digital library data quality are the quality of the data in the objects themselves, and the quality of the metadata associated with the objects. Because poor metadata quality can result in ambiguity, poor recall and inconsistent search results, the existence of robust quality assurance mechanisms is a necessary feature of a well-functioning digital library. In order for end users to benefit fully from the development of digital libraries, responsible and viable service providers need to address metadata quality issues. Based on the University of North Texas Libraries experiences, this paper discusses issues related to metadata quality management and demonstrates a number of tools, workflows and quality assurance mechanisms.

Metadata versus Full-Text: Tracking Users’ Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Seeking Behavior

This presentation provides data from a recent research project at the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries to better understand how users are discovering the electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the UNT Libraries. To extract the specific requests for ETDs in the UNT Digital Library, the data was obtained from a server log-that contained more than 178 million lines of requests. From these requests, the search query was executed in an ambiguous way (not specific fielded searches) queries were extracted to create a dataset of item-query pairs. These item-query pairs were presented to the Solr full-text indexer that powers the search and retrieval side of the UNT Digital Library to report back on statistics, and help to explain whether a specific query was satisfied by either the ETDs full-text, metadata, or by both fields. The resulting data helps us understand how our users are arriving at a given ETD in the collection. Among other speculations, the role of metadata for the discovery process, and the possible overlap that is present between metadata and the full-text of the ETD itself will be analyzed and discussed.