David Bainbridge

Power to the people: end-user building of digital library collections

Naturally, digital library systems focus principally on the reader: th e consumer of the material that constitutes the library. In contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the users own web server, or (given appropriate permissions) remotely on a shared digital library host. End users can easily build new collections styled after existing ones from material on the Web or from their local files-or both, and collections can be updated and new ones brought on-line at any time. The interface, which is intended for non-professional end users, is modeled after widely used commercial software installation packages. Lest one quail at the prospect of end users building their own collections on a shared system, we also describe an interface for the administrative user who is responsible for maintaining a digital library installation.

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. We set out the requirements for these tasks and describe a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts.

The promise of digital libraries in developing countries

Many current technology trends are not benefiting developing countries—indeed, some bring serious negative consequences. Just as industrialization and globalization have increased the gulf between haves and have-nots, so information and communications technology is creating a chasm between “knows” and “know-nots.” By and large developing countries are not participating in the information revolution, although knowledge is critical for development. The knowledge gap between rich and poor is widening [1, 2, 3].

Greenstone: Open-source DL software

Browsing involves hierarchical lists that the user can examine interactively. Metadata (based round the Dublin Core) is the raw material for browsing, and must be provided explicitly or be derivable automatically from the source documents. Different collections offer different searching and browsing facilities. Indexes for both are constructed during a “building” process, according to information in a collection configuration file.

Managing Change in a Digital Library System with Many Interface Languages

Managing the organizational and software complexity of a comprehensive open source digital library system presents a significant challenge. The challenge becomes even more imposing when the interface is available in different languages, for enhancements to the software and changes to the interface must be faithfully reflected in each language version. This paper describes the solution adopted by Greenstone, a multilingual digital library system distributed by UNESCO in a trilingual European version (English, French, Spanish), complete with all documentation, and whose interface is available in many further languages. Greenstone incorporates a language translation facility which allows authorized people to update the interface in specified languages. A standard version control system is used to manage software change, and from this the system automatically determines which language fragments need updating and presents them to the human translator.

A fedora librarian interface

The Fedora content management system embodies a powerful and flexible digital object model. This paper describes a new open-source software front-end that enables end-user librarians to transfer documents and metadata in a variety of formats into a Fedora repository. The main graphical facility that Fedora itself provides for this task operates on one document at a time and is not librarian-friendly. A batch driven alternative is possible, but requires documents to be converted beforehand into the XML format used by the repository, necessitating a need for programming skills. In contrast, our new scheme allows arbitrary collections of documents residing on the users computer (or the web at large) to be ingested into a Fedora repository in one operation, without a need for programming expertise. Provision is also made for editing existing documents and metadata, and adding new ones. The documents can be in a wide variety of different formats, and the user interface is suitable for practicing librarians. The design capitalizes on our experience in building the Greenstone librarian interface and participating in dozens of workshops with librarians worldwide.