Milena Dobreva

Digital Natives and Specialised Digital Libraries: A Study of Europeana Users

The alignment of user needs with the technical capabilities of modern digital libraries is an area attracting the interest of researchers and practitioners. Europeana, conceived with the intention of offering a single access point to European cultural heritage, has been developed in recent years with a continuous effort to identify and respond to the needs of a range of users. This paper presents a study of two user communities – young people and the general public. The study, conducted between October 2009 and January 2010, comprised a series of focus groups and media labs in Bulgaria, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. A distinctive aspect of this study is that it combines questionnaire-based and verbal feedback gathered from users with evidence of user actions whilst undertaking a well-defined task. The paper presents the context and the methodology of the study, and some of the data gathered within the study which helps to understand better the attitude of digital natives towards specialised digital libraries. The data analysis supports several conclusions: specialised digital libraries require strong advocacy to target the “digital natives” generation which tends to prefer general purpose search engines to specialised resources; young users are confident that they know how to use advanced search yet there is little evidence of their applying these skills in contrast to general public users; the perception of digital libraries differs in groups from different countries. The study contributes to the better understanding of some behavioural characteristics of users of digital libraries.

Beyond OAIS: Towards a reliable and consistent digital preservation implementation framework

Current work in digital preservation (DP) is dominated by the “Open Archival Information System” (OAIS) reference framework specified by the international standard ISO 14721:2003. This is a useful aid to understanding the concepts, main functional components and the basic data flows within a DP system, but does not give specific guidance on implementation-level issues. In this paper we suggest that there is a need for a reference architecture which goes beyond OAIS to address such implementation-level issues - to specify minimum requirements in respect of the policies, processes, and metadata required to measure and validate repository trustworthiness in respect of the authenticity, integrity, renderability, meaning, and retrievability of the digital materials preserved. The suggestion is not that a particular way of implementing OAIS be specified, but, rather that general guidelines on implementation are required if the term “OAIS-compliant” is to be meaningful in the sense of giving an assurance of attaining and maintaining an operationally adequate or better level of long-term reliability, consistency, and cross-compatibility in implemented DP systems that is measurable, verifiable, manageable, and (as far as possible) future-proofed.

Digital libraries and digitised maps: an early overview of the DIGMAP project

DIGMAP is a project to find solutions for digital libraries scenarios focused on digitised historical maps. The main service will reuse metadata from European national libraries and other relevant third party metadata sources to provide discovery and access to contents. This will also include a proof of concept of a scenario of reusing and enriching these metadata by automatic processes that will try to extract relevant indexing information from the images of the digitised maps, as well as from any kind of associated text.

Assessing and measuring impact of a digital collection in the humanities: an analysis of the SPHERE (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) project

Although a substantial corpus of digital materials is now available to scholarship across the disciplines, objective evidence of their use, impact, and value, based on a robust assessment, is sparse. Traditional methods of assessment of impact in the humanities, notably citation in scholarly publications, are not an effective way of assessing impact of digital content. These issues are problematic in the field of Digital Humanities where there is a need to effectively assess impact to justify its continued funding and existence. A number of qualitative and quantitative methods exist that can be used to monitor the use of digital resources in various contexts although they have yet to be applied widely. These have been made available to the creators, managers, and funders of digital content in an accessible form through the TIDSR (Toolkit for the Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources) developed by the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, the authors of this article developed the SPHERE project (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) specifically to use TIDSR to evaluate the use and impact of The Stormont Papers , a digital collection of the Hansards of the Stormont Northern Irish Parliament from 1921 to 1972. This article presents the methodology, findings, and analysis of the project. The authors argue that TIDSR is a useful and, critically, transferrable method to understand and increase the impact of digital resources. The findings of the project are modified into a series of wider recommendations on protecting the investment in digital resources by increasing their use, value, and impact. It is reasonable to suggest that effectively showing the impact of Digital Humanities is critical to its survival.

The Role of Metadata in the Longevity of Cultural Heritage Resources

Digital preservation is an integral part of the management of information and the institutions in the cultural heritage sector are seeking for ways to incorporate it into their everyday practice. While there are generic approaches to long-term preservation, further research and development work is needed to address any specifics of the digital objects in the cultural heritage domain. In this paper, we will take two case studies of recent projects and analyse to what extent the metadata accompanying digital objects contribute to guarantee longevity. We summarize this analysis in two scenarios for sustainability of resources produced by small projects because compared to big institutions their digital assets are facing a higher risk not to be preserved properly. We also identify processes where natural language technologies could be of help to make the preservation more efficient.

Using wavelet analysis for text categorization in digital libraries: a first experiment with Strathprints

Digital libraries increasingly benefit from research on automated text categorization for improved access. Such research is typically carried out by means of standard test collections. In this article, we present a pilot experiment of replacing such test collections by a set of 6,000 objects from a real-world digital repository, indexed by Library of Congress Subject Headings, and test support vector machines in a supervised learning setting for their ability to reproduce the existing classification. To augment the standard approach, we introduce a combination of two novel elements: using functions for document content representation in Hilbert space, and adding extra semantics from lexical resources to the representation. Results suggest that wavelet-based kernels slightly outperformed traditional kernels on classification reconstruction from abstracts and vice versa from full-text documents, the latter outcome being due to word sense ambiguity. The practical implementation of our methodological framework enhances the analysis and representation of specific knowledge relevant to large-scale digital collections, in this case the thematic coverage of the collections. Representation of specific knowledge about digital collections is one of the basic elements of the persistent archives and the less studied one (compared to representations of digital objects and collections). Our research is an initial step in this direction developing further the methodological approach and demonstrating that text categorization can be applied to analyse the thematic coverage in digital repositories.

Bridging the gap between digital libraries and e-learning

Abstract Digital Libraries (DL) are offering access to a vast amount of digital content, relevant to practically all domains of human knowledge, which makes it suitable to enhance teaching and learning. Based on a systematic literature review, this article provides an overview and a gap analysis of educational use of DLs.

Collective Knowledge and Creativity: The Future of Citizen Science in the Humanities

Citizen science is a contemporary reinvention of some research practices of the past when ‘unprofessional’ researchers contributed to scientific projects led by academics; a worth-noting peak of research undertaken in this paradigm had been observed in the 19th century. In the 21st century, citizen science mostly resides in digital environments and depends upon eInfrastructures which not only provide citizens with access to research data management, but also play the role of novel scientific communication tools aiming to engage and support citizens in their research contributions. This paper’s main purpose is to introduce the concept focusing on citizen science within the Humanities where its use is still limited compared to other research domains, as well as frequently confused with crowdsourcing. We also present some initial outcomes of the user studies undertaken within the EC-funded Civic Epistemologies project featuring a set of three international focus groups and a web questionnaire; these help to understand better the current attitudes and challenges in this area. Finally the paper delves into some possible reasons for the slower uptake of citizen science in both the humanities domain and digital cultural heritage and explores to what extent such projects contribute to ‘collective knowledge’ as well as to creativity.

Matching evolving Hilbert spaces and language for semantic access to digital libraries

Extended by function (Hilbert) spaces, the 5S model of digital libraries (DL) [1] enables a physical interpretation of vectors and functions to keep track of the evolving semantics and usage context of the digital objects by support vector machines (SVM) for text categorization (TC). For this conceptual transition, three steps are necessary: (1) the application of the formal theory of DL to Lebesgue (function, L2) spaces; (2) considering semantic content as vectors in the physical sense (i.e. position and direction vectors) rather than as in linear algebra, thereby modelling word semantics as an evolving field underlying classifications of digital objects; (3) the replacement of vectors by functions in a new compact support basis function (CSBF) semantic kernel utilizing wavelets for TC by SVMs.