Timothy W. Cole

Federating diverse collections of scientific literature

The Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing the information infrastructure to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The authors are constructing a large testbed of scientific literature, evaluating its effectiveness under significant use, and researching enhanced search technology. They are building repositories (organized collections) of indexed multiple-source collections and federating (merging and mapping) them by searching the material via multiple views of a single virtual collection. Developing widely usable Web technology is also a key goal. Improving Web search beyond full-text retrieval will require using document structure in the short term and document semantics in the long term. Their testbed efforts concentrate on journal articles from the scientific literature, with structure specified by the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Research efforts extract semantics from documents using the scalable technology of concept spaces based on context frequency. They then merge these efforts with traditional library indexing to provide a single Internet interface to indexes of multiple repositories.

Federated search of scientific literature

The Internet of the 21st Century will radically transform how we interact with knowledge. The rise of the World Wide Web and the information infrastructure have rapidly developed the technologies of collections for independent communities. In the future, online information will be dominated by small collections. The information infrastructure must similarly be radically different to support indexing of community collections and searching across such small collections. Users will consider themselves to be navigating in the Interspace, across logical spaces of semantic indexes, rather than in the Internet, across physical networks of computer servers. The digital libraries initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. The goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. This article details their efforts.

Harvesting cultural heritage metadata using the OAI Protocol

In July of 2001, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. To date, the Illinois project has indexed over two million Dublin Core metadata records contributed by 39 metadata repositories in the museum, academic library, and digital library project communities. These records describe a mix of digital and analog primary content. Our analysis of these metadata records demonstrates wide divergence in descriptive metadata practices and the use and interpretation of Dublin Core metadata elements. Differences are particularly notable by community. This article provides an overview of the Illinois project, presents quantitative data about divergent metadata practices and element usage patterns, and details implications for metadata providers and harvesting services.

Using collection descriptions to enhance an aggregation of harvested item-level metadata

As an increasing number of digital library projects embrace the harvesting of item-level descriptive metadata, issues of description granularity and concerns about potential loss of context when harvesting item-level metadata take on greater significance. Collection-level description can provide valuable context for item-level metadata records harvested from disparate and heterogeneous providers. This paper describes an ongoing experiment using collection-level description in concert with item-level metadata to improve quality of search and discovery across an aggregation of metadata describing resources held by a consortium of large academic research libraries. We present details of approaches implemented so far and preliminary analyses of the potential utility of these approaches. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of related issues and future work plans

Dublin Core Metadata Harvested Through OAI-PMH

ABSTRACT The introduction in 2001 of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) increased interest in and awareness of metadata quality issues relevant to digital library interoperability and the use of harvested metadata to build “union catalogs” of digital information resources. Practitioners have offered wide-ranging advice to metadata authors and have suggested metrics useful for measuring the quality of shareable metadata. Is there evidence of changes in metadata practice in response to such advice and/or as a result of an increased awareness of the importance of metadata interoperability? This paper looks at metadata records created over a six-year period that have been harvested by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and reports on quantitative and qualitative analyses of changes observed over time in shareable metadata quality.

Search and Discovery Across Collections: The IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project

In the fall of 2002, the University of Illinois Library at Urbana‐Champaign received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to implement a collection registry and item‐level metadata repository for digital collections and content created by or associated with projects funded under the IMLS National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. When built, the registry and metadata repository will facilitate retrieval of information about digital content related to past and present NLG projects. The process of creating these services also is allowing us to research and gain insight into the many issues associated with implementing such services and the magnitude of the potential benefit and utility of such services as a way to connect, bring together, and make more visible a broad range of heterogeneous digital content. This paper describes the genesis of the project, the rationale for architectural design decisions, challenges faced, and our progress to date.

Metadata for Special Collections in CONTENTdm: How to Improve Interoperability of Unique Fields Through OAI-PMH

Collection curators develop locally defined unique fields to support local requirements. As per the guidelines of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), Simple Dublin Core is the minimum requirement for exposing metadata to aggregators. Oftentimes the level of specificity of unique local fields is not translated well to Dublin Core, which may hinder the interoperability of the item metadata record. This paper researched 21 digital collections that were hosted in CONTENTdm. The objective was to explore the use and issues of unique fields in local context and recommend best practices that will increase the interoperability of metadata for special collections.

Strategies for reprocessing aggregated metadata

The OAI protocol facilitates the aggregation of large numbers of heterogeneous metadata records. In order to make harvested records useable in the context of an OAI service provider, the records typically must be filtered, analyzed and transformed. The CIC metadata portal harvests 450,000 records from 18 repositories at 9 U.S. Midwestern universities. The process implemented for transforming metadata records for this project supports multiple workflows and end-user interfaces. The design of the metadata transformation process required trade-offs between aggregation homogeneity and utility for purpose and pragmatic constraints such as feasibility, human resources, and processing time.

Library Marc Records Into Linked Open Data: Challenges and Opportunities

Today researchers search for books in various ways. Once discovered, a variety of Web technologies can be used to link to related resources and/or associate context with a book. This environment creates an opportunity for libraries. The linked open data (LOD) model of the Web offers a potential foundation for innovative user services and the wider dissemination of bibliographic metadata. However, best practices for transforming library catalog records into LOD are still evolving. The practical utility on the Semantic Web of library metadata transformed from MARC remains unclear. Using a test set of MARC21 records describing 30,000 retrospectively digitized books, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library explored options for adding links, transforming into non-library specific LOD-friendly semantics, and deploying as RDF to maximize the utility of these records. This paper highlights lessons learned during this process, discusses findings to date, and suggests possible avenues for further work and experimentation.

Genesis of an electronic database expert system

This article reports on the creation of a prototype, Web‐based, expert system utility that helps end‐users better navigate the range of library databases available at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC). Both librarian‐assigned database descriptors and terms drawn from the controlled vocabularies of the databases themselves are used to thoroughly characterize resources. End‐users then utilize keyword searches and/or menu selections to identify resources most relevant to their information needs. In addition to reporting on the UIUC prototype and the work done to create it, the concerns that gave rise to the project are discussed. Previous work and research elsewhere are summarized, and the more common approaches currently in place in academic libraries today are noted. Plans for testing the UIUC prototype with librarians and end‐users, for evaluating the results of those tests, and for iteratively refining the tool based on those evaluations are then briefly described.