Product Description
This fully revised and updated second edition of Understanding Digital Libraries focuses on the challenges faced by both librarians and computer scientists in a field that has been dramatically altered by the growth of the Web.

At every turn, the goal is practical: to show you how things you might need to do are already being done, or how they can be done. The first part of the book is devoted to technology and examines issues such as varying media requirements, indexing and classification, networks and distribution, and presentation. The second part of the book is concerned with the human contexts in which digital libraries function. Here you'll find specific and useful information on usability, preservation, scientific applications, and thorny legal and economic questions.

. Useful for digital library projects in all kinds of settings, including commercial and community ventures, museums, research institutions, and schools.
. Covers the entire spectrum of media, including text, all kinds of images, audio, and video.
. Provides practical advice on achieving the best of what is possible while avoiding common pitfalls.
. Filled with case studies and references to valuable outside resources. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good as far as mandatory course books go
Arrived new, quick, and safe.The content isnt like reading your favorite novel but it wont instantly put you to sleep either.Current content as of 2007.Not techie at all.

Readable primer for digital libraries
In Understanding Digital Libraries, Michael Lesk explains a new method of distribution and preservation in a dry, informative, even-handed and almost academic fashion. His book, while unlikely to capture the imagination of the average layperson, is a reasonably successful textbook, which might be of interest to students and professionals alike.

If I had to lobby a complaint against the book it would be that the book does not always delve deep enough into its topics. The book is an excellent primer, but I often felt that I had only a cursory idea of the subjects it explained rather than then a genuine understanding. For example after reading Understanding Digital Libraries' chapter on knowledge representation schemes, I have a basic of idea of XML's function in representing data on the web; however, I wouldn't be able to use it myself.

Of course, this deficiency in the book is merely a result of its purpose, not a fault in execution. As an introductory text, it is perfectly functional. However, for someone looking to work with digital libraries in the field it will almost certainly need to be supplemented by other books.
... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Confused by all the new technology available today? Looking for ways to promote future innovation in academic strategic management? Written by LiLi Li of Georgia Southern University, this essential resource provides the latest information on developing trends and technologies for student-centered and service-oriented academic learning environments. Readers will gain practical, realistic suggestions and solutions for utilizing these emerging technologies in academic learning environments, as well as an in-depth look at their impact on library administration, resources, services and instruction. ... Read more

Product Description
Evaluation of Digital Libraries summarizes research and practice on both sides of the Atlantic and aims to answer the potential questions that both the theoretical and practical areas of digital library evaluation have posed during recent years. The book systematically presents aspects of participating communities, reasons and aims of evaluation, methodologies and metrics, and application paradigms. The book deals with practical and theoretical issues on digital libraries development and evaluation. It will be multi-disciplinary due to its nature incorporating views and perspectives of various contributing fields. The readership include: practitioners, who need to evaluate digital library applications, as well as to researchers in the area of digital libraries. However, the book also addresses the needs of under-graduate and post-graduate students of Library, Information Science and Computer Science courses. ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, ICADL 2003, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in December 2003.

The 68 revised full papers presented together with 15 poster abstracts and 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information retrieval techniques, multimedia digital libraries, data mining and digital libraries, machine architecture and organization, human resources and training, human-computer interaction, digital library infrastructure, building and using digital libraries, knowledge management, intellectual property rights and copyright, e-learning and mobile learning, data storage and retrieval, digital library services, content development, information retrieval and Asian languages, and metadata.

Product Description

Given modern society's need to control its ever-increasing body of information, digital libraries will be among the most important and influential institutions of this century.With their versatility, accessibility, and economy, these focused collections of everything digital are fast becoming the "banks" in which the world's wealth of information is stored.

How to Build a Digital Library is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library-no matter how large or small. Two internationally recognized experts provide a fully developed, step-by-step method, as well as the software that makes it all possible. How to Build a Digital Library is the perfectly self-contained resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries.

* Sketches the history of libraries-both traditional and digital-and their impact on present practices and future directions
* Offers in-depth coverage oftoday's practical standards used to represent and storeinformation digitally
* Uses Greenstone, freely accessible open-source software-available with interfaces in the world's major languages (including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic)
* Written for both technical and non-technical audiences
* Web-enhanced with software documentation, color illustrations, full-text index, source code, and more ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

How to Build a Digital Library
This work would be more aptly entitled: "How to Build A Digital Library Using Greenstone Software", since it is largely a primer and manual for Open Source software. The publishers present the work as a book and a website. The website's technology is useful, allowing the reader to search words and phrases.

The choice of example projects for digital libraries given in the opening Orientation section are laudable, centering as they do on the support for human development, improvement of scientific communication, and preservation of indigenous cultures.
The authors provide a valuable cross-fertilization of ideas, which comes from a computer science perspective.

The main focus of this book is the fact that the digital library can be whatever we as librarians envision.A major objective is to use technology to replace repetitive human intervention. Surely this is a most valuable attainment for any organization. There are significant insights throughout the book that deal with user interfaces and how search engines operate on the Internet. Perhaps the strongest and best thread that runs throughout is the role of open standards. Bursting out of the chapter on Standards and Protocols, are excellent, non technical descriptions of major industry and formal standards like TWAIN, MPEG, Unicode, XML, OEBPS, and library standards, like Dublin Core, OAI, and Z39.50 on which the interconnecting webs of library systems are based.The authors, however, have most difficulty describing library standards, for example, MARC and AACR. The authors, however, are most at home with the technical aspects of Greenstone and provide an excellent overview of processes like indexing using optical character recognition, and searching free text using phrases and key phrases. They ask intriguing questions, such as, "Is the digital library an institution or a piece of technology?" though they falter in finding answers on occasion.

The approach of the authors is humorous and humanistic, helping to put technology into perspective within varied disciplines.The approach to communication is personal. Whimsical characters are used to illustrate points, such as, the King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland

There are factual errors, which illustrate the main weakness of the book and may throw the main theses into some doubt. In stating that the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme originates in England, demonstrate a lack of research on the part of the authors. Their failure to include a librarian as an editor is a definite faux pas. Factoids such as, "A recent edition of the big red books was published in 1998", betray their lack of understanding of conventional libraries. They do not appear to know that the Library of Congress updates authority databases continually and publishes their major products online on a regular basis and in various formats.

They frequently can be seen struggling to provide opaque descriptions of simple library processes and terminology. The understanding of basic concepts of librarianship would have been clearer had the corpus of established library knowledge been consulted more extensively. There are questionable assertions, like "Placing like books together adds an element of serendipity to searching".

They ultimately fail to make the connection between the eminently effective and efficient operation of worldwide library systems and the librarian in her "conventional" library. In fact the technology relies squarely on the co-operative spirit, the strongest, most fundamental characteristic of the librarian. They fail to link the systems with this mainspring of libraries, which facilitates sharing and fosters "interoperability" -- the sine qua non of library systems.

A conclusion they seem to be drawing is that there is no place for the librarian in their vision of the future digital library. This is a provocative question: could they possibly be right? The value of traditional cataloging is questioned.

An inescapable conclusion drawn is that the information set on which the work is based is selective, to say the least, and leads to a narrow and somewhat idiosyncratic view of libraries.There are some strange choices, like the hapless Charles Ammi Cutter,while the bulk of classics of modern technical librarianship are missing. Absent are luminaries of the technical library world, like Mai Chan, Roy Tennant and Henriette Avram. Clifford Lynch is relegated to a single entry in the bibliography.

Although the reader is left to fill in the blanks, the work is good read for those contemplating developing or working in a digital library.The book assists librarians to use technology to do more and do more efficiently. Overall there are important insights for the people who run libraries, however, the work reflects a patronizing view and has serious deficiencies. The reader must use with care to avoid reinventing some basic wheels.

Kathleen Crewdson, Ian Dew, NextLibrary
April 22, 2004

Good introduction
As a pediatrician working in a third-world hospital (and not as an information professional) I found this a fascinating and useful book. Its scope includes everything from the history of libraries to problems of preservation of digital data to some details of JPEG encoding algorithms.

I definitely sensed that I was reading a book by professional librarians ... this is not just a book about how to throw some text onto the Internet or onto a CDROM. Rather it covers the whole area of how to organize large quantities of information of all types in ways that make it most accessible to users.

The most useful part of the book for me is the guide to the structure and use of the Greenstone open-source digital library software, which has great potential for organizing and distributing (via Internet or CDROM) libraries of all sorts. The software site... includes some documentation but this book is far more detailed, for those wanting to go beyond the basics. The Greenstone site includes links to examples such as the New Zealand Digital Library Project ...The book includes an introduction to XML and related topics. Greenstone stores and processes XML data so the reader will have to understand XML to some degree to be able benefit from the subsequent explanation of how to use Greenstone. As a newcomer to XML I thought that the presentation was good for the amount of space that could be devoted to it, but I still had a hard time following some of the later material.

The only problem I had with the book was that it had an uneven mix of broad strokes and technical detail. I found even much of the detail interesting (including a good introduction to Unicode) but I wished that the space had been devoted instead to a slower-paced, fuller explanation of the Greenstone architecture and how to build on it. ... Read more

Product Description
The contributors to this volume view digital libraries (DLs) from a social as well as technological perspective. They see DLs as sociotechnical systems, networks of technology, information artifacts, and people and practices interacting with the larger world of work and society. As Bruce Schatz observes in his foreword, for a digital library to be useful, the users, the documents, and the information system must be in harmony.The contributors begin by asking how we evaluate DLs -- how we can understand them in order to build better DLs -- but they move beyond these basic concerns to explore how DLs make a difference in people's lives and their social worlds, and what studying DLs might tell us about information, knowledge, and social and cognitive processes. The chapters, using both empirical and analytical methods, examine the social impact of DLs and also the web of social and material relations in which DLs are embedded; these far-ranging social worlds include such disparate groups as community activists, environmental researchers, middle-school children, and computer system designers.Topics considered include documents and society; the real boundaries of a "library without walls"; the ecologies of digital libraries; usability and evaluation; information and institutional change; transparency as a product of the convergence of social practices and information artifacts; and collaborative knowledge construction in digital libraries. ... Read more

Product Description
Get the current research and insightful case studies

Technological advances and innovative perspectives constantly evolve the notion of what makes up a digital library. Archives and the Digital Library provides an insightful snapshot of the current state of archiving in the digital realm. Respected experts in library and information science present the latest research results and illuminating case studies to provide a comprehensive glimpse at the theory, technological advances, and unique approaches to digital information management as it now stands. The book focuses on digitally reformatted surrogates of non-digital textual and graphic materials from archival collections, exploring the roles archivists can play in broadening the scope of digitization efforts through creatively developing policies, procedures, and tools to effectively manage digital content.

Many of the important advances in digitization of materials have little to do with the efforts of archivists. Archives and the Digital Library concentrates specifically on the developments in the world of archives and the digitization of the unique content of information resources archivists deal with on a constant basis. This resource reviews the current issues and challenges, effective user assessment techniques, various digital resources projects, collaboration strategies, and helpful best practices. The book is extensively referenced and includes helpful illustrative figures.

Topics in Archives and the Digital Library include:

A case study of LSTA-grant funded California Local History Digital Resources Project
Expanding the scope of traditional archival digitations projects beyond the limits of a single institution
A case study of the California Cultures Project
The top ten themes in usability issues
Case studies of usability studies, focus groups, interviews, ethnographic studies, and web log analysis
Developing a reciprocal partnership with a digital library
The technical challenges in harvesting and managing Web archives
Metadata strategies to provide descriptive, technical, and preservation related information about archived Web sites
Long-term preservation of digital materials
Building a trusted digital repository
Collaboration in developing and supporting the technical and organizational infrastructure for sustainability in both academic and state government
The Archivists' Toolkit software application

Archives and the Digital Library is timely, important reading for archivists, librarians, library administrators, library information educators, archival educators, and students. ... Read more

Product Description

Digital stories are brief multi-modal digital videos, which libraries can use to engage their staff members with one another, to market library services and collections, to attract donors, and most importantly, to engage students and faculty with the library. Fields and Diaz address the how-tos of creating digital stories, as well asthe challenges of building a digital storytelling program and creating partnerships across campus.Of primary interest to academic librarians and instructional technology staff.

Product Description
This book is based on Sebastian's PhD thesis. He reviews architectures, abstract models, metadata standards and various technologies for building digital library management systems. He derives requirements for advanced digital libraries and proposes an architecture model and a set of ontologies for semantic digital libraries.

This book presents information discovery services using the semantic and social technologies, and the prototype implementation of a semantic digital library that answers these requirements. The claim presented in this book is that the semantic and social technologies applied a digital library management system delivers more efficient information discovery solutions, while the library users become more satisfied and can remember more information from what they have learned when using the library. This book presents the essence of Sebastian's research on the Semantic Digital Libraries in years 2002-2009.

[more at http://semdl.info/books/] ... Read more

Product Description
International authority Ross Harvey's new How-To-Do It-Manual is the first one-stop resource in digital curation, and guides readers to understand and make the best use of the wide-ranging combinations of strategies, technological approaches, and activities that apply to this rapidly-emerging field. Any information professional who appraises, selects, organizes, or maintains digital resources acts as a digital curator. Whether you are a librarian, archivist, or records manager, you will find useful concepts here for professional setting. Harvey offers an in-depth, start-to-finish explanation of the digital curation process, and clarifies each step in the Digital Curation Centre's (DCC) lifecycle model, including: Create or Receive; Appraise & Select; Ingest; Preservation Action; Store; Access, Use, and Reuse; and Transform. You will learn best practices for improving data access, quality, and protection, and find time-saving tools such as an extensive directory of online resources, tutorials and further references in the area. Book buyers receive exclusive access to a password-protected companion website that offers electronic, customizable versions of planning forms, checklists, and more. This book's essential techniques and expert advice are crucial to ensuring that today's digital resources will be available to and useable by future generations. ... Read more

Product Description
The emergence of the Internet and the wide availability of affordable computing equipment have created tremendous interest in digital libraries and electronic publishing. This book is the first to provide an integrated overview of the field, including a historical perspective, the state of the art, and current research. The term "digital libraries" covers the creation and distribution of all types of information over networks, ranging from converted historical materials to kinds of information that have no analogues in the physical world. In some ways digital libraries and traditional libraries are very different, yet in other ways they are remarkably similar. People still create information that has to be organized, stored, and distributed, and they still need to find and use information that others have created. An underlying theme of this book is that no aspect of digital libraries can be understood in isolation or without attention to the needs of the people who create and use information. Although the book covers a wide range of technical, economic, social, and organizational topics, the focus is on the actual working components of a digital library.Amazon.com Review
These days we seem to be creating information faster than we can store it, but the near future is looking bright. Cornell professor William Y. Arms offers a program for that future in Digital Libraries, a synthesis of library and computer sciences that presents the history and current developments in each field with special emphasis on their interactions.

Since the book necessarily must appeal to a broad spectrum of professionals, any given reader will find some parts elementary, but Arms clearly maps the common ground and much of the text will appeal to all. Chapters covering the basics of information management, the Internet, security, archives, and retrieval bridge the traditional books-and-shelves library systems and the often jury-rigged information architecture developed over 40 years of computer use.

Digital Libraries contains plenty of sidebars detailing historical information as well as definitions primarily suited to professionals entering the interdisciplinary zone (but which would unacceptably break up the text flow; while it's important to understand both MARC codes and TCP/IP protocols, it's best for each reader to decide what supplementary information is needed). Digital Libraries is an ambitious and important book--if we are to develop truly efficient and accessible information management systems, everyone concerned must understand their shared technical history and move forward as one. --Rob Lightner ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Introduction to Digital Libraries
While I was a little bit disappointed about the lack of in-depth detail, I must say that _Digital Libraries_ provides an excellent overview of the range of issues surroundingmanaged collections of digital information.

Arms covers everything from the economic and legal issues (nice coverage of the issues involved for publishers!) to the concepts behind object models and structural metadata. The book finishes with a glossary which should prove useful to those trying to wade through the alphabet soup around asset management and digital library technology.

Given that this is an overview, I missed a good bibliography for people interested in taking any of the topics in the book to a deeper level. ... Read more

Product Description
Designed to ease the process of matching the community with the best content possible, this book provides a starting point for key technologies and the associated tools that make them usable. Introducing the concept of the digital library, Rhyno details the open source tools that are instrumental in developing many of the digital libraries in today's institutions, both from an introductory technical perspective and from the vantage point of the emerging community of users that is erecting the digital library. ... Read more

Product Description
Exploring the Digital Library, a volume in The Jossey-Bass Online Teaching and Learning series, addresses the key issue of library services for faculty and their students in the online learning environment. Written by librarians at Athabasca University, a leading institution in distance education, this book shows how faculty can effectively use digital libraries in their day-to-day work and in the design of electronic courses. Exploring the Digital Library is filled with information, ideas, and

• Discusses how information and communication technologies are transforming scholarship communication
• Provides suggestions for integrating digital libraries into teaching and course development
• Describes approaches to promoting information literacy skills and integrating these skills across the curriculum
• Outlines the skills and knowledge required in digital library use
• Suggests opportunities for faculty and librarians to collaborate in the online educational environment

Customer Reviews (1)

make an online community?
It is very understandable that the book should emanate from Athabasca University. By sheer geographic necessity, that uni would be acutely interested in distance learning, aka online teaching and learning. The book is directed towards librarians and academics in any field, who might be interested in promulgating their data and research to a potentially global audience.

The book makes clear that you do not have to be as physically isolated as Athabasca. Indeed, you could be in a megalopolis, but still face issues of data distribution.

Plus, you do not have to specialise or be an expert in computing to understand the book. The narrative deliberately minimises low level computing details, that are best left to people in that field. ... Read more

Product Description
Librarians embarking on the challenge of building a digital collection have their work cut out for them and here is the book to help launch and complete the mission! Easy to understand, this guide demonstrates how resources are created, distributed, and accessed and how librarians can keep up with the latest technologies for successfully completing these tasks. Chapters walk you step-by-step through all of the stages. This how-to offers detailed advice for: planning for and assessing the purpose of your digital repository; acquiring, processing, classifying, and describing digital content; storing documents; choosing a platform; specific technologies useful repositories (XML, SOAP, and more); sharing data; federated searching of repositories; understanding issues with allowing/restricting access to information; analyzing repository use, and migrating to other platforms and accommodating new types of data. Librarians looking for a timely, comprehensive guide to creating a digital collection will find this book an invaluable resource. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An integral part of the telecommunication revolution
School and community libraries are now an integral part of the telecommunication revolution that is exemplified by the now ubiquitous presence of internet informational resources and online databases. "Building Digital Libraries: A How-To-Do-It Manual For Libraries" is co-authored by Terry Reese (Digital Production Unit Head for Oregon State University Libraries) and Kyle Banerjee (Digital Services Program Manager for the Orbis Cascade Alliance in Eugene Oregon and a key architect of Oregon State's electronic documents repository) who draw upon their many years of experience and expertise to provide librarians and staff members with a detailed, organized, non-technical instruction guide through every step of the process for creating, organizing, and maintaining local repositories of information, records, and other forms of data. Covering the fundamental basics as well as the logistics of designing, constructing, and maintaining digital products using in-house content, all of the relevant tools, approaches, and third-party resource technologies are addressed, along with the role of metadata and standards, sharing data, systems operability, digital rights management, and more. A complete single volume manual, "Building Digital Libraries" is a welcome and strongly recommended reference for inclusion into Library Science curriculums and library staff on-site training programs. ... Read more

Product Description
Advice from the experts—on collecting and managing the digital resources that are an increasingly vital part of librarianship!

Managing Digital Resources in Libraries is a practical guide to managing library materials in digital formats. Working librarians share their expertise in the acquisition and management of digital resources, addressing questions of licensing, funding, and providing access. The contributors also examine innovative projects and systems, such as the integration of PDA-accessible resources into a library collection and the development of all-digital libraries. You’ll also find supplementary reading lists and bibliographies of additional resources, including relevant Web sites.

Addressing the challenges of and barriers to the preservation and dissemination of electronic information, Managing Digital Resources in Libraries explores vital questions, such as: How are librarians coping with digital resources? How do they compare and select titles and formats to purchase? How do they allocate limited funds—to lease or to purchase high-priced electronic titles? Does consortium membership provide the answer to funding problems, or does it force librarians to pay for content their users neither want nor need? Is MARC still an appropriate format for cataloging? How can librarians make themselves familiar with the multitude of available resources?Managing Digital Resources in Libraries will update your working knowledge of:online resources open archives—their uses and their history the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the First Sale Doctrine, and the Fair Use Doctrine—and their implications for librarians e-journal cataloging and e-journal management software electronic collection development and management personal digital assistants digital licensing agreements electronic searching systems, including ELIN@, Electronic Journal Finder, Pirate Source, OPAC, and cold fusion databases ... Read more

Product Description
This work presents models for numerous systems which will be used in future optical network implementation. Covering the most significant noise sources, these models should allow the practical system designer to quantify experimental sensitivity deviations from the ideal system performance. ... Read more

Product Description
In this study, Christian Vandendorpe examines how digital media and the internet have changed the process of reading and writing, significantly altering our approaches toward research and reading, our assumptions about audience and response, and our theories of memory, legibility, and context. Reflecting on the full history of the written word, Vandendorpe provides a clear overview of how materiality makes a difference in the creation and interpretation of texts. Looking to the future, reading and writing will continue to evolve based on the current, contested trends of universal digitization and accessibility. ... Read more

Product Description
Recent developments in IT, especially the World Wide Web, have led to the creation of a number of digital library research projects in the UK, USA and elsewhere. This phenomenon is designed to bring a shift in the ways we create, access and use information. The design and development of digital libraries depend on computer, communication and other technical skills, and the dream of successful digital libraries leading to a global digital environment can only be fulfilled when enough practitioners have the skills to design, build and manage them. Designed to present a holistic view of the digital library scene, this text is based on evidence from examples of major digital library research projects around the globe. It is intended for students of digital librarianship and related courses at departments of information science and computer science in the UK and worldwide, and also for practitioners and researchers who need to get a good grasp of issues and developments in the field. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Evaluation of Digital Libraries
The book is valueble for the introduction of digital librraies.
It gives some good examples of digital libraries in the world. It also gives a clear descripition of digital libraries.
I think that it is a good reference book
... Read more