This conference paper has been published by IFLA Journal, vol. 31, n 3, 2005, p. 229-233 / The development of virtual libraries that offer Internet users access to full-text documents requires the team work of librarians, editors and webmasters. In this presentation, Dr. Dominique Babini, coordinator of the Latin American and the Caribbean Social Sciences Virtual Library of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences´ Network (CLACSO), proposes the option of cooperative virtual libraries and describes how they organized a distance training course via Internet for a group of librarians and editors of 18 countries of Latin American and the Caribbean, pointing out the factors that must be considered for the organization of courses via Internet

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, Univeristy of Arizona / In an effort to assist medical researchers and professionals in accessing information necessary for their work, the A1 Lab at the University of Arizona is investigating the use of a natural language processing (NLP) technique called noun phrasing. The goal of this research is to determine whether noun phrasing could be a viable technique to include in medical information retrieval applications. Four noun phrase generation tools were evaluated as to their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts. Tests were conducted using the National Cancer Institute's CANCERLIT database. The NLP tools evaluated were Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Chopper, The University of Arizona's Automatic Indexer, Lingsoft's NPtool, and The University of Arizona's AZ Noun Phraser. In addition, the National Library of Medicine's SPECIALIST Lexicon was incorporated into two versions of the AZ Noun Phraser to be evaluated against the other tools as well as a nonaugmented version of the AZ Noun Phraser. Using the metrics relative subject recall and precision, our results show that, with the exception of Chopper, the phrasing tools were fairly comparable in recall and precision. It was also shown that augmenting the AZ Noun Phraser by including the SPECIALIST Lexicon from the National Library of Medicine resulted in improved recall and precision.

There is increasing evidence that libraries, traditional and digital, must support learning, especially the acquisition and enhancement of scientific reasoning skills. This paper discusses how classificatory structures, such as a faceted thesaurus, can be enhancedfor novice science learning. Physical geography is used as the domain discipline, and the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype project provides the test bed for instructional materials and user analyses. The use of concept maps and topic maps for developing digital learning spaces is briefly discussed.

This paper describes an Afghanistan digital library initiative of building an Integrated Library System (ILS) for Afghanistan universities and colleges based on open source software. As one of the goals of the Afghan eQuality Digital Libraries Alliance, the authors applied systems analysis approach, evaluated different open source ILS, and customized the selected software to accommodate users' needs. Improvements include Arabic/Persian language support, user interface changes, call number label printing and new ISBN-13 support. To our knowledge, the ILS is the first big academic libraries in the the world running on open source software.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As the Web has been growing exponentially, it has become increasingly difficult to search for desired information. In recent years, many domain-specific (vertical) search tools have been developed to serve the information needs of specific fields. This paper describes two approaches to building a domain-specific search tool. We report our experience in building two different tools in the nanotechnology domain - (1) a server-side search engine, and (2) a client-side search agent. The designs of the two search systems are presented and discussed, and their strengths and weaknesses are compared. Some future research directions are also discussed.

Providing collections of resources â books, journals, videos, CDs, papers â was and still is a major function of academic libraries to support learning. When resources were offered electronically, libraries responded proactively, integration was done naturally into a virtual environment of learning. Leveraging on the convenience and speed of technology to meet the information needs of students was a challenge that could not be ignored. This paper highlights user education initiatives that relate to the support of learning and teaching in the virtual environment.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) Working Group, the highest level of the country's National Information Infrastructure (NII) technical committee, held an invited workshop in May 1995 to define a research agenda for digital libraries. The shared vision is an entire net of distributed repositories in which objects of any type and any size can be organized and searched within and across different indexed collections. The ultimate goal, as described in the IITA report, is the Grand Challenge of Digital Libraries: "deep semantic interoperability -- the ability of a user to access, consistently and coherently, similar (though autonomously defined and managed) classes of digital objects and services, distributed across heterogeneous repositories, with federating or mediating software compensating for site-by-site variations...Achieving this will require breakthroughs in description as well as retrieval, object interchange and object retrieval protocols. Issues here include the definition and use of metadata and its capture or computation from objects (both textual and multimedia), the use of computed descriptions of objects, federation and integration of heterogeneous repositories with disparate semantics, clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information, and algorithms for automatic rating, ranking, and evaluation of information quality, genre, and other properties." "The use of computed descriptions of (multimedia) objects" and "clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information" present pressing scientific and engineering problems that have a significant potential impact on the US society in this era of the Internet and distributed, multimedia computing.

With the development of internet and the trend of information system technology, the object of digital library research has extended to the application of digital archives. Basically, digital libraries store huge amounts of data, including text, image, map audio, video and illustration via electronic formats. Further more, digital libraries could be conveniently accessed through the Internet. As the research intention of network information systems, the critical technology in digital library research could be how to let users effectively harvest correct information from the digital library. Digital library users could discover, present, and organize knowledge among these data of digital libraries. The traditional library automation system, related applying technologies and protocols, such as MARC, Z39.50 and ISO 2709, could not totally match the requirement of digital archives. The purpose of this research is to find out how to effectively manage and apply the related technology of digital archive to handle the existing operation processes in library and the management requirement of digital archives. This paper discusses an evolution model of the related technology of library automation systems.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this chapter we discuss digital libraries from an electronic commerce perspective. The focus is on what the two have in common. The first section is an introduction which discuses some of the impacts that digital libraries and electronic commerce have had on our lives. The second section discusses common driving forces behind the two. The next section discusses common challenges, with an emphasis on the digital library perspective. The fourth section discusses several common issues, in particular, social, legal, quality, security and economic issues that both digital libraries and electronic commerce must address. The discussion in the fourth section primarily presents a digital library perspective, although the issu-es are important to both digital libraries and electronic commerce. Finally, the chapter closes with a conclusion.

Discusses briefly the concept and significance of resource sharing in Indian context with a view to justify on the basis of tremendous growth as well as diversity of explicit knowledge, increased users' demands, diminished budgets, galloping prices for subscribing periodicals and purchasing books, etc. Papers suggest that resource sharing is inevitable among libraries and mentions the concepts, the areas and modalities for cooperation through library consortia in the networked information environment. This paper also covers growth as well as points out merits and demerits of library consortia and the future prospect of consortia in Indian scenario.