Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references.

Advances in Information Communication Technology (ICT) has created immense methods for creating, storing, maintaining, accessing and preserving the traditional printed documents in digital form. The different publishers have taken the full advantage of publishing the research outputs of the academicians and deprive the institutions and the community of the institution from the research outputs. This paper explores the importance of Institutional Repository (IR) and the role of the Open Source Software (OSS) in building the Institutional Repository of any institution. To publish and serve the community of an institution building institutional repositories is the most feasible solution. We have to take the help of some special software packages to build up an institutional repository and the role of open source software in this regard is very important. The institutions which are economically not strong enough can take the advantage of usingopen source software to build up their own institutional repository and can expose their knowledge stock to the world.

Crawling the Web to build collections of documents related to pre-speciï¬ ed topics became an active area of research during the late 1990â s, crawler technology having been developed for use by search engines. Now, Web crawling is being seriously considered as an important strategy for building large scale digital libraries. This paper covers some of the crawl technologies that might be exploited for collection building. For example, to make such collection-building crawls more effective, focused crawling was developed, in which the goal was to make a â best-ï¬ rstâ crawl of the Web. We are using powerful crawler software to implement a focused crawl but use tunneling to overcome some of the limitations of a pure best-ï¬ rst approach. Tunneling has been described by others as not only prioritizing links from pages according to the pageâ s relevance score, but also estimating the value of each link and prioritizing them as well. We add to this mix by devising a tunneling focused crawling strategy which evaluates the current crawl direction on the ï¬ y to determine when to terminate a tunneling activity. Results indicate that a combination of focused crawling and tunneling could be an effective tool for building digital libraries.

This is a lecture delivered at Ranganathan Research Circle, 26th July 2003, Delhi, India. Defines digital libraries. Highlights major characteristics and myths about digital libraries. A comparision is made between digital libraries and conventional libraries. Various aspects of building digital libraries are given including Design, Standards, Organisation, User Interface, Preservation and Services.

Even though Latin America is one of the developing regions with excellent regional cooperative bibliographic databases, which is mainly due to the common use of Spanish and Portuguese in countries of the region, access to the printed documents mentioned in the bibliographies is a privilege for a very few. Very slowly Internet is being introduced as a regular service for students, professors and researchers working in Latin American academic institutions, as well as being introduced as a platform for e-publishing and offering digital library services to users. In this context of growing e-publishing and digital libraries initiatives to provide open access to research results, CLACSO (an academic network gathering 173 social science research institutions from 21 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean) decided to build a cooperative digital library with open source Greenstone software to facilitate integrated access to full-text books, articles, papers and working documents of its member institutes.

Digital Library for Earth Science Education, DLESE / The National Science Foundation's (NSF) National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) program comprises a set of projects engaged in a collective effort to build a national digital library of high quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational materials for students and teachers at all levels, in both formal and informal settings. By providing broad access to a rich, reliable, and authoritative collection of interactive learning and teaching resources and associated services in a digital environment, the NSDL will encourage and sustain continual improvements in the quality of STEM education for all students, and serve as a resource for lifelong learning. Though the program is relatively new, its vision and operational framework have been developed over a number of years through various workshops and planning meetings. The NSDL program held its first formal funding cycle during fiscal year 2000, accepting proposals in four tracks: Core Integration System, Collections, Services, and Targeted Research. Twenty-nine awards were made across these tracks in September 2000.

The US National Science Foundation has established a program to create a National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). One of the subsidiary NSDL libraries under development is the National Civil Engineering Educational Resources Library (NCERL). The first phase of NCERL is the creation and collection of digital resources in three areas of civil engineeringâ geotechnical (soil), rock, and water engineering (GROW). The concept of interactivities guides the design, development, and evaluation efforts of the GROW digital collection. This article describes the salient features of GROW, defines and discusses interactivities as an emerging, integral part of teaching and learning in civil engineering education. Interactivities take place at three distinct levels: the information resource, the collection, and the context. Very simply, the concept of interactivities can be defined as the emphasis on structured representations of interactive multimedia resources. Additionally, resources are designed with rich learning tasks and organized in pedagogical collections supplemented with contextual information. Preliminary evaluation of GROW-NCERL using interactivities is briefly described.

It has often been said that the library is the heart of the university. As the central repository of recorded knowledge on campus, the library is an essential resource for scholarly activity, and one measure of the greatness of a university is its library's collections. As electronic publishing expands and universities become computer-intensive organizations, what will the academic library's role be in this dynamic, technology-driven environment? Will it still be the heart of the university? This paper examines the medium-term future (10-15 years) of electronic publishing, the emerging "electronic university," and integrated public-access computer systems. Its central theme is that the academic library can synergetically combine traditional collections and services with new computer-based information resources and services to create a unified information system. By employing this strategy, it can continue to be the heart of the evolving electronic university.

This is a presentation of 8 slides at the ASIST 2005 Annual Meeting in the session on Progress in the Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries.

This paper surveys university libraries, special libraries, public libraries, the National Library and school libraries in Thailand about their digital collections and services.