Instalment on the role of open source software within the digital curation lifecycle. Describes a range of explicit digital curation application areas for open source, some examples of existing uses of open source software, a selection of open source applications of possible interest to the digital curator, some quantifiable statistics illustrating the value of open source software and some advice and pointers for institutions planning on introducing these technologies into their own information infrastructures. Includes Bibliography and Glossary

The difference between a digital library and a library with which a digital reference service is affiliated is discussed, and digital reference in these contexts is defined. There are several issues involved in integrating digital reference service into a digital library environment, but two that are unique to the intersection between digital libraries and digital reference: collection development of previously-answered questions, and presentation of specialized subsets of the materials in the digital library's collection. These two issues are explored.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this paper we report an automatic and scalable concept space approach to enhancing the deep searching capability of the NCSA Mosaic. The research, which is based on the findings from a previous NSF National Collaboratory project and which will be expanded in a new Illinois NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library project, centers around semantic retrieval and user customization. Semantic retrieval supports a higher level of abstraction in user search, which can overcome the vocabulary problem for information retrieval. Rather than searching for words within the object space, the search is for terms within a concept space (graph of terms occurring within objects linked to each other by the frequency with which they occur together). Co-occurrence graphs seem to provide good suggestive power in specialized domains, such as biology. By providing a more understandable, system-generated, semantics-rich concept space as an abstraction of the enormously complex object space plus algorithms and interface to assist in object/concept spaces traversal, we believe we can greatly alleviate both information overload and the vocabulary problem of internet services. These techniques will also be used to provide a form of customized retrieval and automatic information routing. Results from past research, the specific algorithms and techniques, and the research plan for enhancing the NCSA Mosaic's search capability in the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library project will be discussed.

Digital archives are not meant to be mere collections of digital artifacts organized for reference. It ought to be a record, providing evidence for dynamic digital cultural activities, because these activities form an organic and primary source of cultural information and artifacts. This paper investigates two national web archiving projects, argues for the need for greater attention to be paid to archival principles and shows how contextual elements can be retained in a collection. We will also demonstrate how some of these principles have been applied in the Asian Tsunami Web Archives via a web archival method called Web Sphere Analysis. In conclusion, we present a framework where existing and future web archives projects can incorporate Web Sphere analysis to transform their collection into a genuine Digital Archives and become a richer resource for future research.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This research presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Using a variation of the automatic thesaurus generation techniques, to which we refer as the concept space approach, we aimed to create graphs of domain-specific concepts (terms) and their weighted co-occurrence relationships for all major engineering domains. Merging these concept spaces and providing traversal paths across different concept spaces could potentially help alleviate the vocabulary (difference) problem evident in large-scale information retrieval. We have experimented previously with such a technique for a smaller molecular biology domain (Worm Community System, with 10+ MBs of document collection) with encouraging results.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Public awareness of the Net as a critical infrastructure in the 1990s has spurred a new revolution in the technologies for information retrieval in digital libraries.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This chapter will focus on digital libraries, starting with a discussion of the historical visionaries, definitions, driving forces and enabling technologies and some key research issues. Also discussed will be some of the US and international digital library projects and research initiatives. Some of the emerging techniques for building large-scale digital libraries, including semantic interoperability, will be described. Finally, the conclusion will offer some future directions for digital libraries.

Poster paper / The advent of Information and communication technology has revolutionized the way information was accessed and disseminated; one of the most visible changes came in the arena of librarianship. Suddenly, the idea of easy, fingertip access to information became widely prevalent and phrases like "virtual library," "electronic library," "library without walls" and, most recently, "digital library," very popular. However, this produced a new and confusing bog of electronic "stuff" that is hard to find, hard to use, buried in restrictions, unreliable in content, and useless to researchers baffled by bad choices of material for expensive digitisation investments? Now, the question is sustaining digital libraries will require overcoming substantial uncertainties about long-term preservation, institutional commitments, and financing. AND here lies the challenge for the digital librarian!!!! Playing the balancing act between management, fast changing needs of the user community and ever changing information storage media and technologies.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This research aims to provide a semantic, concept-based retrieval option that could supplement existing information retrieval options. Our proposed approach is based on textual analysis of a large corpus of domain-specific documents in order to generate a large set of subject vocabularies. By adopting cluster analysis techniques to analyze the co-occurrence probabilities of the subject vocabularies, a similarity matrix of vocabularies can be built to represent the important concepts and their weighted “relevance” relationships in the subject domain. To create a network of concepts, which we refer to as the “concept space” for the subject domain, we propose to develop general AI-based graph traversal algorithms and graph matching algorithms to automatically translate a searcher’ s preferred vocabularies into a set of the most semantically relevant terms in the database’s underlying subject domain. By providing a more understandable, system-generated, semantics-rich concept space plus algorithms to assist in concept/information spaces traversal, we believe we can greatly alleviate both information overload and the vocabulary problem. In this chapter, we first review our concept space approach and the associated algorithms in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe our experience in using such an approach. In Section 4, we summarize our research findings and our plan for building a semantics-rich Interspace for the Illinois Digital Library project.

This abstract is an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the Report: "The general goals for this summative evaluation study are twofold. One goal is to inform our understanding about the impact that use of project support materials (e.g., lesson plans) has on teaching. Consequently, research efforts were made to assess teachersâ use of the site and changes in their instructional strategies, if any, as the result of having the project support materials available for lesson planning and instruction. A second goal is to determine the impact of the Teachersâ Domain: Physical Science features and resource material on student learning of science as described in the National Science Education Standards in the areas of physical science content and process. Toward these ends, both descriptive and explanatory findings are reported. The researcher looked for patterns in the quantitative and qualitative data to explain the effective and ineffective aspects of the Web site. Credibility of findings were established through triangulation of methods. Communication between the evaluator and project staff took place at the outset of research in order to review developments and agree upon specific evaluation issues." The comprehensive evaluation is 111 (88 numbered) pages long and besides a summary of results also contains respondents actual comments.