This paper surveys information architecture in the context of digital libraries. Key concepts are defined as well as common attributes of information architectures in general. Communications standards - including hybrid TCP/IP-OSI, CORBA, and Web services - are explored, as well as the history of information architecture and related models. A number of digital library projects are analyzed with a focus on their distinct architectures. The key role of information architecture in the design and development of the twenty-first century digital library is detailed throughout.
Europeana - the European digital library, museum and archive - is a 2-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers. The prototype will be launched in November 2008 by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media.
The concept of representation format, or type, permeates all technical areas of digital repositories. Policy and processing decisions regarding object ingest, storage, access, and preservation are frequently conditioned on a per-format basis. In order to achieve necessary operational efficiencies, repositories need to be able to automate these procedures to the fullest extent possible.
JSTOR and the Harvard University Library are collaborating on a project to develop an extensible framework for format validation: JHOVE (pronounced "jove"), the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment.
Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for
performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex
regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same
general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the
higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract
models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region
of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is
expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a
multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence
framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered
to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific
community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.
This paper not only shares the designing and implementation challenges faced by the KnowGenesis team, but also presents the approach used to match the user requirements with the Library design. Based on the lessons learned during the process, the paper also presents specific set of guidelines and recommends methodologies that can provide critical assistance for developing and managing medium and large-scale repositories.
This is the home page for the National Science Digital Library Metadata Registry.
The Metadata Registry provides services to developers and consumers of controlled vocabularies and is one of the first production deployments of the RDF-based Semantic Web Community's Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
KHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a SOA layer which collects RDF data from web pages. It provides REST based Web Services for managing data available on Social Semantic Information Sources (SSIS): semantic blogs, semantic wikis, and JeromeDL (the Social Semantic Digital Library). These Web Services allow saving harvested data in the informal knowledge repository, and providing them in a form of informal Learning Objects (LOs) that are described accroding to LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard.
Also, IKHarvester is an extension to Didaskon system.
Didaskon (διδάσκω - gr. teach) delivers a framework for composing an on-demand curriculum from existing Learning Objects provided by e-Learning services (formal learning). Moreover, the system derives from SSIS which provide informal knowledge. Then, the selection and work-flow scheduling of Learning Objects is based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills/knowledge (pre-conditions), anticipated resulting skills/knowledge (goal) and technical details of the clients platform.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive. Our overarching aims are to preserve a record of scholarship for posterity and to advance research and teaching in cost-effective ways. We operate a research platform that deploys information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. We collaborate with organizations that can help us achieve our objectives and maximize the benefits for the scholarly community
The key phrase is "forced browsing". Scientific discovery is often a story of serendipity, of stumbling on an idea that has been neglected or discarded (it's one of those remote Google search results that you don't bother to click on). The question is whether putting science on the internet makes such unexpected encounters less likely.