This paper describes a project led by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informações em Ciência e Tecnologia (Ibict), a government institution, to build a national digital library for electronic theses and dissertations - Bibliteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações (BDTD). The project has been a collaborative effort among Ibict, universities and other research centers in Brazil. The developers adopted a system architecture based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) in which universities and research centers act as data providers and Ibict as a service provider. A Brazilian metadata standard for electronic theses and dissertations was developed for the digital library. A toolkit including open source package was also developed by Ibict to be distributed to potential data providers. BDTD has been integrated with the international initiative: the Networked Digital Library of Thesis and Dissertation (NDLTD). Discussions in the paper address various issues related to project design, development and management as well as the role played by Ibict. Conclusions highlight some important lessons learned to date and challenges for the future in expanding the BDTD project.
This article proposes a metadata dictionary (MDD) be used as a tool for metadata management. The MDD is a repository of critical data necessary for managing metadata to create "shareable" digital collections. An operational definition of metadata management is provided. The authors explore activities involved in metadata management in organizational settings and indicate how the MDD can support these activities. A detailed discussion of the metadata dictionary and its structure, benefits and challenges is provided.
In recent years major efforts have been made in developing digital library technologies for information seeking. This is an evolving area with many challenges for both practitioners and researchers. In particular, at the current stage in digital library development, users may still be unable to find relevant resources to solve their information problems without the help of human intermediaries. Intermediaries have traditionally served an important role in assisting library system users. Following on this tradition, information services have begun to offer human‐mediated reference to assist remote users. Despite this trend, there remains an inadequate understanding of the effectiveness of these systems. This paper reports on an exploratory case study of intermediation in a hospital digital library information service. The study focused on intermediation where user‐intermediary communications were conducted through an asynchronous text‐based digital medium. The goal of the research was in describing and gaining a further understanding of the processes of intermediation. The overall approach was naturalistic with grounded theory providing a framework for data analysis. The contributions of the study are evidenced in a descriptive framework of nine categories of factors perceived as affecting digital intermediation. The paper concludes with directions for future research.
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