Building Digital Libraries Made Easy: Toward Open Digital Libraries

Abstract

Abstract. Digital libraries (DLs) promote a sharing culture among those who contribute and those who use resources. This same approach works when building Open Digital Libraries (ODLs). Leveraging the intellectual and practical investment made in the Open Archives Initiative through an eXtended Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (XPMH), one can build lightweight protocols to tie together key components that together make up the core of a DL. DL developers in various settings have learned how to apply this framework in a few hours. The ODL approach has been effective with the Computer Science Teaching Center (www.cstc.org), the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (www.ndltd.org), and AmericanSouth.org. Hence, to support our Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (www.citidel.org) and to provide a generic capability for other parts of the US National Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education Digital Library (www.nsdl.org), we are developing a "DL-in-a-box" toolkit. When lightweight protocols, pools of components, and open standard reference models are combined carefully, as suggested in the OCKHAM discussions, both the DL user and developer communities can benefit from the principle of sharing.

Digital libraries

“…These applications are said to demonstrate the benefits of the 5S formal descriptions of digital library architectures (structures), content definitions (streams), clients (societies), service models (scenarios), and perspectives (spaces). If not yet exactly full‐scale digital libraries in a box, these are, at least, boxes of useful components (Fox, 2003; Fox, Suleman, & Luo, 2002; Hussein, Fox, Kelapure, Krowne, & Luo, 2003).…”

Semantics in the Semantic Web: A Critical Evaluation

“…-Real world semantics: the practice of mapping real world objects for a system originated in database research, when data models became known as semantic models (Peckham and Maryanski 1988); in this case, semantics concerns the improvement of the understanding of models, since the previous ones were implementation-oriented; -Implicit semantics: this is not necessarily a formal semantics, and what seems to characterize it is the existence of a consensus among a group of people in order to establish a standard; in digital libraries, for instance, this approach is called federation (Fox, 2002); and, -In addition to exceptions, we can still highlight in Table 2 the "Formal for humans" semantics item in order to clarify that Formal Semantics is not exclusively used in computer-based information system contexts, but is also used by people.…”

Convergence of knowledge management and e-learning: the GetSmart experience

“…We have also developed a standalone version. We hope to make GetSmart more portable by configuring it into an ODL [7 ] component.…”