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Digital Libraries</a>
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<h1 class="title">Themes: Digital Libraries</h1>
<h2 class="title">What do we mean by digital libraries?</h2>
<p class="title">Libraries are a key component of the information
infrastructure which underpins modern life. The provide a essential
resource for the public and the specialist for reference and for
research.</p>
<p class="title">However, the environment for libraries is
changing. The cost of buying and archiving books and journals is
increasing, and the amount of space required to provide physical
collections based on paper is becoming so great that only a few
national collections can accommodate more than a fraction of the
total output. At the same time, the use of digital media has
enabled the production of material electronically economically and
with much smaller space constraints. at the same time the near
universal availability of high-speed networks with the WWW has
revolutionised the distribution and access of information resources
to anywhere in the world. Together these givce an opportunity to
reinvent the library as a <em>digital library</em>, a library which
is largely defined by its provision of resources using digital
media, and providing online access to those resources.</p>
<p>Digital libraries also offer the opportunity for the library to
reconsider its function. Traditionally, libaries have collected
publications generated by publishers, and catalogued them so that
they can be retrieved in a systematic fashion. In a university or
research organisation, they have typically supplied subject
specialists to assist users to find the relevant resources. In a
world of digital libraries, this function can be reconsidered, and
two major functions are now possible:Information gathering, and
Information Publication</p>
<h3>Information gathering.</h3>
<p>This is the traditional role of the library; gathering and
cataloguing resources for archiving and use by the users of the
library.</p>
<p>This traditional role remains, but with a change of emphasis
away from the storage and cataloguing of physical resources, to the
provision of <em>access</em> to reources (they are not necessarily
physically moved) and the addition of electronic, searchable
catalogues so that users can electronically locate the relevant
resources.</p>
<p>For information gathering in digital libraries, the major issue
is how to locate material from amongst the very large amount
available either in free or subscription repositories, those which
are most relevant to the users in the organisation; that is how to
narrow down the search accurately to provide the most relevant and
only the most relevant publications.</p>
<h3>Information publishing.</h3>
<p>The library also has the opportunity of becoming the channel by
which the organisation disseminates its results to the world.</p>
<p>In this role, the library takes on one of the traditional roles
of the publisher in spreading the word of the output of the
organisation. Publishers will certainly likely to continue to play
their role, typically as a mark of quality through peer review. But
through movements such as the Open Archive Initiative <a href=
"http://www.openarchives.org/">http://www.openarchives.org/</a>,
institutes are increasing preserving and disseminating their own
publications.</p>
<p>For information publishing via libraries, the main issue is how
to provide information on the publications stored in the
institutional repository so that they can be accessed by the
maximum number of the relevant readership (for example typically
for research publications this would be other researchers in the
field; for other publications there is also the most relevant
target audience. Thus the problem is one of providing accurate
catalogue data which can be searched by other users and their
agents.</p>
<h2 class="title">How does the semantic web help?</h2>
<p>The key aspect for the Digital Library community is the
provision of <em>shared catalogues</em> which can be published and
browsed. This requires the use of common <em>metadata</em> to
describe the fields of the catalogue, (such as author, title, date,
publisher); and common <em>controlled vocabulary</em> to allow
subject indentifiers to be assigned to publications.</p>
<p>By publishing controlled vocabularies in one place, which can
then be accessed by all users across the Web, then library
catalogues can use the same web-accessible vocabularies to
catalogue their publications, marking them using the most relevant
terms from the most relevant thesauri for the domain of interest.
Then search engines can use the same vocabularies to control and
refine their search to ensure that the most relevant items of
information are returned to the user.</p>
<p>The semantic web offers relevant standards and approaches that
can help with these problems. It offers open standards that can
enable vendor neutral solutions, it offers a useful flexibility
(structured and semi-structured, formal and informal, open
extensibility) and it helps to support decentralized solutions
where that is appropriate. Thus RDF can be used as a common
interchange format for catalogue metadata and shared vocabulary,
which can be used by all libraries and search engines across the
Web.</p>
<p class="title">Whilst other formats can be used as well, RDF does
have some advantages. It is a generic open standard whereas many
alternatives are either proprietary or specific to a particular
domain. It standardizes the data model (together with a
serialization syntax) whereas alternatives such as direct use of
XML focus on the document syntax. By breaking down information into
small independent units (triples) and using global identifiers for
all objects/properties/types (URIs) it becomes possible to
integrate information from several sources by simply concatenating
the sets of the triples and following the new relations. The data
model is sufficiently simple and makes sufficiently few assumptions
that it be used to express both structured and semi-structured data
making integration across heterogeneous sources more
straightforward.</p>
<h2 class="title">SWADE resources relevant to this problem</h2>
<h3 class="title">Thesaurus formats and demonstrators</h3>
<p>The main place to begin for the Digital Library community in the
SWAD-Europe project is the <a href=
"http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/">SWAD-Europe
Thesaurus Activity</a>. Here, we provide a set of standard formats
and tools for describing controlled vocabularies and
classifications called the Simple Knowledge Organistion System
(SKOS). We also provide some sample thesauri which use these
formats, and some demonstration software to allow people and
programs to browse and select terms from a thesuaus across the
web.</p>
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