Collection metadata solutions for digital library applications

Abstract

Within a digital library, collections may range from an ad hoc set of objects that serve a temporary purpose to established library collections intended to persist through time. The objects in these collections vary widely, from library and data center holdings to pointers to real‐world objects, such as geographic places, and the various metadata schemas that describe them. The key to integrated use of such a variety of collections in a digital library is collection metadata that represents the inherent and contextual characteristics of a collection. The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) Project has designed and implemented collection metadata for several purposes: in XML form, the collection metadata “registers” the collection with the user interface client; in HTML form, it is used for user documentation; eventually, it will be used to describe the collection to network search agents; and it is used for internal collection management, including mapping the object metadata attributes to the common search parameters of the system.

The HathiTrust Research Center Workset Ontology: A Descriptive Framework for Non-Consumptive Research Collections

“…The notion of collection and the determination of what the label "collection" actually describes continues to be challenging for digital libraries (see [3,6,9,13,17]; among others). That scholars actively undertake collection development activities as a normal method for furthering their research seems incontrovertible [3,8,10,11,12].…”

“…The idea around non-consumptive research is that humanities scholars and researchers can employ computational science techniques to large corpuses of text that fall within the auspices of copyright. The settlement 6 vaguely defines "non-consumptive research" as any research that involves computational analysis on books wherein the researchers do not, themselves, have direct access to the text of those books such that they might read them or reproduce large portions of text from them. The entire workset notion has been developed by the HTRC as a means to refer to research collections that are expected to operate within the confines of a non-consumptive computational environment.…”

“…5 It seems likely that there will be a great deal of overlap between curatorial criteria and research motivation; however, for the purposes of developing a metadata vocabulary, distinguishing between these two concepts allows us to provide places to record the specifics of curatorial policy separately from the generalizations of motivating research questions. 6 As summarized in [1] and [4]. 7 These are expected to be drawn from an ontology of concepts such as SKOS.…”

Public Commons of Geographic Data: Research and Development Challenges

“…There are currently many competing metadata standards in use [8] and even professionals have difficulty staying current with them. In addition, using any current metadata system, for example the ISO 19115 Metadata Standard (ultimately ISO 19139 in XML), requires systematic study and practice.…”

MEDQUAL: Improving Medical Web Search over Time with Dynamic Credibility Heuristics

“…In addition, concept maps may be generated with Latent Semantic Indexing (Deerwester, Dumais et al 1990); this technique has been applied in numerous specialized domains, for example the biomedical area (Chute, Yang et al 1991). The Alexandria Digital Earth project visualizes geospatial data (Hill, Janee et al 1999) using the ADEPT digital library architecture (Janee and Frew 2002) which provides logical "buckets" for metadata collection descriptions. Finally, the GenNav project (Bodenreider 2002) provides an interface to link a large glossary of genetic terms to the visualization of gene ontology pathways for biomedical researchers" (Ginsburg 2004).…”