Evaluation of the accessibility of archival cartographic documents in digital libraries

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to present the authors’ attempts to evaluate the access to archival maps available in digital libraries. Its aim was to pinpoint the factors determining the effectiveness of access to old maps and to evaluate which Polish libraries provide resources in such a way as to give the users the best chance of finding the materials necessary for their research. Design/methodology/approach The presented research focussed on archival documents from academic libraries accessible from the Polish Digital Libraries Federation and available from Europeana Collections. The evaluation criteria were established along with features that determine the level of difficulty of access to data describing archival documents. The research took into account the way of recording the data about archival documents in metadata. The authors have also analysed the quantity of available resources and the consistency of metadata record. Findings The results of the research have demonstrated that one-third of the analysed libraries deserve a positive evaluation. The digital library of the Warsaw University and the Jagiellonian Digital Library received the best scores in terms of the description of archival documents. Considering the number of resources, the Jagiellonian Digital Library and the Digital Library of the University of Wrocław are positively distinguished. Originality/value The method of evaluating the access to archival maps has been developed. The criteria and features necessary for this evaluation and the way of their interpretation have also been defined. The future goals leading to the improvement of the access to the archival maps have been also presented.

Evaluation of Metadata Describing Topographic Maps in a National Library

“…The rst part of the procedure -evaluation of topographic maps metadata -is based on the method of evaluation of the accessibility of archival cartographic documents in digital libraries de ned by the authors [6]. This methodology uses evaluation criteria of accessibility of resources and their features to assess quality of digital libraries metadata.…”

“…The model metadata pro le Spatial data are currently described with use of the ISO 19100 series standards [20] de ning the elements and the way in which they should be included in the description of the resource to obtain its correct characteristics. The basis for developing the model metadata pro le was the scope pattern [6], MARC 21 (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) [21], as well as literature on map development and their usability for various purposes [16,[22][23][24].…”

“…These weights are also indicators of the degree to which each of the metadata elements is consistent with the corresponding element of the model metadata pro le. The weights were assigned to the features based on the study by Kuzma and Moscicka [6], and they took the values 0.0, 0.5, 0.8 and 1.0, where 0.0 means that data are not available in metadata, 1.0 means that data can be taken directly from metadata, and 0.5 and 0.8 mean that data can be extracted from metadata with more (0.5) or less (0.8) workload.…”

“…In order to compare the topographic maps metadata pro le and the model metadata pro le, based on the rules/ways and their weights, the degree to which the metadata values provided according to digital library rules can ful l the model metadata pro le for the whole metadata pro le (E 1 ) was adopted using the formula presented in [6], which was generalized for one library and for any number of criteria, so that it took the form of formula (1): 1…”

“…As a result, the metadata range used for books description was adopted to the description of the maps. This is also due to the fact that certain information typical of books is typically also located on each of the maps [6]. Additionally, many studies [7][8][9][10] emphasize the need to use geographic data to increase the interoperability of data from various scienti c disciplines, which is rather time-consuming.…”