Search results

For over a decade, the Louisiana State University Libraries have been engaged in providing digital access to their many varied special collections. The most recent of these projects is a collaboration between the LSU Libraries, the New Orleans Public Library, and the LSU Digital Library, focused on the upcoming bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase on 30 April 2003. “Louisiana Purchase bicentennial: a heritage explored” will be a collection of more than 25,000 images of primary source material from the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s held by the LSU libraries and the New Orleans Public Library. The collection is scheduled to be completed and online in March of 2003, and will be available for use by educators, school children, and independent researchers. This article details the process of digitizing such a varied collection, and the lessons learned from it.

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenges that special collections repositories face when creating digital surrogates driven by researcher demand, to link these digitization issues with archival practice, and to provide recommendations for improvement.

Presents an overview of the development of the University of Maryland Libraries' digital imaging workflows and a critique of current practices.

A viable digital repository can be built from surrogates created in response to researcher demand, but there are limitations to this approach, with opportunity for improvement.

As a case study, this paper is limited to one institution's perspective.

Provides insight into constructing and managing digitization programs at special collections repositories.

This paper offers a case study approach for an institutional digital repository influenced heavily by researcher demand, in contrast to a digital repository constructed with a more structured plan.

The purpose of this paper is to address the key components of building good digital collections.

Different categories of digital collections based on guidelines defined by the authors are presented. Issues related to public access are illustrated. A model using the FRBR entities relationships is proposed to improve the accessibility of digital cultural materials so that scholarly research can be enhanced. The number of digital collections has been increased significantly since the late 1990s, but few studies investigated how these collections were organized and managed. To attain an understanding of the current status of institutional digital collections, various collection sites were examined and analyzed. The study focused on the existence and level of richness of bibliographic descriptions provided for each image; whether a search engine was available or not; how easily the search could be performed; and how search results were organized. The presentation of search results is problematic. Applying the IFLA FRBR model to digital materials can bring a solution.

The IFLA FRBR model presents the search results hierarchically so that related materials can be easily collocated. This feature meets the end‐users needs. The attributes of work and expression entities presented in the IFLA FRBR model should be applied differently for event‐based digital cultural materials. Defining work‐ or expression‐level entities under the event or theme will be more logical than under author and/or title for cultural materials. Doing expression‐level cataloging might also work for this type of materials.

Before building a digital collection, institutions should have a well‐thought‐out and well‐planned collection management mechanism. Metadata scheme, content standards and content management system are important fundamentals. Much can be done to improve the accessibility of digital collections. The proposed FRBRized approach will make the retrieval of digital cultural objects easier.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the University of South Carolina's Digital Activities Department's history and development.

This article recounts the development of the Digital Activities Department and examines local policies and procedures. In addition, the article discusses the fundamental issues of choosing a digital repository, creating metadata, and scanning images. The authors take a practical, in‐depth approach in discussing their experiences.

After just a few years, the Library has launched the department and successfully provided online access to a growing number of digital collections. Collaboration has been the key element in the department's success.

The lessons learned will help other institutions develop digital activities departments and provide online access to digital archives and collections.

The purpose of this project is to study how art museum practitioners use current image‐indexing practices and services to retrieve images from museum collections. The investigation examines several areas, including image needs, information‐seeking strategies, information queries, search functions, display formats, and human‐computer interaction.

The six participating museums are in Washington, DC, and the states of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. The investigator interviewed 35 museum practitioners in various departments at the six museums about their image sources, search behaviors, and use of images.

Wide variations and internal conflicts exist among curators, IT staff, slide librarians, registrars' offices, educational staff, faculty, and photographers. Museum practitioners' knowledge and expertise should inform the design and presentation of digital images of museum collections as well as the images' relationships with the construction of digital museums.

Digital technologies have pushed museum practitioners to initiate organizational changes to accommodate the effects of technology. Museums' digital images and their relevant information are the foundation of the digital museums. Museums must incorporate a re‐examination of their roles in the digital age. An ideal digital museum is not just an online version of the museum, if that is achievable, or an online catalog of museum collections with pictures. It is also a resource that must be founded upon museum practitioners' expertise and professional practices.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the approach to collection development that has characterized the building of the ARTstor Digital Library.

The approach adopted is a brief history, overview, and analysis of the development of the ARTstor collections.

The paper finds that ARTstor has sought to pursue a strategic approach to collection development, taking as its point of departure the needs of potential users.

The paper offers an inside view of the development of a new non‐profit digital library.

This study aims to explore how metadata have been applied in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) institutions in New Zealand (NZ) and to analyse its overall quality with the interoperability of the metadata element set especially in mind.

The first stage of data collection involved an analysis of the metadata records from 16 institutions from the NZ GLAM sector to examine the types and extent of metadata used. However, by looking at publicly accessible metadata records, it was impossible to determine the full extent of metadata created, especially when there could be metadata that were kept in‐house. This was complemented with interviewing of staff from the institutions concerned.

The study found that metadata records for digital images in four types of institutions have different emphases on metadata functions and a variety of metadata are not applied on a consistent basis. The lack of technical data in metadata records means that digital visual images are not always well protected. There is a consensus among those interviewed that metadata sharing is important. However, the wide use of a proprietary system which comes with pre‐existing metadata fields could result in a lack of flexibility and a risk that institutions adopt cataloguing practices to accommodating their collection management systems rather than to the requirements for interoperability and long‐term preservation.

In addition to studying metadata quality in GLAM digital image repositories, the study also examined the rationale and factors affecting the current practice via interviews with representatives from the institutions concerned. This shed light on potential barriers to interoperability that warranted further examination.

The aim of this paper is to examine related studies to identify which retrieval methods are supported by current digital cultural heritage libraries. In this way it is hoped to provide a direction for future cultural heritage applications to provide more complete and/or improved retrieval functionality.

The methodology of this paper is based on introducing the general concept of image‐based retrieval systems as well as their retrieval methods. Then, users' needs are discussed to illustrate the demands of semantic‐based retrieval. After the retrieval methods have been presented, current digital cultural heritage libraries are examined in terms of their supported retrieval methods that allow users to query images.

Current digital cultural heritage libraries mostly provide only general retrieval methods based on image‐based low‐level features, i.e. query by image contents. Very few consider other retrieval methods such as browsing and semantic‐based retrieval. In addition, none of the current systems provide all possible retrieval methods for users.

This study is the first one to examine image‐based retrieval methods in digital cultural heritage libraries. This study supports the improvement of retrieval functionality for digital cultural heritage libraries in the future.

By reporting the experience gained in the development of a digital image library in the academic environment, this paper aims at providing perspective developers with insights on the main usability issues raised by this type of project.

The paper addresses three common needs in academia with respect to image collections: preservation, access, and reuse. In the framework of the specific project experience, it discusses how usability issues have been tackled at design time, highlights the usability problems revealed by tests on the first implemented prototype, and advances proposals on how these problems may be addressed.

Team formation and high turn‐over impact usability design; collection management functionalities effect final product usability; usability and resource reuse levels are severely reduced if the services are limited to those of classic digital libraries.

All usability issues are discussed with respect to the specific project characterized by a small, in‐house development team with high turn‐over; a participatory design approach; a fairly small, accessible, and heterogeneous user (and stakeholder) population; very limited financial resources but also limited time constraints.

A usability guide for future developers of digital image libraries in academia.

Addressing usability issues related specifically to the design of digital image libraries rather than text‐based digital libraries. Addressing the objectives of image reuse and of widespread adoption. Discussing usability design by a team of students with heterogeneous background in academic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the implications of current theories that advocate for minimal levels of description in digital collections. Specifically, this paper looks at the archival theory of “More Product, Less Process” and its encouragement of collection-level description. The purpose of the study was to analyze how levels of description impact resource retrieval.

This study analyzed 35 images from a New York Public Library (NYPL) digital collection present on the NYPL website and on Flickr. The methodology was designed to reflect users’ information seeking behavior for image collections. There were two research questions guiding this study: what are the descriptive terms used to describe items in digital collections? and what is the success rate of retrieving resources using assigned descriptive terms?

The results of this study revealed that the images from the NYPL collection were more difficult to find on the institution’s website as compared with Flickr. These findings suggest that lesser levels of description in digital collections hinder resource retrieval.

These findings suggest that lesser description levels hurt the findability of resources. In the wake of theories such as “More Product, Less Process”, information professionals must find ways to assign metadata to individual materials in digital image collections.

Recent research concerning description levels of digital collections is several years old and focuses mostly on the usefulness of collection-level metadata as a supplement to or substitute for item-level metadata. Few, if any, studies exist that explore the implications of description levels on resource retrievability and findability. This study is also unique in that it discusses these implications in the context of less-is-more theories of archival processing.