A form founded on repetition, and as such an outgrowth of a fundamental musical and rhetorical principle, in which a discrete theme is repeated several or many times with various modifications ... The roots of the word variatio in the adjective varius originally referred, in non-specialized antique usage, to an impression of mixed coloration in plants and animals ... Thus from the very beginning we see foreshadowed the twofold musical meanings of variation as technique and as form. (Sisman, 2003)
In order to understand what has changed for scientific and scholarly research publication in the transition from the Gutenberg (on-paper) to the Post-Gutenberg (online) era, we first have to make five critical distinctions. If we fail to make any one of these distinctions, it will be impossible to make sense of the unique new possibilities opened up by the online era of 'Scholarly Skywriting' (Harnad, 1990) in the 'Post-Gutenberg Galaxy' (Harnad, 1991).
Electronic texts, unlike the fixed texts of print data, are subject to inadvertent destruction of both the physical medium on which they exist and the intellectual content of their information. Electronic texts, so easy to edit, manipulate, revise, and improve, have lost their assurance of permanence. There are many ways to destroy electronic data inadvertently. First, the medium is at risk. Then there is the bigger problem of intellectual preservation. Data may be destroyed inadvertently. Many types of accidental changes may occur: a document can be damaged accidentally or as a result of the nature of the electronic resource (for example, a dynamic database, by its nature, is frequently updated, erasing previous data in the updating). Unauthorized tampering with one's own work, for example to cover one's tracks or destroy evidence, or with the work of another person, can also destroy electronic data. Lack of metadata and systems documentation, electronic data in forms that cannot be preserved because the software or hardware becomes obsolete or the digital resources have been designed to prevent any copying, and finally a lack of empowering mechanisms to institutions willing and able to be caretakers of our electronic resources all threaten our digital heritage.
Describes the neglected area of e-collection building, on the taxonomy of e-collections and on the possible range of online services.
History and technology provided the Library of Congress with a unique opportunity at the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st to realize fully the potential of a digital library – a virtual library without walls, not bound by time or place. History's greatest innovations have been about mass communication. The printing press linked communities and created a literary culture, the automobile linked urban and rural America, and the internet has spawned a virtual community where, with a PC and a modem, a person can connect, any time, anywhere, with another human being to share information, seek advice, buy or sell a product – the opportunities are limitless.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the new library at Tilburg University was planned and built. Perhaps more than any library building in Europe, it became a model and a 'must see' for those planning libraries in preparation for the digital age. It is difficult to find a library or learning centre in Europe and beyond which was built in the last ten years, where the librarians and architects did not visit Tilburg. For their vision and strategy we pay tribute to the then librarian, Hans Geleijnse, his predecessor Leo Wieers, Solke Veling and the University Computer Centre, the board of Tilburg University and the architect Martien Janssen and all the others whom is it not possible to mention here (Geleijnse and Grootaers, 1994).
The University of Central England (UCE) is a large university based in Birmingham, UK with a student population of 23,000. The student body is a complex mix of full-time, part-time, post-graduate, post-experience and distance learners. There are nine academic faculties offering a broad range of courses, many leading to professional qualifications but with an emphasis on vocational education rather than the humanities. In common with library services in many new universities, the UCE Library Service is responsible for multiple campus service points spread across the city.
The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is a collaborative effort of universities around the world to promote creating, archiving, distributing and accessing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Since its inception in 1996, over a hundred universities have joined the initiative, underscoring the importance institutions place on training their graduates in the emerging forms of digital publishing and information access. The outreach and training mission of NDLTD is an ongoing project so in this article we report on the current status of membership and support activities. Recent research has focused on creating a union database that will provide a means to search and retrieve ETDs from the combined collections of NDLTD member institutions. The Virtua system developed by VTLS will serve as the heart of this union database. In order to bridge the gap between the existing distributed institutional archives and a unified collection of ETDs, we have developed a metadata standard especially suited to ETDs this is then used by partner sites to export their freely-available metadata using the Metadata Harvesting Protocol of the Open Archives Initiative. We also link name authority information into the metadata records to support unique identification of authors and others associated with the works. Additional research efforts include advanced search mechanisms, semantic interoperability, the design and development of multi- and cross-lingual search systems, and software modules that support the development of higher-level services to aid researchers in seeking relevant ETDs.
Introduction The UK eLib programme was launched in 1994 in an atmosphere of expectancy. Seven years, 70 projects and £20 million later, the programme came to a close. The key question is: was it successful? And if so, in what ways? What were its main achievements and, for that matter, failures? These questions (whether it was successful, and if so, how) have been debated within the information profession for a while; a substantial body of the professional literature has addressed them. The consensus seems to have emerged in the literature that eLib was (at least in part) successful, but this success is defined and qualified in different ways. Drawing on the literature and on the personal experiences of the present author of working on the programme, this chapter will attempt to analyse some of the successes and failures of eLib.
This chapter considers the main issues identified by researchers in the field of digital libraries and compares them with issues actually encountered in developing a real digital library service. In order to make this comparison meaningful, some background information is given about the Glasgow Digital Library. This is followed by a systematic commentary on sixteen research issues, with details of problems encountered in practice, solutions adopted, lessons learned, and an assessment of each issue's significance. The 80 days of the title refers to the time available to the author to carry out implementation.
The technological interoperability of digital libraries must be rethought in order to adapt to new uses and networks. Informative digital environments aimed at responding to heritage, cultural, scientific or commercial demands have taken over the global cyberspace and have redesigned the techno-informative landscape of the Web. However, while the technological models demonstrate their effectiveness and explain to a large extent the creation of digital libraries, archives and deposits, the subjacent concept of uses continues to cause debate. The information technologies used by heterogeneous digital libraries enable a technical interoperability of content. This is not enough to allow the adhesion of a public connected to very different information profiles and techniques. This book explores the avenues of a user-orientated interoperability where the questions of consultation interfaces and content description processes are studied. Discusses Metadata as a resource for linkingProvides a practical approachA valuable resource for anyone involved in digital library developments and digital collections and services
Widespread access to the Internet and its most commonly used services, such as electronic mail, Web and, most recently, digital social networks, has led to a trivialization of information retrieval (IR) practices [GRI 11, DIN 14, DIN 07, CIA 05, ASS 02], which were in the recent past reserved for information specialists (journalists, information officers, guards, archivists, librarians, etc.) [CAT 01, DUF 01, LEF 00]. Having been introduced to the general public by the free access general search engines, IR was for several years delegated to a group of Internet surfers at the mercy of these automated indexing and retrieval systems with basic mechanisms1, which can precisely and rapidly list a large part of the visible document production in the Web of documents [LEW 08, CHI 07, RIE 06, LEL 99].
The freedom of all European citizens to work and live anywhere in the European Union has necessitated unprecedented procedures of cooperation between the Member States in order to make that legal liberty into a de facto freedom. Below the surface of this major evolution, what European citizens expect is a significant modernization of administration and administrative practices. From this new political and economic configuration, the Europeans demand a reduction in administrative isolationism and genuine quality of service in terms of access and individualized treatment [ASS 07, FLI 04, SAU 02].
Web technologies have facilitated the development of publication sites with elegant graphic design, intuitive semiotics, refined interactivity, infallible availability, guaranteed evolutivity, which are completely compatible with the habits of users accustomed to the social Web. The earliest versions of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which historical publishers (Microsoft and Netscape) transformed as they saw fit1 to ensure a “captive” audience, have given way to much more structured versions, conforming to the recommendations of the W3 (HTML 4.01, eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) and HTML5). These versions, implemented in the latest-generation browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc.), are stricter from a syntactical viewpoint. Inspired by Extensible Markup Language (XML), they extend the separation of the logical structuring of content and the formatting properties.
Content generated by users is one of the most interesting phenomena of published media. However, the possibility of unrestricted edition is a source of doubts about its quality. This issue has motivated many studies on how to automatically assess content quality in collaborative web sites. Generally, these studies use machine learning techniques to combine large number of quality indicators into a single value representing the overall quality of the document. This need for a high number of indicators, however, has detrimental implications both on the efficiency and on the effectiveness of the quality assessment algorithms. In this work, we exploit and extend a feature selection method based on the SPEA2 multi-objective genetic algorithm. Results show that we can reduce the feature set to a fraction of 15% through 25% of the original, while obtaining error rates comparable to the state of the art.
Mood is a popular access point in music digital libraries and online music repositories, and is often represented as numerical values in a small number of emotion-related dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal). As music mood is recognized as culturally dependent, this study investigates whether regression models built with music data in one culture can be applied to music in another culture. Results indicate that cross-cultural predictions of both valence and arousal values are feasible.
