Reading Notes: Week 2 with question.

Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox. “A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries”, D-Lib Magazine, December 2001. Volume 7 Number 12. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/suleman/12suleman.html.

The development of a standards and definitions for DL’s is difficult due to the current varied design differences and varied concentrations of specialists and designers, be they IT, librarians or information architects.

REASONS:
Many DLs are built as a response to the needs of a local community, involving personnel with no prior experience.

Most modern DLs have WWW interfaces -- thus formed to resemble the way people use the WWW, however the way person’s interact with the WWW is constantly in flux.

Each DL is aimed at meeting the needs of a particular community -- so the underlying program logic varies vastly among systems.

Most DLs are intended to be quick solutions to urgent community needs -- so not much thought goes into planning for future redeployment of the systems.

DLs, by the need to be responsive to user needs, can be complex, so new projects sometimes choose to develop from the ground up. It is cheaper than adapting a preconceived framework to a new scenario. And as these systems become more complex maintenance becomes more time consuming and difficult.

A natural solution would be to create software toolkits that would assist in a standard component model. This would in turn allow for broader connections between particular DLs and promote an ability to cultivate an easily extensible field of individual DLs. It is widely accepted as good software engineering practice to adopt some form of component model in regards to any encroaching advancements that could solidify and promote the DL field.



William Y. Arms , Christophe Blanchi, Edward A. Overly. ”An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries”. D-Lib Magazine, February 1997. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february97/cnri/02arms1.html.

A digital object is a way of structuring information in digital form, some of which may be metadata. a unique identifier, called a handle.

Components of the computer system
1. User interfaces
2. Repository
3. Handle system
4. Search system

This article explores early ideas in the development of housing data within a DL. And the early theories on how to house it within an architectural framework. Arms and company dedicated a lot of the article to understanding the notion and vital importance the handle system plays in the search, select , retrieval formula if the basic DL model.


Sandra Payette, Christophe Blanchi, Carl Lagoze, Edward A. Overly. “Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories, The Cornell/CNRI Experiments”, D-Lib Magazine, May 1999, Volume 5 Issue 5. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may99/payette/05payette.html.

This paper focuses on the definition of interoperability in the joint Cornell/CNRI work. Their motivation for this work is the eventual deployment of tested reference implementations of the repository architecture for experimentation and development by fellow digital library researchers. Section 2 summarizes the digital object and repository approach that was the focus of the interoperability experiments. Section 3 describes the set of experiments that tested interoperability at increasing levels of functionality. Section 4 discusses general conclusions a preview of future work, including plans to develop experimentation to the point of defining a set of formal metrics for measuring interoperability for repositories and digital objects.

The article is a strict discussion of repositories and digital objects, the writers however suggest the obvious implications there work will have in the DL field in general. There experiments are goal driven toward increasing ease in accession between separate repositories (interoperability). The article does discuss the future issues of security and access management in the context of new interoperability parameters.

Question for the week: How much further have these ideas come since their development in the late 90’s early 20th century? Do the warrant more complicated charts in the case of the Arms examples, or is the tendency toward simplifying?