How to Build a Digital Library

Front Cover
Elsevier, Jul 16, 2002 - Computers - 518 pages

Given modern society's need to control its ever-increasing body of information, digital libraries will be among the most important and influential institutions of this century. With their versatility, accessibility, and economy, these focused collections of everything digital are fast becoming the "banks" in which the world's wealth of information is stored. How to Build a Digital Library is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library-no matter how large or small. Two internationally recognized experts provide a fully developed, step-by-step method, as well as the software that makes it all possible. How to Build a Digital Library is the perfectly self-contained resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries.

  • Sketches the history of libraries-both traditional and digital-and their impact on present practices and future directions
  • Offers in-depth coverage of today's practical standards used to represent and store information digitally
  • Uses Greenstone, freely accessible open-source software-available with interfaces in the world's major languages (including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic)
  • Written for both technical and non-technical audiences

From inside the book

Contents

The world of digital libraries
1
Sorting out the ingredients
39
User interfaces
77
The raw material
131
Elements of organization
221
Building collections with Greenstone
283
How Greenstone works
355
Standards and protocols
393
Future past and present
443
Installing and operating Greenstone
477
Glossary
481
References
489
Index
499
About the authors
517
Copyright

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Page 12 - President John Adams created a reference library for Congress when the seat of government was moved to the new capital city of Washington in 1800. He began by providing $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress—and for putting up a suitable apartment for
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Page 23 - Effective human development blossoms from empowerment rather than gifting. As the Chinese proverb says, "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him to fish and he will eat for the rest of his days." Disseminating information originating in the developed world is
Page 15 - years ago, science fiction writer HG Wells was promoting the concept of a "world brain" based on a permanent world encyclopedia which "would be the mental background of every intelligent [person] in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere,
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Page 16 - stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility
Page 222 - material in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid to the maximum the reader's comprehension of the text.
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About the author (2002)

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography.

David Bainbridge is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Optical Music Recognition from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand where he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar. Since moving to Waikato in 1996 he has continued to broadened his interest in digital media, while retaining a particular emphasis on music. An active member of the New Zealand Digital Library project, he manages the group's digital music library, Meldex, and has collaborated with several United Nations Agencies, the BBC and various public libraries. David has also worked as a research engineer for Thorn EMI in the area of photo-realistic imaging and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1991 as the class medalist in Computer Science.