Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

http://persival.cs.columbia.edu/) which is a project based at Columbia
University for building a Digital Library for Patient Care.
The international digital libraries programme
In 1998 the NSF issued a call for proposals to begin addressing some of
the research challenges associated with creating international digital
libraries. The call requested multi-country, multi-team projects involving
at least one research team in the United States and one in another
country. The NSF would support the US part of a joint project while the
non-US parts needed to gain their support from other sources. The UK
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) was the first to join the
NSF in this endeavour and issued a matching call. JISC committed
£500,000 per year for three years to fund new development work in this
programme. The NSF committed a similar amount. The German
Research Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DSF) and
the European Union also joined the NSF to work on collaborative digital
library projects.
The programme aimed to create innovative and beneficial ways to
access networked resources. It planned to make many software tools
available for wider use. Specific objectives of the programme were to:
■
assemble collections of information that are not otherwise accessible
or usable because of technical barriers, distance, size, system
fragmentation or other limits;
■
create new technology and the understanding to make it possible for
a distributed set of users to find, deliver and exploit such information;
■
evaluate the effect of this new technology and its international
benefits.
4
This programme ran from August 1999 until July 2003. Projects
investigated topics such as using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to
set up an e-print archive (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5), digital
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The digital library
preservation, cross-domain searching and metadata construction. They
included projects such as:
■
Open Citation Project: looking at the set up of e-print archives:
http://opcit.eprints.org/
■
Cross-domain Resource Discovery: http://sca.lib.liv.ac.uk/cheshire/
■
HARMONY: metadata for resource discovery of multimedia digital
objects: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/harmony/
■
IMESH Toolkit: an architecture and toolkit for distributed subject
gateways: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/imesh-toolkit/
■
Online Music Recognition and Searching: http://www.omras.org/
These projects raised many issues which remain topical for digital
libraries, including the setting up of e-print archives, metadata
construction and cross-domain searching. Of these projects, the Open
Citation Project is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
Much of the pioneering digital library research concentrated on the
technicalities of the digitisation process. Scanning material to create
images was relatively unproblematic, although the real benefit of
digitisation comes from facilitating access to the text of material. Many
experiments to perfect techniques such as optical character recognition
(OCR), used to convert scanned images into machine-readable text, were
undertaken, and a large amount of literature was generated for
librarians, such as that by Ogg (1992). Later digital library projects were
more concerned with issues such as sustainability and interoperability.
These issues, among others, were identified by DELOS (2001) in their
paper ‘Digital Libraries: Future Directions for a European Research
Programme’ which set out a framework for research for the European
Union from 2002 to 2006.
UK digital library initiatives
In the UK during the corresponding period, the British Library was one
of the key players in developments and initiatives in digitisation. The
British Library’s Strategic Objectives, published in 1993, stated that by
the year 2000 it would be a major centre for the storage of, and access
to, digital texts. This led to the launch of the Initiatives for Access
programme, a series of projects and experiments using ICTs to facilitate
access to collections. For example, one of the first projects resulted in the
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
production of a digital version of the Beowulf manuscript, now available
on the British Library’s website. The programme was regarded as an
overwhelming success and is documented in the 1998 publication
Towards a Digital Library (Carpenter et al., 1998). In developing the
digital library, the British Library sought to improve access, for all users,
to their collections. The Library also hoped digitisation would have
benefits for the conservation and preservation of collections, in