Key Issues Regarding Digital Libraries

This is the second book based on the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) approach to digital libraries (DLs). Leveraging the first volume, on Theoretical Foundations, we focus on the key issues of evaluation and integration. These cross-cutting issues serve as a bridge for those interested in DLs, connecting the introduction and formal discussion in the first book, with the coverage of key technologies in the third book, and of illustrative applications in the fourth book. These two topics have central importance in the DL field, allowing it to be treated scientifically as well as practically. In the scholarly world, we only really understand something if we know how to measure and evaluate it. In the Internet era of distributed information systems, we only can be practical at scale if we integrate across both systems and their associated content. Evaluation of DLs must take place atmultiple levels,so we can address the different entities and their associated measures. Thus, for digital objects, we assess accessibility, pertinence, preservability, relevance, significance, similarity, and timeliness. Other measures are specific to higher-level constructs like metadata, collections, catalogs, repositories, and services.We tie these together through a case study of the 5SQual tool, which we designed and implemented to perform an automatic quantitative evaluation of DLs. Thus, across the Information Life Cycle, we describe metrics and software useful to assess the quality of DLs, and demonstrate utility with regard to representative application areas: archaeology and education. Though integration has been a challenge since the earliest work on DLs, we provide the first comprehensive 5S-based formal description of the DL integration problem, cast in the context of related work. Since archaeology is a fundamentally distributed enterprise, we describe ETANADL, for integrating Near Eastern Archeology sites and information. Thus, we show how 5S-based modeling can lead to integrated services and content. While the first book adopts a minimalist and formal approach to DLs, and provides a systematic and functional method to design and implement DL exploring services, here we broaden to practical DLs with richer metamodels, demonstrating the power of 5S for integration and evaluation.

Rao Shen received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2006. Her advisor was Edward A. Fox. Her research interests include digital libraries, information retrieval, information visualization, and machine learning. She joined the Web search relevance team at Yahoo! in May 2006. She is working on problems related to federated search in Yahoo! Labs. Marcos Andre Goncalves is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the Universida de Federal de Minas Gerais(UFMG), Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science(CS) from Virginia Tech (2004), an M.S. in CS from State University of Campinas, Brazil (Unicamp,1997), and a B.S., also in Computer Science, from the Federal University of Ceara, Brazil (UFC, 1995). Professor Goncalves has served as referee on different journals (TOIS,TKDE, IP&M, Information Retrieval, Information Systems, etc.) and at several conferences (SIGIR, CIKM, JCDL, TPDL, etc.). His research interests include information retrieval, digital libraries, text classification and text mining in general, having published more than 150 refereed journal articles and conference papers in these areas. Marcos is currently an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Edward A. Fox grew up on Long Island, New York. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving a B.S. in 1972 in Electrical Engineering, through the Computer Science option. He received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1981 and a Ph.D. in 1983 from Cornell University. From the summer of 1982 through the spring of 1983 he served as Manager of Information Systems at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria. From the fall of 1983 through the present he has been on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (also called VPI&SU or Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). In 1988 he was given tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1995 he was promoted to Professor. Dr. Fox has been an IEEE Senior Member since 2004, an IEEE Member since 2002, an IEEE-CS Member since 2001, and a member of ACM since 1967. He was vice chairman of ACM SIGIR 1987-1991 and then chair 1991-1995. During that period, he helped launch the new ACM SIG on Multimedia. He served as a member of the ACM Publications Board 1988-1992 and as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Press Database and Electronic Products 1988-1991, during which time he helped conceive and launch the ACM Digital Library. He served 2000-2006 as a founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Journal of Education Resources In Computing (JERIC), which led to the ACM Transactions on Education. Since 2013 he has been editor for Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries for the ACM Book Series. Over the period 2004-2008 he served as Chairman of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, and continues to serve on its Executive Committee. Dr. Fox served 1995-2008 as Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.Series on Multimedia Information and Systems. Dr. Fox has been a member of Sigma Xi since the 1970s and a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon since 1998. In 1987 Dr. Fox began to explore the idea of all students shifting to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and has worked in this area ever since. He led the establishment of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (operating informally starting in 1995, incorporated in May 2003). He serves as founder and Executive Director of NDLTD. He won its 1st Annual NDLTD Leadership Award in May 2004. Dr. Fox has been involved in a wide variety of professional service activities. He has chaired scores of conferences or workshops, and served on hundreds of program or conference committees. At present he serves on ten editorial boards. From 2010-2013 he was a member of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA; he was co-chair of its membership committee, as well as a member of CRA-E, its education committee). He chairs the steering committee of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Dr. Fox has been (co)PI on over 115 research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech, Dr. Fox has taught over 78 tutorials in more than 28 countries. His publications and presentations include: 17 books, 107 journal/magazine articles, 49 book chapters, 184 refereed (+40 other) conference/workshop papers, 61 posters, 66 keynote/banquet/international invited/distinguished speaker presentations, 38 demonstrations, and over 300 additional presentations. His research and teaching has been on digital libraries, information storage and retrieval, hypertext/hypermedia/multimedia, computing education, computational linguistics, and sub-areas of artificial intelligence.