DML and RusDML – Virtual Library Initiatives for Covering All Mathematics Electronically

With the rapidly growing activities in electronic publishing ideas came up to install global repositories which deal with three mainstreams in this enterprise: storing the electronic material currently available, pursuing projects to solve the archiving problem for this material with the ambition to preserve the content in readable form for future generations, and to capture the printed literature in digital versions providing good access and search facilities for the readers. Long-term availability of published research articles in mathematics and easy access to them is a strong need for researchers working with mathematics. Hence in this domain some pioneering projects have been established addressing the above mentioned problems.

Digitization Projects Carried out by the Mathematical Institute Belgrade

In this paper some current digitization projects carried out by the Mathematical Institute of Serbian Academy of Science and Arts Belgrade and the Faculty of Mathematics Belgrade are described. The projects concern developing of a virtual library of retro-digitized books and an Internet data base and presentation of electronic editions of some leading Serbian journals in science and arts, and the work on the South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative (SEEDI).

Virtual Encyclopaedia of the Bulgarian Iconography

East-Christian icon art is recognised as one of the most significant areas of the art of painting. Regrettably, it is still being neglected in the digital documentation and the registry of the art of painting. The accessibility to that large part of mankind's cultural and historical ancestry would be enhanced greatly if icons of all possible kinds and origins were digitised, classified, and „exhibited“ in the Internet. That would allow the preservation and even the future digital restoration of a large number of rare specimens of the East-Christian art of painting. This article aims to introduce how modern techniques from the area of digital libraries can be used for implementing the demonstrative multimedia library “Virtual encyclopaedia of the Bulgarian iconography ” 4, containing a large number of Bulgarian iconic art masterpieces and iconography of various authors, periods and schools.

Services for Content Creation and Presentation in an Iconographical Digital Library

Content creation and presentation are key activities in a multimedia digital library (MDL). The proper design and intelligent implementation of these services provide a stable base for overall MDL functionality. This paper presents the framework and the implementation of these services in the latest version of the “Virtual Encyclopaedia of Bulgarian Iconography” multimedia digital library. For the semantic description of the iconographical objects a tree-based annotation template is implemented. It provides options for autocompletion, reuse of values, bilingual entering of data, automated media watermarking, resizing and conversing. The paper describes in detail the algorithm for automated appearance of dependent values for different characteristics of an iconographical object. An algorithm for avoiding duplicate image objects is also included. The service for automated appearance of new objects in a collection after their entering is included as an important part of the content presentation. The paper also presents the overall service-based architecture of the library, covering its main service panels, repositories and their relationships. The presented vision is based on a long-term observation of the users’ preferences, cognitive goals, and needs, aiming to find an optimal functionality solution for the end users.

Potsdam Library of Astronomical Photographic Plates

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): J.2.

3D Environment for Virtual Collections

This paper describes a framework for building virtual collections of several digital objects and presenting them in an interactive 3D environment, rendered in a web browser. Using that environment, the website visitor can examine a given collection from a first-person perspective by walking around and inspecting each object in detail by viewing it from any angle. The rendering and visualization of the models is done solely by the web browser with the use of HTML5 and the Three.js JavaScript library, without any additional requirements.