Content and Connectivity in the Age of Digital Libraries

"Behind the world of virtual university is more than a method or system of work, you need to own, develop and master a connectivity structure of both technological and content development in multimedia digital text and then implement teaching methods line. "

Children's Library system, its projection in the Costa Rican Education

To focus the projection that libraries have had children in Costa Rican education, it is necessary to note that Costa Rica is one of the countries of Latin America, which has developed valuable experience of having specialized libraries in the care of preschool and school children , becoming an important resource in supporting educational and cultural level. This, then places it as a model country in this field in Latin America, on the initiative and from the heart of the capital, starting in 1971 with the opening of the Children's Library Carmen Lyra. System currently operates six libraries of this type, installed in different districts of the Central Canton of San Jose.

Optimal resource allocation and budgeting in libraries

Libraries since their inception 4000 years ago have been in a process of constant change. Although, changes were in slow motion for centuries, in the last decades, academic libraries have been continuously striving to adapt their services to the ever-changing user needs of students and academic staff. In addition, e-content revolution, technological advances, and ever-shrinking budgets have obliged libraries to efficiently allocate their limited resources among collection and services. Unfortunately, this resource allocation is a complex process due to the diversity of data sources and formats required to be analyzed prior to decision-making, as well as the lack of efficient integration methods. The main purpose of this study is to develop an integrated model that supports libraries in making optimal budgeting and resource allocation decisions among their services and collection by means of a holistic analysis. To this end, a combination of several methodologies and structured approaches is conducted. Firstly, a holistic structure and the required toolset to holistically assess academic libraries are proposed to collect and organize the data from an economic point of view. A four-pronged theoretical framework is used in which the library system and collection are analyzed from the perspective of users and internal stakeholders. The first quadrant corresponds to the internal perspective of the library system that is to analyze the library performance, and costs incurred and resources consumed by library services. The second quadrant evaluates the external perspective of the library system; user’s perception about services quality is judged in this quadrant. The third quadrant analyses the external perspective of the library collection that is to evaluate the impact of the current library collection on its users. Eventually, the fourth quadrant evaluates the internal perspective of the library collection; the usage patterns followed to manipulate the library collection are analyzed. With a complete framework for data collection, these data coming from multiple sources and therefore with different formats, need to be integrated and stored in an adequate scheme for decision support. A data warehousing approach is secondly designed and implemented to integrate, process, and store the holistic-based collected data. Ultimately, strategic data stored in the data warehouse are analyzed and implemented for different purposes including the following: 1) Data visualization and reporting is proposed to allow library managers to publish library indicators in a simple and quick manner by using online reporting tools. 2) Sophisticated data analysis is recommended through the use of data mining tools; three data mining techniques are examined in this research study: regression, clustering and classification. These data mining techniques have been applied to the case study in the following manner: predicting the future investment in library development; finding clusters of users that share common interests and similar profiles, but belong to different faculties; and predicting library factors that affect student academic performance by analyzing possible correlations of library usage and academic performance. 3) Input for optimization models, early experiences of developing an optimal resource allocation model to distribute resources among the different processes of a library system are documented in this study. Specifically, the problem of allocating funds for digital collection among divisions of an academic library is addressed. An optimization model for the problem is defined with the objective of maximizing the usage of the digital collection over-all library divisions subject to a single collection budget. By proposing this holistic approach, the research study contributes to knowledge by providing an integrated solution to assist library managers to make economic decisions based on an “as realistic as possible” perspective of the library situation.

MARS (Media Asset Retrieval System): Puget Sound’s Digital Archive

The MARS (Media Asset Retrieval System) Project is the collaborative effort of public broadcasters,libraries and schools in the Puget Sound region to create a digital online resource that provides access to content produced by public broadcasters via the public libraries. Convergence ConsortiumThe Convergence Consortium is a model for community collaboration, including organizations such as public broadcasters, libraries, museums, and schools in the Puget Sound region to assess the needs of their constituents and pool resources to develop solutions to meet those needs. Specifically, the archives of public broadcasters have been identified as significant resources for the local communities and nationally. These resources can be accessed on the broadcasters websites, and through libraries and used by schools, and integrated with text and photographic archives from other partners.MARS’ goalCreate an online resource that provides effective access to the content produced locally by KCTS (Seattle PBS affiliate) and KUOW (Seattle NPR affiliate). The broadcasts will be made searchable using the CPB Metadata Element Set (under development) and controlled vocabularies (to be developed). This will ensure a user friendly search and navigation mechanism and user satisfaction.Furthermore, the resource can search the local public library’s catalog concurrently and provide the user with relevant TV material, radio material, and books on a given subject.The ultimate goal is to produce a model that can be used in cities around the country.The current phase of the project assesses the community’s need, analyzes the current operational systems, and makes recommendations for the design of the resource.Deliverables• Literature review of the issues surrounding the organization, description and representation of media assets• Needs assessment report of internal and external stakeholders• Profile of the systems in the area of managing and organizing media assetsfor public broadcasting nationwideActivities• Analysis of information seeking behavior• Analysis of collaboration within the respective organizations• Analysis of the scope and context of the proposed system• Examining the availability of information resources and exchangeof resources among users

Puget Sound’s MARS (Media Asset Retrieval System) Digital Library

The MARS (Media Asset Retrieval System) Project is a collaboration between public broadcasters, libraries and schools in the Puget Sound region to assess the needs of their constituents and pool resources to develop solutions to meet those needs. The Project’s ultimate goal is to create a digital online resource that will provide access to content produced by public broadcasters and libraries. The MARS Project is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Television Future Fund. Convergence ConsortiumThe Convergence Consortium is a model for community collaboration, including representatives from public broadcasting, libraries and schools in the Puget Sound region. They meet regularly to consider collaborative efforts that will be mutually beneficial to their institutions and constituents. Specifically, the archives of public broadcasters have been identified as significant resources that can be accessed through libraries and used by schools, and integrated with text and photographic archives from other partners.Using the work-centered framework, we collected data through interviews with nine engineers and observation of their searching while they performed their regular, job-related searches on the Web. The framework was used to analyze the data on two levels: 1) the activities and organizational relationships and constrains of work domains, and 2) users’ cognitive and social activities and their subjective preferences during searching.

An integrated library system on the CERN document server

O CERN - a Organização Europeia para a Investigação Nuclear - é um dos maiores centros de investigação a nível mundial, responsável por diversas descobertas na área da física bem como na área das ciências da computação. O CERN Document Server, também conhecido como CDS Invenio, é um software desenvolvido no CERN, que tem como objectivo fornecer um conjunto de ferramentas para gerir bibliotecas digitais. A fim de melhorar as funcionalidades do CDS Invenio foi criado um novo módulo, chamado BibCirculation, para gerir os livros (e outros itens) da biblioteca do CERN, funcionando como um sistema integrado de gestão de bibliotecas. Esta tese descreve os passos que foram dados para atingir os vários objectivos deste projecto, explicando, entre outros, o processo de integração com os outros módulos existentes bem como a forma encontrada para associar informações dos livros com os metadados do CDS lnvenio. É também possível encontrar uma apresentação detalhada sobre todo o processo de implementação e os testes realizados. Finalmente, são apresentadas as conclusões deste projecto e o trabalho a desenvolver futuramente. ABSTRACT: CERN - The European Organization for Nuclear Research - is one of the largest research centers worldwide, responsible for several discoveries in physics as well as in computer science. The CERN Document Server, also known as CDS Invenio, is a software developed at CERN, which aims to provide a set of tools for managing digital libraries. ln order to improve the functionalities of CDS Invenio a new module was developed, called BibCirculation, to manage books (and other items) from the CERN library, and working as an Integrated Library System. This thesis shows the steps that have been done to achieve the several goals of this project, explaining, among others aspects, the process of integration with other existing modules as well as the way to associate the information about books with the metadata from CDS lnvenio. You can also find detailed explanation of the entire implementation process and testing. Finally, there are presented the conclusions of this project and ideas for future development.