SLIS S652: Digital Libraries: Fall Semester 2008
John A. Walsh

Contact Information

Course Description

This course covers general digital library topics including:
  • organization, planning, project management
  • digital content (media types, standards, format-specific metadata)
  • general digital library metadata formats and standards
  • digital library technologies and systems
  • user-center design in digital libraries
  • digital preservation
  • current/future trends in digital libraries
  • institutional, societal, and professional issues/challenges facing digital libraries and their analog counterparts

Text

Witten, Ian H. and David Bainbridge. How to Build a Digital Library. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003. (Referred to as Witten below.)
The above text will be supplemented by online and reserve readings.

Assignments

Technical Assignments (30%)

You will select a personal collection or items of interest (e.g., a set of old letters between parents or grandparents, a collection of old photographs, hand-made books or art objects, etc.), and digitize the collection/item and then perform a series of technical exercises based on the digital object(s).
  • Write a 500-word illustrated contextual essay about your collection; due 2008-09-25. (5%)
  • Digitize objects in archival format, capture technical metadata, and create web-deliverable derivatives. Turn in link to web page that contains links to these objects; due 2008-10-09 (5%)
  • Create Dublin Core and MODS records for digital objects. Add links to records to your web page. 2008-10-23 (10%)
  • Depending on the media type of your project select a relevant standard, e.g., TEI or VRACore, for your collection, and provide examples. How large should your examples be? If possible you could encode the entire text in TEI or provide VRACore records for the entire collection. If you are dealing with a larger collection, then perhaps fifteen to twenty pages of encoded TEI text or twenty VRACore records. Add links to your examples to your web page. Due 2008-11-06 (10%)

Review of an Existing DL Project; due 2008-11-13 (25%)

Write a 1000-word review of an exisiting digital library project hosted somewhere other than Indiana University. Your review should:
  • summarize the project's content, significance, and audience
  • identify and discuss the examine the content and metadata standards used in the project
  • discuss whether and how content and metadata is exposed to the user and other library systems (e.g., by OAI-PMH)
  • identify and discuss the infrastructure and/or delivery system
  • identify and discuss any noteworthy, unique, or interesting interface features or other functionality
In order to conduct this assignment correctly you will need to choose a digital library project with thorough documentation or about which detailed articles have been written and you may need to communicate with and gather information from individuals involved in the development of the project. An example of a project with good documentation is Indiana University's Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection. Please try to keep to the specified length. Longer is not better, and these papers should be clear and thorough, but also concise. All essays may, where relevant, be accompanied by screen shots, tables, or other graphics. All essays should be clearly organized with liberal use of headings and other “signposts.”

Final Project: DL Project Proposal (35%)

  1. preliminary proposal (500 words) (5%); due 2008-10-30. Use the IU Digital Library Program's Project Proposal Form as a template for your preliminary proposal.
  2. final project presentation (5%); due on 2008-12-04 or 2008-12-11.
  3. final project (25%); due on 2007-12-13.

Participation (10%)

Students are expected to attend, to be prepared for, and to participate in all class meetings.

Letter Grade Definitions

All grades will be assigned according to the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Definitions of Letter Grades.

Schedule

Date Topics Readings
2008-09-04
  • Introductions
  • Overview of Syllabus
  • Concepts
  • History
  • Example programs & projects
  • Personal Profiles
2008-09-11
  • History of digital libraries and library automation
  • Digitization Overview
Witten. Ch. 1, pp. 1-38.
Wattenberg, F. (1998). A National Digital Library for Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education. D-Lib Magazine, 4(9). http://dx.doi.org/cnri.dlib/october98-wattenberg.
Greenstein, Daniel and Suzanne Thorin. The Digital Library: A Biography. Council on Library and Information Resources. December 2002. 31 August 2006. http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub109abst.html.
Griffin, S. M. (1998). NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative: A Program Manager's Perspective. D-Lib Magazine (July/August). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july98/07griffin.html
A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. National Information Standards Organization (NISO). 2004. 28 August 2006. http://www.niso.org/framework/Framework2.html.
Bush, V. (1945). “As We May Think”. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
Smith, Abby. (1999). Why Digitize? Washington, DC: Council on Library & Information Resources. Retrieved November 2, 2007, from http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub80.html
2008-09-18 No class. Professor Walsh will be attending the Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference.
2008-09-25
Assignment Due!
Digital Content: Image
  • general issues
  • digitization processes & standards
  • formats
  • delivery systems
  • metadata
2008-10-02
Digital Content: Text
  • general issues
  • digitization processes & standards
  • formats
  • Unicode
  • delivery systems
  • metadata
2008-10-09
Assignment Due!		 Metadata
2008-10-16
Digital Content: Time-Based Formats (Audio & Video)
  • general issues
  • digitization processes & standards
  • formats
  • delivery systems
  • metadata
  • Witten. Ch. 4.6 "Representing Audio and Video," pp. 206-215.
2008-10-23
Assignment Due!		 Digital Objects & METS
2008-10-30
Assignment Due! 		Digital Library Architecture Overviews
Arms, W. Y. (1995). Key Concepts in the Architecture of the Digital Library. D-Lib Magazine, 1(1). http://dx.doi.org/cnri.dlib/july95-arms
Kahn, R., & Wilensky, R. (1995). A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services. http://dx.doi.org/cnri.dlib/tn95-01
Marcos André Gonçalves, Robert K. France and Edward A. Fox. “MARIAN: Flexible Interoperability for Federated Digital Libraries”. Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: [Proc. of] 5th European Conference, ECDL-01 (Darmstadt, Germany: 4-9 Sept. 2001) Springer, 2001, pp. 173-186. http://www.dlib.vt.edu/reports/ecdl2001_8.pdf
Rodger J. McNab, Ian H. Witten, Stefan J. Boddie, “A Distributed Digital Library Architecture Incorporating Different Index Styles (1997),” Advances in Digital Libraries. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ihw/papers/RM-IHW-SB-Adistributeddl.pdf.
da, Yves Petinot, C. Lee Giles, V. Bhatnagar, Pradeep B. Teregow Hui Han, Isaac G. Councill, “A Service-Oriented Architecture for Digital Libraries (2004),” http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/i/g/igc2/papers/petinot04service.pdf
Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox, “A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries,” D-Lib Magazine, Volume 7 Number 12 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/suleman/12suleman.html
2008-11-06
Assignment Due!		 Professor Walsh will be attending the annual TEI Members Meeting and Conference
Guest Lecture: TBA
2008-11-13
Assignment Due!		 Application Software
Explore the "Infrastructure Project" space on the Digital Library Program Wiki: http://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/confluence/display/INF/Infrastructure+Project.
Explore the METS Navigator site at: http://metsnavigator.sourceforge.net/ and a sample collection that uses METS Navigator: http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/general/pageturner/VAA3220.
Read “Introducing EPrints 3” and watch short QuickTime video clips at http://www.eprints.org/software/v3/
Visit DSpace homepage at http://www.dspace.org/ and read 9 “About DSpace” under “New to DSpace?” on the top left pane.
Ian H. Witten and David Bainbridge, “A brief history of the Greenstone Digital Library Software,” http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/gsdoc/others/Greenstone_history.htm
Visit http://www.oclc.org/contentdm/about/default.htm and read the topics under “About” on the left pane.
2008-11-20 User-Centered Design & DL Evaluation
2008-11-27 Thanksgiving. No class.
2008-12-04 Final Project Presentations
2008-12-11 Final Project Presentations
2008-12-12 Final projects due by noon.

Resources