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Exam period can be a stressful time for students, and having examples of past papers to help prepare for the tests can be extremely helpful. It is possible that past exams are already shared on your campus--by professors in their specific courses, via student unions or groups, or between individual students. In this article, we will go over the workflows and infrastructure to support the systematic collection, provision of access to, and repository management of past exam papers. We will discuss platform-agnostic considerations of opt-in versus opt-out submission, access restriction, discovery, retention schedules, and more. Finally, we will share the University of Toronto setup, including a dedicated instance of DSpace, batch metadata creation and ingest scripts, and our submission and retention workflows that take into account the varying needs of stakeholders across our three campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital heritage portal interfaces are generally similar to digital library and search engine interfaces in displaying search results as a list of brief metadata records. The knowledge organization and search result display of these systems are item-centric, with little support for identifying relationships between items. This paper proposes a knowledge graph system and visualization interface as a promising solution for digital heritage systems to support users in browsing related items, understanding the relationships between items, and synthesizing a narrative on an issue. The paper discusses design issues for the knowledge graph, graph database, and graph visualization, and offers recommendations based on the authors' experience in developing three knowledge graph systems for archive and digital humanities resources: the Zubir Said personal archive collection at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore; Singapore Pioneers social network; and Polyglot Medicine knowledge graph of Asian traditional and herbal medicine. Lessons learned from a small user study are incorporated in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the potential of the Gamified Metaverse as a platform for promoting library services. The study compares the effectiveness of a traditional library program with a Metaverse- based library program in terms of knowledge acquisition and library anxiety. The research also examines students' perceptions of implementing gamification within the context of the Gamified Metaverse platform. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, including pre- and post-test analysis, statistical analysis, and qualitative data collection. The results indicate that both the traditional and Metaverse-based library programs effectively increased the participants' knowledge, with no significant difference between the two approaches. However, the Metaverse-based program was found to be less effective in facilitating interaction with librarians and reducing library anxiety. Additionally, students expressed positive perceptions of implementing gamification in the Gamified Metaverse platform, finding it engaging and motivating. These findings contribute to the understanding of the effect of the Metaverse as a tool for promoting library services and enhancing knowledge acquisition. However, it is not as effective in reducing library anxiety, particularly in terms of interaction with librarians and staff. It should be noted that the platform may have limitations such as high costs and potential side effects of virtual reality, making it more suitable as an additional tool for promoting library services, taking into account its feasibility and potential benefits for specific student populations and larger libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the importance of the DSpace open-source software that supports numerous digital libraries and repositories around the world. With the release of DSpace version 7, a natural question that arises is whether the new version offers enough new functionalities to motivate system administrators to upgrade. This paper briefly describes the most important changes, including new features and bug fixes, included in DSpace 7.4 and prior minor versions. The next parts of this paper explore our estimate that there are several thousand DSpace-based systems globally that will likely have to be upgraded in the near future. The main reason for this need is that older versions of DSpace (including 5.x) have reached the end of their developer support period or are reaching it in mid-2023. Based on our own upgrade experience, we propose suggestions and recommendations on migrating from the previous DSpace 6.3-based environment to the new one in a case study that concludes this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present findings from a three-year research project funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services that examined how advanced broadband measurement capabilities can support the infrastructure and services needed to respond to the digital demands of public library users across the US. Previous studies have identified the ongoing broadband challenges of public libraries while also highlighting the increasing digital expectations of their patrons. However, few large-scale research efforts have collected automated, longitudinal measurement data on library broadband speeds and quality of service at a local, granular level inside public libraries over time, including when buildings are closed. This research seeks to address this gap in the literature through the following research question: How can public libraries utilize broadband measurement tools to develop a better understanding of the broadband speeds and quality of service that public libraries receive? In response, quantitative measurement data were gathered from an open-source broadband measurement system that was both developed for the research and deployed at 30 public libraries across the US. Findings from our analysis of the data revealed that Ookla measurements over time can confirm when the library's internet connection matches expected service levels and when they do not. When measurements are not consistent with expected service levels, libraries can observe the differences and correlate this with additional local information about the causes. Ongoing measurements conducted by the library enable local control and monitoring of this vital service and support critique and interrogation of the differences between internet measurement platforms. In addition, we learned that speed tests are useful for examining these trends but are only a small part of assessing an internet connection and how well it can be used for specific purposes. These findings have implications for state library agencies and federal policymakers interested in having access to data on observed versus advertised speeds and quality of service of public library broadband connections nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We hope to contribute to the field of research in information technology and digital libraries by analyzing the connections between Thematic Digital Universities and digital user-learner profiles. Thematic Digital Universities are similar to digital libraries, and focus on creating and indexing open educational resources, as well as improving learning in the information age. The digital user profile relates to the digital representation of a person's identity and characteristics. In this paper we present the design of an ontology for the digital User-Learner Profile (OntoULP) and its application program. OntoULP is used to structure a user-learner's digital profile. The application provides each user-learner with tailor-made analyses based on informational behaviors, needs, and preferences. We rely on an exploratory research approach and on methods of ontologies, user modeling, and semantic matching to design the OntoULP and its application program. Any user-learner could use the OntoULP and its application program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries are the central agencies for the dissemination of knowledge. Every library aspires to provide maximum opportunities to its users and ensure optimum utilization of available resources. Hence, libraries have been seeking technological aids to improve their services. Near-field communication (NFC) is a type of radio-frequency technology that allows electronics devices--such as computers, mobile phones, tags, and others--to exchange information wirelessly across a small distance. The aim of this paper is to explore NFC technology and its applications in modern era. The paper will discuss potential use of NFC in the advancement of traditional library management system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year of COVID-19, 2020, brought unique experiences to everyone in their daily as well as their professional life. Facing many challenges of division in all aspects (social distancing, political and social divisions, remote work environments), University of South Florida Libraries took the lead in exploring how to overcome these various separations by providing access to its high-quality information sources to its local community and beyond. This paper shares the insights of using Linked Data technology to provide easy access to digital cultural heritage collections not only for the scholarly communities but also for those underrepresented user groups. The authors present the challenges at this special time of the history, discuss the possible solutions, and propose future work to further the effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interoperability between research management systems, especially digital libraries or repositories, has been a central theme in the community for the past years, with the discussion focused on means of enriching, linking, and disseminating outputs. This paper considers a frequently overlooked aspect, namely the migration of records across systems, by introducing the Stateful Library Analysis and Migration system (SLAM) and presenting practical experiences with migrating records from DSpace and Digital Commons repositories to Figshare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions of advanced education and research, through their libraries, invest substantially in licensed online resources. Only authorized users of an institution are entitled to access licensed online resources. Seamless on-campus access to licensed resources happens mostly through Internet Protocol (IP) address authentication. Increasingly, licensed online resources are accessed by authorized users from off-campus locations as well. Libraries will, therefore, need to ensure seamless off-campus access to authorized users. Libraries have been using various technologies, including proxy server or virtual private network (VPN) server or single sign-on, to facilitate seamless offcampus access to licensed resources. In this paper, authors share their experience in setting up a Shibboleth-based single sign-on (SSO) access management system at the JRD Tata Memorial Library, Indian Institute of Science, to enable authorized users of the institute to seamlessly access licensed online resources from off-campus locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whenever librarians use Semantic Web services and standards for representing data, they also generate graphs, whether they intend to or not. Graphs are a new data model for libraries and librarians, and they present new opportunities for library services. In this paper we introduce graph theory and explore its real and potential applications in the context of digital libraries. Part 1 describes basic concepts in graph theory and how graph theory has been applied by information retrieval systems such as Google. Part 2 discusses practical applications of graph theory in digital library environments. Some of the applications have been prototyped at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, others have been described in peer-reviewed journals, and still others are speculative in nature. The paper is intended to serve as a high-level tutorial to graphs in libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Librarians and administrators speculate that the digitization and access of items through the HathiTrust Digital Library may reduce or eliminate demand for the corresponding print content. This belief feeds into a perception that monographs housed in academic libraries and delivered via such services are ripe for deduplication or outright withdrawal, yet other institutions may remain dependent upon those holding titles to provide print-based access for their patrons. Embracing HathiTrust's emerging Shared Print Monograph Program, more than seventynine member institutions committed to retain print monographs that correspond to those digitized from their collections. Putting aside concerns expressed by some about the meaningfulness of those commitments, not all members made such commitments. Moreover, retention commitments are not always publicly displayed, leading to scenarios in which such commitments may be used by other institutions to withdraw from their collections, based on these holdings. This paper provides a data-driven examination of the use of one research library's print items that correspond to the digital materials deposited into the HathiTrust, detailing both the results and the process by which data was gathered, managed, and digested to yield the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ohio State University Libraries' Serials and Electronic Resources team tracked reports of problems with electronic resources through a ticketing system, but had not used the system functions to articulate the work involved in supporting such resources. When a new Electronic Resources Officer was hired, the librarian reviewed the type of statistics provided to management and identified an opportunity to more fully document reported problem and staff effort. With the help of team members, a mechanism was created to highlight different types of problems through the application of a controlled vocabulary developed specifically for that environment. Once the vocabulary was available and in use, after some time, terms were evaluated for efficacy, and for how the use of the vocabulary enabled analysis of the trouble-shooting process. Following an analysis by the Electronic Resources Officer of the terms after being in use for some time, the ways that staff were involved in the workflow was changed, leading to faster responses and more consistent communication of information to patrons and vendors. This paper describes the process of developing the controlled vocabulary, the insights found following implementation, and the changes to the workflow that came from that analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plots and figures play an important role in the process of understanding a scientific publication, providing overviews of large amounts of data or ideas that are difficult to intuitively present using only the text. State-of-the-art digital libraries, which serve as gateways to knowledge encoded in scholarly writings, do not yet take full advantage of the graphical content of documents. Enabling machines to automatically unlock the meaning of scientific illustrations would allow immense improvements in the way scientists work and the way knowledge is processed. In this paper, we present a novel solution for the initial problem of processing graphical content, obtaining figures from scholarly publications stored in PDF. Our method relies on vector properties of documents and, as such, does not introduce additional errors, unlike methods based on raster image processing. Emphasis has been placed on correctly processing documents in high-energy physics. The described approach distinguishes different classes of objects appearing in PDF documents and uses spatial clustering techniques to group objects into larger logical entities. Many heuristics allow the rejection of incorrect figure candidates and the extraction of different types of metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing need for digital libraries to manage large amounts of data requires storage infrastructure that libraries can deploy quickly and economically. Cloud computing is a new model that allows the provision of information technology (IT) resources on demand, lowering management complexity. This paper introduces a file-storage service that is implemented on a private/hybrid cloud-computing environment and is based on open-source software. The authors evaluated performance and resource consumption using several levels of data availability and fault tolerance. This service can be taken as a reference guide for IT staff wanting to build a modest cloud storage infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy is a long-held value of information professionals, but new technologies of the contemporary digital age pose new risks to privacy. In an effort to build participatory, profession-wide action in support of designing privacy-oriented library services, two groups were formed with the goal of generating ideas and sustaining action: the National Forum on Web Privacy and Web Analytics, and Digital Library Federation Technologies of Surveillance Working Group. In this paper, members of these two groups present case study descriptions and analysis via reflective self-assessment. The authors discuss how these groups can serve as models of participatory action for integrating the value of privacy into the design of library services, technologies, policy, and outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domain-specific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate the possibility of improving the efficiency of data compression, and thus reducing storage requirements, for seven widely used text document formats. We propose an open-source text compression software library, featuring an advanced word-substitution scheme with static and semidynamic word dictionaries. The empirical results show an average storage space reduction as high as 78 percent compared to uncompressed documents, and as high as 30 percent compared to documents compressed with the free compression software gzip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes one approach to creating a search application that unlocks heterogeneous content stores and incorporates integrative functionality of Web search engines. LaneConnex is a search interface that identifies journals, books, databases, calculators, bioinformatics tools, help information, and search hits from more than three hundred full-text heterogeneous clinical and bioresearch sources. The user interface is a simple query box. Results are ranked by relevance with options for filtering by content type or expanding to the next most likely set. The system is built using component-oriented programming design. The underlying architecture is built on Apache Cocoon, Java Servlets, XML/XSLT, SQL, and JavaScript. The system has proven reliable in production, reduced user time spent finding information on the site, and maximized the institutional investment in licensed resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the applications and importance of content-based information retrieval technology in digital libraries. It generalizes the process and analyzes current examples in four areas of the technology. Content-based information retrieval has been shown to be an effective way to search for the type of multimedia documents that are increasingly stored in digital libraries. As a good complement to traditional text-based information retrieval technology, content-based information retrieval will be a significant trend for the development of digital libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews how usability has been defined in the context of the digital library, what methods have been applied and their applicability, and proposes an evaluation model and a suite of instruments for evaluating usability for academic digital libraries. The model examines effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learn-ability. It is found that there exists an interlocking relationship among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. It also examines how learn-ability interacts with these three attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and tabulates the literature of the strengths of Web-based survey methods versus non-electronic survey methods in educational, business, and other institutions. The relative importance of the strengths of each method is examined. As indicated by Perkins and Yuan's study comparing Web-based and non-electronic library-satisfaction survey results, earlier non library, institutional findings may have applications in the library. Of particular current interest is survey respondents' representation of a large sample at Western Kentucky University (WKU) for the Web-based Association of Research Libraries (ARL) LibQUAL+ survey. Finally, there is a summary of comments from a small sample of respondents from three library electronic discussion lists-the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA-L), the Association of College and Research Librarians (ACRL- FRM), and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA-L) to discuss how electronic/Internet survey methods may, in part, replace current non-electronic survey methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the Decentralized Image Retrieval for Education (DIRECT) service for the National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Digital Library (NSDL). DIRECT augments NSDL by providing content-based image-retrieval (CBIR) functionality. CBIR allows the user to designate a query image so that the service can search the library for images of similar content. DIRECT matches images not by text metadata but by the color or texture of the image objects; the matching process does not depend on a match between the cataloger description and the user description. DIRECT is a peer-to-peer service built for decentralized digital libraries. The content-based image-retrieval service is available to all collections in NSDL without imposing new standards or protocols. With DIRECT, NSDL can support images that have yet to be cataloged or have incomplete metadata without adding overhead (expenditure of additional resources) to the collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2010, the University of Colorado Boulder (CUB) Libraries implemented a patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) e-book program through Ingram Content Group's on the MyiLibrary platform. CUB's PDAprogram expanded to include all campuses within the University of Colorado (CU) system, launching a collaborative pilot project for shared purchasing and shared cataloging of e-books among five geographically separate and diverse CU libraries in December 2011. The PDA program affects the catalogs, cataloging departments, and cataloging workflows of each library. This paper describes the CU PDA program with a focus on how MARC records are prepared and distributed to the CU libraries, both before and after titles are purchased. It covers factors that impact editing and customization of the records such as the quality of vendor-supplied data, local needs, and best practices for Prospector, a regional unified catalog in which all CU system libraries participate. In addition, the authors share their strategies for detecting and correcting cataloging errors that occur and their methods for handling PDA titles duplicated in other e-book packages available at CU libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys research and professional literature on preservation-related topics published in 2009 and 2010, identifies key contributions to the field in periodicals, monographs, and research reports, and provides a guide to the changing landscape of preservation in the digital age. The authors have organized the reviewed literature into five major areas of interest: tensions in preservation work as libraries embrace digital resources, mass digitization and its effects on collections, risk management and disaster response, digital preservation and curation, and education for preservation in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hidden special collections are increasingly being made visible and accessible by small digitization projects. In the project described in this paper, the British Library employed existing library standards and systems to accomplish key functions of a project to digitize a selection of maps contained within rare books. The integrated library system, using the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) format, acted as a lynchpin, linking directly bibliographic descriptions of both the original and the digital copies of the map, the book containing the map, the digital image, and preservation data and strategy, making the items widely searchable and visible while uniting them with the broader collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author provides an overview of the issues related to preservation in the digital environment and describes initiatives that promise to address these issues. He considers the mutability of electronic content, the mission of libraries to preserve, the long-term ownership of digital content, the nature of preservation in a digital age, and promising digital preservation initiatives. The paper, drawing on the work of a collaborative Duke/Dartmouth Mellon-sponsored project, concludes with recommended elements for a campuswide digital repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editorial. Discusses the impact of the digital movement on academic libraries in the United States and what needs to be done for their survival. Questions raised about the necessity of paper-based collections due to the expansion of digital libraries; Decline in circulation figures and reference transactions of libraries; Need for librarian expertise in paper-based and electronic environments.