WXGB6105: Technologies for Information Management

9^th entry

Discuss how open source and social software applications can serve to fill digital library roles

The various types of open source social software by category are blogs, RSS and News Readers, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, social cataloging, video sharing, personalized start pages, social networking software, vertical search engines, social news, answers technology, virtual worlds, productivity tools, podcasting and mashups. These social software applications or Web 2.0 technologies are used by libraries, librarians and information professionals for managing library resources, information and services in some and a variety of ways, using the Web as a platform. These technologies opened the way for “libraries to be part of the global online community and truly collaborate with the people they serve “(Kroski 2008, xiv).

Digital libraries

Digital libraries, in place of physical books and place, but having all the attributes of a traditional library like resources and services, are created to meet a specific community and facilitate its users. Digital libraries, regardless of the software used for its creation, rely on metadata standard to collect and index information for its collection to be searchable when queried.  

A digital library is characterized by its universal and open access with digitized content accessible only with computer. The contents can be textual, image, or in audio or video format.     

Borgman (1999, 234) defined digital libraries as:

            a set of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating,
            searching and using information…and exist in distributed networks. The content
            of digital libraries includes data, metadata that describe various aspects of the data
            (e.g. representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights) and metadata that consist
            of links or relationships to other data or metadata, whether internal or external to
            the digital library.  

Arms (2000, 2) gave an informal definition of digital library as “a managed collection of information, with associated services, where the information is stored in digital formats and accessible over a network.”

Among some of the elements associated with the definition of digital library is that the collections “are not limited to document surrogates: they extend to digital artifacts that cannot be represented or distributed in printed formats” (Association of Research Libraries).

Open source social software in digital library roles

In a digital library project for the purpose of creating a digital repository for historic photographs and collections of Forsyth County, NC institutions, the Qualified Dublin Core metadata standard was used whereas the content was managed using Protégé (free open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework). Although the back-end of the digital library was functioning well, but it did not have a public interface that users can interact with. The researchers had to look for an alternative platform that could also provide a user interface. A blogging social software, WordPress, was finally selected as a platform for the digital repository, but not without facing some issues. The open source software used was able to fill digital library roles in its ability to “store and display QDC metadata”. The software was able to contain and present metadata based on the hierarchical faceted categorization system and manage data. It had the capacity to permit public interface, thus allowing user interactivity. Several modifications to the software had to be made to suit the needs of the digital repository. The issues encountered were in the areas of data management, technical skills and sustainability. The first issue that involved data management referred to the fact that digital libraries create, manage and preserve digital objects whereas social software’s main purpose is to present data and having user-friendly interfaces. Hence, they had to be careful in representing and preserving accurate data. Some skills were required in customizing the social software, especially in using PHP, SQL, CSS/HTML, web server software and JavaScript. Sustainability was another issue in using social software, in view of the fact that open source social software stability and permanence depends on the user community. Despite the issues, the researchers found that development and maintenance costs were reduced by using WordPress (Mitchell and Gilbertson 2008).   

References:

Arms, William Y. 2000. Digital libraries. MIT Press.

Association of Research Libraries. Definition and purposes of a digital library. 

         http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/mmproceedings/126mmappen2.shtml

         (accessed April 8, 2011).

Borgman, Christine L. 1999. What are digital libraries?: Competing visions. Information 

         Processing & Management, 35(3): 227-243.

Kroski, Ellyssa. 2008. Web 2.0 for librarians and information professionals. New York: 

         Neal-Schuman Publishers.

Mitchell, Erik and Kevin Gilbertson. 2008. Using open source social software as digital 

         library interface. D-Lib Magazine, 14(3/4).     

         http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/mitchell/03mitchell.html#Polar (accessed April 

         7, 2011)