University of Michigan Digital Library Activities

DLI General Information

• Home Page
• IEEE Computer article
• Introduction
• Current Status
• Technologies
• Agents, Ontologies

Campus Strategy

• Strategies for DL Development: partnership of
  • University Library
  • Information Technology Division
  • School of Information
• combine: R&D; technology infrastructure; content access & user services; outreach
• shift to 21st century library model
  • user-centric, collaborative teams, global reach
  • distributed collections, heterogeneous access protocols, just-in-time information delivery
  • mixed funding models, value = access + services
• Registries: SGML database, subject specialist librarian created digital libraries across Internet
• Electronic Reserve Shelf
• Knowledge Navigation Center: develop and support teaching and learning projects
• Questions:
  • How does the infrastructure at U. Michigan compare to that at your university?
  • How does this strategy relate to previous services of libraries?

Projects

• JSTOR: Journal Storage: over 1.2M pages
• Making of America: with Cornell - 5K volumes, D-Lib article: scanning, OCR, SGML encoding, tif2gif, interface
• Museum Educational Site License Project: see also V. 5 N. 8 Oct. 1996 Information Technology Digest
• Humanities Text Initiative and Collaboratory for the Humanities
• Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge (PEAK) - 1100 Elsevier journals with flexible pricing
• Papryology
• Middle English Compendium Demo
• American Verse
• TULIP
• NDLF
• Questions:
  • Which of these projects do you find most interesting? Why?
  • Which of these projects should your university become involved in?

Technical Approaches

• see especially 1996 Ann Arbor Conf. on Electronic Records R & D
  • Problem scenarios (see bullet list under The Importance of Digital Preservation)
  • Research questions (see The 10 Research Questions)
  • Research results: possible, requires changes and new types of efforts (see bullet list under Research Projects and Results
  • International Council on Archives: see Guide for Managing Electronic Records from an Archival Perspective, survey, literature review
  • Australian Council of Archives statement
• Advanced Interfaces
• Pad++
• Ontology - Concept Descriptions and May 1997 slides
• Learning Agents
• Teaching and Learning Project
• Artemis Java Interface to UMDL Production System
• SGML creation and delivery
  • enormous collection: 2M pages
  • flowchart
  • SGML Server Program: middleware, training
  • cross collection searching
  • multiple representations
• Leveraging rich document formats
  • patterns of use
  • ease of changing delivery: new standards (HTML), new rendering/packaging
  • collection management
  • Panorama, XML support by W3C
• Questions:
  • Will the agent and ontology approach work? Soon? For production DLs?
  • What is the support needed for establishing a digital library following the UMDL approach? Training?
  • What interfaces for DLs will be usable?