Digital Library 2.0 — Source of Knowledgeand Research Collaboration Platform

Włodzimierz Gruszczynski1, Maciej Ogrodniczuk2

1Warsaw School of Social Sciences and HumanitiesChodakowska 19/31, Warsaw, Polandwgruszczynski@swps.edu.pl

2Institute of Computer SciencePolish Academy of Sciences

Jana Kazimierza 5, Warsaw, Polandmaciej.ogrodniczuk@ipipan.waw.pl

AbstractDigital libraries are frequently treated just as a new method of storage of digitized artifacts, with all consequences of transferringlong-established ways of dealing with physical objects into the digital world. Such attitude improves availability, but often neglectsother opportunities offered by global and immediate access, virtuality and linking — as easy as never before.The article presents the idea of transforming a conventional digital library into knowledge source and research collaboration platform,facilitating content augmentation, interpretation and co-operation of geographically distributed researchers representing differentacademic fields. This concept has been verified by the process of extending descriptions stored in thematic Digital Library of Polishand Poland-related Ephemeral Prints from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries with extended item-associated information provided byhistorians, philologists, librarians and computer scientists. It resulted in associating the customary fixed metadata and digitized contentwith historical comments, glossaries of foreign interjections or explanation of less-known background details.

Keywords: digital libraries, old-Polish prints, historical corpus

1. IntroductionApart from serving the needs of the linguistic commu-nity, The Digital Library of Polish and Poland-relatedEphemeral Prints from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuriesproject (PL. Cyfrowa Biblioteka Druków Ulotnych pols-kich i Polski dotyczacych z XVI, XVII i XVIII w., CBDU:http://cbdu.id.uw.edu.pl) was from the very be-ginning planned to be set up as a proof of concept validat-ing the idea of making a thematic digital library a platformfor co-operation of researchers with the possibility of stor-ing the research results very closely related to the originaldigital object.CBDU comprises about 2,000 pre-press documents datedbetween 1501 and 1729. At that time, before Polishnewspapers started regular circulation, ephemeral prints —short, disposable and occasional informative publications— were playing a significant part in the development ofPolish writing, serving as the most influential media of thetime. The scope of the materials is Poland-related, whichcombines the Polish sources with prints published abroad,concerning the Republic of Poland, political, religious andmilitary issues (e.g. the reports or letters on the famousrelief of Vienna in 1683, see e.g. Figure 1), but also sensa-tional facts or canards. The materials were prepared “live”,mostly by participants or observers of the reported eventsand as such they are valuable sociological source of in-formation on mechanisms of spreading information at thattime, its reception, propaganda and readers’ interests. Thisvariety is reflected in diversity of topics, layouts and lan-guage variants.The digital library was created with the intention of provid-

ing public online access to all preserved and described inthe literature pre-press documents. The prints were iden-tified, scanned from microfilms (since the original speci-mens are preserved in libraries all over Europe), convertedinto DjVu (Bottou et al., 1998) format and saved in aEPrints-based system (EPrints, 2010) (see (Ogrodniczukand Gruszczynski, 2011) for a more detailed description ofthe process). Currently over 70% of the prints are availableas DjVu images.

2. From Storage to Knowledge AboutObjects

Obviously, for researchers the most important goal of thedigital library is making available scanned versions of ob-jects (images, not text) with best possible quality — andthis requirement is fulfilled by virtually all digital libraries,including CBDU. What is worthy of attention is that thisgoal is final for most thematic digital libraries managingmanuscripts and old prints. This makes a very serious limi-tation, making it impossible to e.g. automatically search fortextual content or reuse (copy-paste) fragments in furtherresearch. For less experienced users from the general pub-lic it is even more hermetic due to the sheer form of the oldprint with its fonts (Schwabacher, Fraktur), no longer usedabbreviations etc. Language and time barriers create evenmore problems — our library comprises foreign-languageprints, but even old Polish prints can contain many archaicwords and syntactic constructs which hinder understand-ability of the text. Foreign-language quotations, particu-larly Latin, pose another challenge.We believe that the thematic digital library should offer far

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Figure 1: An English abridged translation of a letter of John III Sobieski, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, tohis wife on the Battle of Vienna (see http://cbdu.id.uw.edu.pl/10120/).

more: different ways of accessing content, suitable for var-ious groups of visitors with different abilities, knowledgeand reasons for using the library.

2.1. Augmented Content RepresentationThe above-mentioned reasons influenced our decision thatCBDU prints will be available not only as scanned versionsof original objects, but also in other, related forms suchas transliterated or transcribed text. In the future we alsoplan to offer translations of foreign-language prints intoPolish. Each of these versions will be synchronized withall other layers so that they can be viewed simultaneouslywhen needed.

To clarify this scenario, let’s assume that the user decidedto see the scanned version first (see Figure 2). It apparentlycontains letters or words difficult for an inexperienced user.However, the system offers the transliteration possibility,which yields:

Poczyna sie Hi∫

torya o porazcze Sákrámentar-zow y zábiciu wodzá ich Ksiazeciá de Conde.

Such form is helpful, but still not very reader-friendly. Forusers unfamiliar with Polish who would like to get roughunderstanding of the content, it is also insufficient since e.g.automated translation into English does not recognize manywords belonging to old Polish:

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Figure 2: First sentence of a sample print in old Polish from1569 (see http://cbdu.id.uw.edu.pl/700/).

The History conceives of porazcze Sákrámentar-zow killing their leader s prince de Conde.

Such problems are overcome when transcription of text isoffered (by default — to contemporary Polish). The fol-lowing version is almost perfectly understandable by an or-dinary user of Polish:

Poczyna sie historia o porazce sakramentarzów izabiciu wodza ich Ksiazecia de Conde.

and can be further automatically translated:

Begins the story of the failure sakramentarzówand killed their chief prince de Conde.

The last persisting problem is the inflected outdated wordsakramentarz (meaning heretyk — En. heretic), no longerused in contemporary Polish. Such words can be, on user’srequest, explained and presented in the form ready to befurther processed, e.g. translated. Our example, after thenew inflected form is applied to the transcribed text, makesthe following:

Poczyna sie historia o porazce heretyków i zabi-ciu wodza ich Ksiazecia de Conde.

which can be understood not only by an ordinary Polishspeaker, but also for a machine translation system:

Begins the story of the failure of heretics andkilling their leader the prince de Conde.

Such different textual versions synchronized with image isa valuable source of information for scientific work, e.g.creation of historical dictionaries (see e.g. (Mayenowa etal., 1966 2012)).

2.2. Interpretation and Collaboration PlatformThe process of augmenting the representation has alreadybeen started in CBDU. Currently the 300 dpi scanned ver-sions of prints have been supplemented with rich metadata(see Figure 3). Apart from fields considered standard (titletransliteration, name of the font used, precise informationabout the original object and its known copies etc.), thelibrary also contains descriptions going beyond the usualunderstanding of metadata, thus moving towards interpre-tation. These set of fields, also represented as metadata,are used to store e.g. additional information about thecontent, historical comments (concerning facts or people

described by the print), relations between library objects(translations, adaptations, alterations of the base text, theiralleged sources or derivates etc.) or glossaries providingtranslations of selected outdated terms or foreign interjec-tions. Several prints have been also commented by mediaexperts and linguists to explain less known background de-tails or presently unintelligible metaphors or symbols.To achieve that, the library installation was from the verybeginning used as a collaboration environment for histori-ans, philologists, librarians and computer scientists, allow-ing them to jointly work out and extend metadata contentand correct identified omissions on the fly. Proofreading ofmetadata, linking of objects and storing the newly createdspecialized print-related content were also carried out in thesystem, using the workflow defined for the project. What ismore, additional fields were used to store expert comments,versioning information etc.

2.3. Current WorkTwo new directions exploiting the cross-domain, constant-update approach of the library have been followed recentlyby establishing new project synergies. As for transliterationof the content, initially it was stored in a separate meta-data field and was filled in for a single print, for verificationonly. After possibilities offered by DjVu format for similarcontent have been recently explored in the IMPACT project(see (Bien, 2011)), the hidden text layer, usually containingthe results of Optical Character Recognition, is planned tobe used to store the transliteration along with the coordi-nates of corresponding words on the scanned image. Creat-ing synergy between CBDU and IMPACT, which used thelibrary data for testing OCR algorithms, we plan to supple-ment the CBDU repository of prints with OCR-ed IMPACTdata.Transliterated text with word coordinates would also beused to improve user-friendliness of the interface. Glos-saries explaining more difficult terms (see left window inFigure 3), currently stored as separate files and displayedin its entirety, will be used as sources of shorter explana-tory notes shown on user demand in tooltips after point-ing the term with a mouse (similarly to triggering thesaurusdefinitions in Microsoft Word or Open Office). All inflec-tional forms of a term will be automatically detected (cf.(Mykowiecka et al., 2012)). A similar paragraph-basedmechanism will be used for presenting text translations.After pointing a foreign, e.g. Latin fragment on a scan,users will be able to display its transliteration and/or trans-lation into Polish.The above-stated approach will be applied in a recentlystarted project of an electronic corpus of 17th and 18thcentury Polish texts (see http://clip.ipipan.waw.pl/KORBA for details). It intends to be the first stage ofsupplementing the National Corpus of Polish (Pol: Nar-odowy Korpus Jezyka Polskiego, NKJP, see http://nkjp.pl/ and (Przepiórkowski et al., 2012)) with oldPolish content and covers the so-called middle Polish con-tent, exactly from the years 1601–1772. The corpus willfeature annotation for text structure and language (all for-eign elements, e.g. Latin intrusions, will be distinguished),and a portion of it will also feature morphological annota-

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Figure 3: Example of augmented content.

tion. Mutually, the texts transcribed in the course of thisproject will bring new content to CBDU.We are aware that CBDU resources are still far from com-pleteness. Zawadzki’s bibliography (Zawadzki, 1990) usedas a source for object selection in the first phase of ouroriginal project does not cover all preserved Polish andPoland-related ephemeral prints. Thanks to developmentof digital libraries and common access platforms (repre-sented by Digital Libraries Federation1 in Poland and EU-ROPEANA2 in Europe) supplementing the material be-came relatively easy. All newly identified objects are suc-cessively acquired by our library by means of storing theirmetadata and references to external sources. Mirroring con-tent still (unfortunately) requires separate arrangement withlibraries preserving the originals.

3. ConclusionAlthough extending descriptions of stored objects withnon-standard interpretation layers goes beyond the presentunderstanding of a “classical” digital library, we haveproved that this is the step in the right direction. Whenevera digital library is not intended to purposefully reflect thephysical one, the “new type” library can be created, readyto store content closely related to objects (such as relevant

1Pol. Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych, see http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/owoc.

2http://www.europeana.eu/

metadata-rich references to other digital libraries, also of-fered by our project), making partial critical editions andoffering fragment translations.

4. ReferencesBien, J. S. (2011). Efficient search in hidden text of large

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EPrints. (2010). EPrints Manual. School of Electronicsand Computer Science at the University of Southamp-ton. http://wiki.eprints.org/w/EPrints_Manual.

Mayenowa, M. R., Pepłowski, F., and Mrowcewicz, K.,editors. (1966–2012). Dictionary of 16th century Pol-ish (Pol. Słownik polszczyzny XVI w.), in Polish, volume1–36. National Ossolinski Institute and The Institute ofLiterary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences,Wrocław and Kraków.

Mykowiecka, A., Rychlik, P., and Waszczuk, J. (2012).Building an electronic dictionary of old polish on thebase of the paper resource. In Proceedings of the Work-

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Ogrodniczuk, M. and Gruszczynski, W. (2011). Dig-ital Library of Poland-related Old Ephemeral Prints:Preserving Multilingual Cultural Heritage. In Proceed-ings of the Workshop on Language Technologies forDigital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, pages 27–33, Hissar, Bulgaria. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-4105.

Przepiórkowski, A., Banko, M., Górski, R. L., andLewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., editors. (2012). Naro-dowy Korpus Jezyka Polskiego [Eng.: National Corpusof Polish]. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw.

Zawadzki, K. (1990). Polish and Poland-relatedEphemeral Prints from the 16th-18th Centuries (Pol.Gazety ulotne polskie i Polski dotyczace z XVI, XVII iXVIII wieku), in Polish. National Ossolinski Institute,Polish Academy of Sciences, Wrocław.

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