EDUCATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARIES IN E-LEARNING

Mohamed MOSTAFA ∗ Emad EL din EID∗ ∗

Abstract: Digital libraries are fast expanding into the role of independent educational entities that aspire not only to complementing traditional classroom teaching, but also allow open electronic learning for distance and continued education. We have developed tools, expanded our digital library systems and content, and built almost 5000“pages” of WWW-accessible courseware, increasing the interactivity and quality of learning about computer science. Evaluation has shown that learning practices have changed, most students are happy with the emerging infrastructure and pedagogy, and there is growth in both local and remote access. Identify concept of “learning object” to address the issues and needs. In order to accommodate the digital nature of education, a new modern profile of learning is proposed that allows modular yet efficient transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil.

What is a Digital Library? Digital Library, Electronic Library, Electronic Archive, Virtual Library; Digital Repository

there are many definitions, for over 50 definitions for a digital library in web.simmons.edu/~schwartz/462-defs.html. The Internet is not a digital library. Digital Libraries are forever, not just a fad. The Digital Library Federation has proposed the following definition:

Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use a by a defined community or set of communities. Digital Library Content Library, Archive & Museum Collections, Digital and Digitized Material, Academic Journals,

Government Materials, Internet Content, Self-Archived Materials, Institutional Repositories which contain infrastructure for scholarship Clifford Lynch, self-archiving initiatives like Dspace www.dspace.org (MIT/HP) and ePrints www.eprints.org (Southampton),not a substitute for academic publishing, about communication, not control, requires long-term institutional commitment, multi-disciplinary but narrow (just institutional), applicable to corporate and e-government.

Digital Library Scope It is not just a repository, It is also a way of organizing data, surrounded by technologies,

controlled through policies, managed by librarians and used by researchers. Digital Libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including specialized staff, to

select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities. Digital Library Foundation www.clir.org/diglib.

Digital Library Positioning

Digital Libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.

Digitization Challenges Material handling, especially high volume or high value, Efficient and reliable imaging work-

flow, Obtaining accurate OCR from poor-quality source materials, Obtaining high quality re-keying (and metadata creation) at low cost, Developing and maintaining strong quality control.

The Acquisition Process

A digital library collection may be built through either or both of the following processes (in addition to creation of content by the library itself):

• Digital documents may be created by digital conversion of existing printed or other analogue materials.

• Existing digital documents may be gathered from the Web or from physical digital sources such as CD-ROMs.

Digital Library and e-Documentation Technologies

A repository of useful information, held in a digital format, that has easily searchable metadata, and a useable & powerful retrieval & display system accessible to the majority of intended users.

• Material handling, especially high volume or high value. • Efficient and reliable imaging work-flow. • Obtaining accurate OCR from poor-quality source materials. • Obtaining high quality re-keying (and metadata creation) at low cost. • Developing and maintaining strong quality control.

Repository & Digital Formats • Scanners work, OCR is starting to work • Formats are stabilizing

o Gif, JPEG, PDF, Tiff, File Sizes, BMP, PNG, JP2 o Packbits, JPEG, Gif, PNG, DjVu, JPEG 2000, CCITT Group 4

• Disk is free o in 2000 1 terabyte of storage cost $1million o in 2002 $100,000, in 2004 $10,000, in 2006 $2,000, in 2008 1,000 in 2009 … o A terabyte is: a million million or 1012 bytes;

300 movies or 40,000 faxes or 15,000 music CDs

Useful Information How much information is there? (UC Berkeley School of Information Management, 2007) (www.simms.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info)

o 1-2 billion gigabytes (1018 bytes) of information is created annually. o 0.03% is printed, 5% is on photographic media, the rest is in digital storage (including

images). o About 300 terabytes of this is 'published' ($300m in disk in 2000). o 2 billion WebPages are created annually.

Measuring & Reporting Usage • Huge opportunity to measure usage of resources, especially expensive e-journals

o Value-for-money; collection development; research • Huge problem in standardization

o COUNTER – "counting online usage of networked electronic resources". o Started in 2002, following work in UK (the PALS group) and the USA ARL E-metrics

project.

o ISI, Blackwells & OUP comply with the code of practice, many others have declared support.

o NISO Z39.7 (Library Statistics) potential. • Metadata

o Standards are essential Dublin Core, EAD.

o Interoperability is essential XML, MARC, Web Services.

o Cataloguing is a skilled activity. o High-quality tools deliver:

Productivity, Accuracy, Usefulness

Useable and Powerful Retrieval • Pattern Searching

o Compensates for scanning errors o Allows search success even with spelling errors

• Concept Searching o Supports broadening of search terms o Allows search success even with spelling errors

• Boolean Searching o Supports broadening and narrowing of search terms o Allows very complex and targeted searching

Typical Search Process result done in EUN “Egyptian University Network”. Here we do a pattern search for 'economic', Then we get 26 results for 'economic' and words with the same 'pattern' as 'economic'. So if we search for 'ekonomic', note the incorrect spelling, we get…the same 26 records. Now let's do a 'concept' search for 'economic' or any similar ideas. The result was 34 hits as we have found matches for 'economic', but also, if we look for the records here.....we will have matches for 'economy'. If we do a 'concept' search for 'ekonomic', a word that does not really exist... ...we rightly get no hits.

Finally, if we do a Boolean search for 'economic', we can explicitly exclude the 'economy' examples......limiting our results to these 12 items. So those are some very brief examples, using 'Horizon Digital Library' to show how different searches can be done.

Access & Display

• Accessibility Depends on: o Viewing Technology o Bandwidth o Security

• Usability Depends on: o Format Familiarity (and Integration) o Choices of Mode (Expert / Non-Expert) o No Overload or Clutter – Simplify!

What are the components of the Horizon Digital Library Solution

Web Editor Digitization

Service Light Scanning Data

Migration E-Contents Databases

• Horizon Digital Library is separate, powerful system, not just a Horizon Information Portal add-on

• Horizon Digital Library is equivalent or greater in database complexity compared to Horizon • The solution includes both products and web services • The core software product includes the Horizon Digital Library Archive, Web Editor, and an

Import Wizard (part of the Data Migration functionality)

Full Text Searching Capabilities of Digital Documents

Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing • Fuzzy searching: fault tolerant • Specially enhanced for errors from

OCR • No Cleanup of Documents • Most closely matching documents

are returned first

Semantic Expansion • Matches users’ concepts to

concepts in the full-text document database.

• Natural language queries: easy-to-use

• Semantic Networks can be tailored to vertical markets, subject domains

• Alleviates tedious keyword indexing and abstracting of documents

Query: moamar khadafi Finds: Moammar Kadhafi Moammar Gadhafi Moamer Kadhafi Moammar Qadaffi

Query: Foreign Trade Finds: International Commerce External Business Business abroad Overseas markets

Survey: Goals and Methodology Being the first survey of this kind conducted by EUN Administration Committee of using a

consortia of digital library connected by 12 universities in Egypt. Goals:

• Obtaining direct feedback on the usability of electronic publications • Obtaining information on areas to be expanded • Developing and improving offered services • Collecting general information on opinions and attitudes regarding the usage of e-journals • Measuring the need for additional e-journals.

Measures For Alexandria University during 7 days (member of EUN)

Tab. 1 – Absolute values and percentages: Distribution of Digital Library users by profession

Absolute values Percentages Professor 152 13,3 Associate Professor 197 17,2 Researcher 320 27,9 Ph.D. 103 9,0 Ph.D. candidate 184 16,0 Student 72 6,3 Librarian 31 2,7 Technical / Administrative staff 26 2,3 Other 62 5,4 No answer 3

Total 1,150 100,0

Tab. 2 Absolute values and percentages: Distribution of users by disciplinary area of interest

Absolute values Percentages Biology and Biomedical Sciences 283 24,6 Engineering 212 18,4 Chemistry and Pharmacology 158 13,7 Medicine and Veterinary Science 134 11,7 Physics and Maths 130 11,3 Agricultural and Earth Sciences 85 7,4 Economics, Statistics and Social Sciences 77 6,7 Other 56 4,9 No answer 15 1,3 Total 1,150 100,0

What kind of research do you generally undertake?

Conclusion The Future Library will have the following properties:

• User access will be highly personalized. • Expanded user access from new devices: phones, PDAs, tablets, notebooks… • User access will be extended to new users with the growth of consortia and global

reach. • Digital content and access will increase. • E-commerce will continue to become more accepted and even required.

Portals • More than a Web OPAC • More than a Federated Search Tool • More than a Resource Gateway • A Portal:

o Single Sign-on o Multiple Channels o Automated Personalization o User Personalization o Consistent Interface o Transaction Processing

Digital Library Technologies: • Technology is in early stages • Look for:

o good digitisation and workflow o powerful searching of metadata & text. o easy & flexible user interface. o integration with library and portals. o local knowledge, training & support. o integration of open source & proprietary. o There are good solutions today. o Leading suppliers continue to develop.

• There are good solutions today • Leading suppliers continue to develop

Information Portal • Standard presentation regardless of data location and format • MARC, XML, Dublin Core, CIMI, EAD, New ISBN • Results de-duplicated and relevancy-ranked based on personal preferences • Delivery of full text, information objects

Vision Summary • Open systems leverages platform tools & enables system expansion • Multi-tier platform for improved reliability and scalability • Information portal & e-commerce delivers enhanced power to the user • Enhanced management of library assets – today & in the future • Interoperability through standards

Acknowledgments

The role of libraries has and is changing The nature of technology has and is changing The expectations of the end user has and is changing

Libraries are the hub of information management

BIBLIOGRAPHY [1] Dublin Core Metadata Initiative www.dublincore.org [2] The D-Imaging Guide www.dig-mar.com D-Lib Magazine www.dlib.org [3] The Digital Library Federation (DLF) www.diglib.org [4] Digital Library Research & Development sunsite.berkeley.edu/R+D [5] IFLA Digital Library Sources www.ifla.org/II/diglib.htm [6] Myths & Challenges (Kuny & Cleveland 1996) www.ifla.org/IFLA62 [7] The Digital Electronic Library (Newby 2007) www.ifla.org/documents [8] Tilburg University Summer School www.ticer.nl/summer03 [9] European Conference on Digital Libraries 2003 in Norway, 2006 in UK. [10] Definition of d-library, at: http://www.clir.org/diglib/dldefinition.htm [11] The phrase “born digitally” has been popularized recently by the Digital Library Federation

and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See, for example, The Digital Library Federation program agenda, June 1, 1998, page 4.

[12] Lynch, Clifford A. and Garcia-Molina, Hector. Interoperability, Scaling, and the Digital Libraries Research Agenda: a report on the May 18-19, 1995 IITA Digital Libraries Workshop. Available at: http://www-diglib.stanford.edu/diglib/pub/reports/iita-dlw/main.html

[13] Arms, Caroline R. Historical collections for the National Digital Library: lessons and challenges at the Library of Congress. D-Lib magazine, April and May 1996. Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april96/loc/04c-arms.html and http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may96/loc/05c-arms.html

[14] NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative Projects. Available at: http://www.cise.nsf.gov/iis/dli_home.html

[15] Kahn, Robert and Wilensky, Robert. A framework for distributed digital object services. Available at: http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/home/cstr/arch/k-w.html

∗ Eng. Information Technology Consultant Alzarka Academy for computer and business administration ∗∗ Dr. Literature Alzarka Academy for computer and business administration