Building a “Library in a Box” with an out of the box solution: creating a prototype engineering library using XTF
| Pages | 8-10 |
| Published date | 03 August 2012 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419051211277931 |
| Date | 03 August 2012 |
| Author | Laura Bolton Palumbo |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Introduction
Rutgers University Libraries, in
collaboration with the University of
Liberia, and with grants from the
Engineering Information Foundation
(EIF), the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID),
and with contributions from the
International Society of Electrical
Engineers (IEEE), have created
The Engineering Access to Knowledge
Offline (EAKO) System, a prototype
“Library in a Box” for engineering
information. The product runs on the
open source platform eXtensible Text
Framework (XTF), c reated by California
Digital Library, and is based on
TEEAL, The Essential Electronic
Agricultural Library, developed by
Cornell University. The EAKO System,
like TEEAL, will work entirely offline
(The Essential Electronic Agricultural
Library, 2010).
Internet access in Liberia, as it is in
many developing countries, is extremely
limited, and if available, excessively
slow. Liberia’s 14 year civil war, which
began in 1989, decimated the country’s
infrastructure and basic services. The
University of Liberia is the largest
university in the country with 23,800
current students (Dennis, 2012), yet
their library lacks quality information
resources and up-to-date technology.
EAKO will provide a digital collection
of open source engineering articles,
books, and courses, which will be
stored on a high capacity hard drive,
accessed offline via a browser installed
on a computer in the University library.
As the computer resources in the library
grow, the program will be migrated to a
local area network. The program can
also be used online when broadband
internet becomes available. Future
development of the project would
allow access via mobile devices.
Background
During the initial development of the
product, the existing physical and
informational resources of the library at
the University of Liberiawere evaluated,
along with the current engineering
curriculum. It was determined that
the library’s resources were extremely
limited to non-existent. The engineering
curriculum consists of programs in civil
engineering, electrical engineering,
and mining engineering, with plans
to include a major in mechanical
engineering as well. In order to provide
as much useful informationas possible, it
was determined that the EAKO System
prototype would provide resources in
these areas only, with the addition of
books and instructional materials in
foundation courses in science and
mathematics. Materials to be included
in EAKO would be open source
scientific journal articles and books, as
well as donated archived articles in
electrical engineering from IEEE.
Technical constraints
The EAKO System set out to emulate
the success of TEEAL (http://teeal.org/),
and hoped to utilize the same platform,
Greenstone Digital Library software.
However, early discussions with the
librarians at Cornell University about
the technical modifications which were
necessary to produce TEEAL, as well as
the extremely limited budget for the
EAKO grant, persuaded team members
that a simpler open source solution
should be found. This alternative open
source program would need to be able to
search and manage a collection of
articles and larger documents in a
variety of formats, but primarily
PDF’s, on a high capacity hard drive.
The operating system would be
Windows-based, due to the almost
exclusive use of PC’s in Liberia. More
than 20 programs were investigated,
and as a result we initially hoped to
use Fedora Commons. It was soon
determined that like Greenstone,
Fedora would require some fairly
intensive technical modifications,
which were beyond our budget
to procure. I was very excited when I
then discovered XTF by California
Digital Libraries (http://xtf.cdlib.org).
In addition to the six California Digital
Library (2012) implementations using
XTF, and the 18 highly customized
implementations, there are currently 28
lightly customized uses in academic
universities and archives in the USA, the
UK, and Sweden. XTF not only met our
project requirements, but also provided
easy to follow instructions for simple
technical modifications. Documentation
displayed on the web site is extensive
and well-written, and the program is
actively maintained and supported by
both the developers and a user’s group.
Program features and customization
XTF’s standard searching and
indexing capabilities are quite
powerful, yet it is also adaptable in
that it is easily modified by users with
limited programming experience. Some
of the easily performed customizations
of XTF which are important to its use in
The EAKO System are the ability to
add custom metadata and create our
own hierarchical facets. Another key
feature is its ability to handle large
documents in a variety of formats,
including PDF’s, Word, HTML, text,
and XML. Boolean search capabilities,
as well as wildcard/truncations/exact
phrase search allowances are “out of the
box” features. Browsing and advanced
search by facets are also standard.
Misspelled words are recognized, and
spelling suggestions are provided.
8
Library Hi Tech News
Number 6 2012, pp. 8-10, qEmerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419051211277931
Building a “Library in a Box” with an out
of the box solution: creating a prototype
engineering library using XTF
Laura Bolton Palumbo
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