Document viewer with DSpace: a practical approach
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| Pages | 22-26 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-05-2019-0031 |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Author | Hirak Jyoti Hazarika,S. Ravikumar |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Library & information services |
Document viewer with DSpace: a practical
approach
Hirak Jyoti Hazarika and S. Ravikumar
Document viewers review
As academic institutions continue to
work with a large and different type of
content for their digital repositories
and digital libraries, there is an
essential need to evaluate, provide
examples and implement user-friendly
websites regardless of the digital files
size, format, location or the content/
digital management system in use. This
article provides an overview of the
need and current development of
Document Viewers for digitized
objects in DSpace repositories.
Although some may argue that the
need of a viewer for non-born-digital
files is a result of using a system for
something that was originally designed
for born-digital and traditional digital
repository content such as portable
document format (PDF) files; others
may also agree that the type of content
and file formats in digital repositories
is already diverse. These data seem to
confirm the early finding in a 2005
survey conducted by the Coalition for
Networked Information where the
authors concluded that a growing
number of institutions were using
institutional repositories for not only
e-prints or born-digital materials but
also for digitized materials such as
books, maps and other primary source
materials that are traditionally housed
in libraries’ special collections or
archives (Tzoc, 2007).
The presentation of large and high-
quality images through a Web browser
has led to some significant changes and
improvements in the past few years.
For example, a single image can be
viewed using a standard inline
visualization method that simply loads
an entire image into memory; however,
this approach can be very inefficient
for a set of high-quality image files
such as those of books or newspaper.
The digitized images of a book can
result in large files – often in hundreds
of megabytes, which make them
unsuitable for traditional in-browser
visualization. The benefits of
presenting friendly and customizable
viewers for high-resolution images is
well-presented in an article by Tzoc
(2007). The ability to zoom and pan
high-resolution images in digital
repositories can allow researchers to
take a closer look at interesting parts of
images such as captions under images
or handwritten text that is far beyond
the original image resolution, which
can subsequently lead into interesting
discoveries (Saraiva and Rodrigues,
2009).
The topic of document viewers for
DSpace generated a discussion in
January 2011 in the DSpace-tech
listserve when several developers talked
about the possibilities of such an
implementation, others provided links
to examples or related technologies and
some even talked about the need of an
“out-of-the-box” viewer. The following
two sections of this article include a
brief discussion of the development of a
Web-based document viewer developed
by Google. When any document file is
uploaded that is above 10 MB in
DSpace and document file will be
download in your desktop or PC, one
needs to install any document reader or
viewer such as Adobe reader in our PC
or desktop.
Challenges and opportunities of a
DSpace institutional repository
A repository is an archive for
collecting, preserving and
disseminating digital copies of the
intellectual output of an institution. An
institutional repository might also
include other digital assets generated
by academics such as picture, data sets,
administrative documents, course
notes, learning objects or conference
proceedings (Crow, 2002). According
to Yi et al. (2008), software selection,
acquisition policies and staffing is the
main focusable area of planning a
repository. The major institutional
repository software platforms use a
common open standard protocol, the
open archives initiative (OAI) for
harvesting metadata. Examples of
institutional repository software
include Greenstone, DSpace, EPrints,
Fedora Commons, Invenio, MyCoRe,
Opus, SimpleDL and SobekCM, as
well as Dspace. Few studies have
defined the practical guidelines of
setting up an institutional repository
for research and educational material
produced by an organization or
institution through the DSpace open
source software, Smith et al. (2003),
Sutradhar (2006),Bird and Simons
(2003),Velmurugan (2013) and
Tramboo et al. (2013) discussed
different services and architectures of
digital library software. According to
Saraiva and Rodrigues (2009),the
architecture and major technical details
of WebC-Docs, a highly-customizable
toolkit for the WebComfort CMS
platform, provides document
management functionality. Tzoc
(2007) discussed and provided an
overview of the need and current
development of document viewers for
digitized objects in DSpace
repositories, including a local viewer
developed for a newspaper collection
and other viewers used with Dspace
repositories.
DSpace is freely available to all
institutions worldwide as an open
source system. It is designed for ease
of use, with a Web-based user
interface that can be customised and
extended by individual institutions.
DSpace allows customization to
accommodate the multidisciplinary
and organizational needs of big
institutions. DSpace provides a
22 LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 5 2019, pp. 22-26, V
CEmerald Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/LHTN-05-2019-0031
To continue reading
Request your trial