The New Zealand Digital Library: Collections and experience
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045602 |
| Pages | 495-504 |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| Author | Ian H. Witten,Rodger McNab |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The New Zealand Digital Library:
collections and experience
Ian H. Witten and Rodger McNab
Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
E-mail: {ihw, rjmcnab}@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Abstract: The New Zealand Digital Library project aims to develop the underlying technology for digital
libraries
and
make
it
available
for
others
to use to create
their own
collections.
We have
built a large number
of
demonstration
collections.
Because
our
policy
is to avoid
manual processing
of
material,
full-text indexing
and — to a lesser
degree
—
automatically created browsing structures provide
the primary point of access
to the
material.
As well as
conventional textual
collections,
we are
experimenting
with
collections
of
musical
and
audio
material.
This
article
describes
the library
structure
and present and planned
collections,
and
sum-
marises
our
experiences
in
the
project.
1. introduction
The migration of information from paper to comput-
ers promises to change the whole nature of
research,
and in particular the methods by which
people locate information. The New Zealand Digital
Library project is exploring ways to impose structure
on fundamentally anarchic, uncatalogued, distrib-
uted repositories of information, thereby providing
information consumers with effective tools to locate
what they need and peruse it conveniently and com-
fortably. Our goal is to produce an easy-to-use
digi-
tal library system that runs on inexpensive comput-
ers at information providers' own sites and which
offers a public information service that information
providers themselves maintain.
The aim of our project is not to set up new libraries
but to develop the underlying technology for digital
libraries and make it available publicly so that others
can use it to create their own collections. Not sur-
prisingly, the technology required varies greatly
depending on the kind of collection and the source
of the information. Consequently, we are making
several different substantial collections of public-
domain text available on an experimental basis as
test
cases.
These allow us to investigate the techni-
cal problems of gathering and indexing the material,
to assess the usability of our interfaces and to collect
information on external usage so that we can
improve the facilities offered. Perhaps more impor-
tant, the provision of a large array of test collections
allows us to explore the varying requirements of
diverse collections of information and to develop a
software framework that permits collections of differ-
ent kinds.
Our project rests on five basic planks. First, we avoid
manual processing of the material that comprises
the library, and make a minimum of assumptions
about conventions adopted by document reposito-
ries from which the source material is collected. For
example, we do not assume the presence of any bib-
liographic metadata at all, nor any other information
provided explicitly for organisational or indexing pur-
poses. Second, we provide as the primary access
mechanism a full-text index of the entire contents of
each document, whereas other schemes index on
user-supplied document descriptions, abstracts or
other document surrogates.
Third,
close attention is
paid to the interface and to the real needs of library
users.
Fourth, our work directly addresses the prob-
lem of building the library in a geographically remote
location with high Internet costs — an environment
in which the benefits of networked library technology
are especially striking. Finally, we aim to produce a
library scheme that is economical in the resources it
requires and which can operate on a
small,
inexpen-
sive server.
This article relates our experience so far with the
New Zealand Digital Library project. Because the
core of any library is the collections it contains we
focus on the collections we have created and the
col-
lections that we are developing. Witten et al. (1996)
give a description of the project that covers more
technical issues. The project started in 1995 in an
effort to create a digital library for computer science
research (Witten ef al. 1995), and received a seed
grant shortly thereafter from the New Zealand
Lotteries Grants Board to run a
small
pilot
service.
In
July 1996 we received major funding from the New
Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and
Technology to pursue a programme of research and
development on 'Digital Libraries for New Zealand.'
We begin by describing the facilities offered by the
New Zealand Digital Library, using as an illustration
the first — and still the largest —
collection,
contain-
ing Computer Science technical reports. We then go
on to review the other collections presently offered
The Electronic Library, Vol. 15, No. 6, December 1997 495
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