Product Description

How to Build a Digital Library is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. It is the perfectly self-contained resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries. The Second Edition reflects new developments in the field as well as in the Greenstone Digital Library open source software. In Part I, the authors have added an entire new chapter on user groups, user support, collaborative browsing, user contributions, and so on. There is also new material on content-based queries, map-based queries, cross-media queries. There is an increased emphasis placed on multimedia by adding a "digitizing" section to each major media type. A new chapter has also been added on "internationalization,"  which will address Unicode standards, multi-language interfaces and collections, and issues with non-European languages (Chinese, Hindi, etc.). Part II, the software tools section, has been completely rewritten to reflect the new developments in Greenstone Digital Library Software, an internationally popular open source software tool with a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries. As with the First Edition, a web site, implemented as a digital library, will accompany the book and provide access to color versions of all figures, two online appendices, a full-text sentence-level index, and an automatically generated glossary of acronyms and their definitions. In addition, demonstration digital library collections will be included to demonstrate particular points in the book. to access the online content please visit, www.greenstone.org.

• Sketches the history of libraries-both traditional and digital-and their impact on present practices and future directions


• Offers in-depth coverage of today's practical standards used to represent and store information digitally in all settings


• Uses Greenstone, freely accessible open-source software-available with interfaces in major languages (including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic)


• Written for both technical and non-technical audiences - covers the entire spectrum of media, including text, images, audio and video


• Web-enhanced with software documentation, color illustrations, full-text index, source code, and more
  

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #421138 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

From Library Journal
Although this somewhat technical work is aimed primarily at software developers who will be writing the programs to encompass digital information, the authors never lose sight of the importance of the role that librarians play in the selection and collection of information that will form digital libraries. [The authors, both computer science faculty members at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, are involved with the New Zealand Digital Library research project; Witten is the director.] Anyone who has ever done an Internet search will benefit from understanding some of the concepts underlying the structures of search engines. The section titled "Presentation: User Interfaces" is particularly enlightening in its descriptions of how various search engines can treat the same search differently. For example, this section contains easily understandable explanations of the importance of language stemming using morphological reduction and of case folding. For librarians wanting to try their hands at creating a digital library that can stand alone or be accessible via the Internet, the authors suggest the freely available Greenstone software (www.greenstone.org), for Windows or UNIX operating systems. Librarians, particularly those who envision building their own full-text digital libraries, will find useful information here.
Margaret Sylvia, St. Mary's Univ. Lib., San Antonio
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover

How to Build a Digital Library is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. It is a self-contained resource for individuals, companies, and institutions wishing to put these powerful tools to work in their burgeoning information treasuries. This Second Edition reflects the rapid evolution of the field, with new material on multimedia, metadata and internationalization. New technologies are integrated with concepts from library and information science to provide a comprehensive social, technical and practical treatment of digital libraries. Part II describes how this is put into practice with the Greenstone Digital Library Software, a popular open source software tool suite. For the second edition this material has been completely rewritten to reflect new developments in the software, including a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries and numerous interoperability features.

About the Author

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. He has written several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999) and Data Mining (2000), both from Morgan Kaufmann.

David Bainbridge is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Optical Music Recognition from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand where he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar. Since moving to Waikato in 1996 he has continued to broadened his interest in digital media, while retaining a particular emphasis on music. An active member of the New Zealand Digital Library project, he manages the group's digital music library, Meldex, and has collaborated with several United Nations Agencies, the BBC and various public libraries. David has also worked as a research engineer for Thorn EMI in the area of photo-realistic imaging and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1991 as the class medalist in Computer Science.

---

Customer Reviews

Good introduction
As a pediatrician working in a third-world hospital (and not as an information professional) I found this a fascinating and useful book. Its scope includes everything from the history of libraries to problems of preservation of digital data to some details of JPEG encoding algorithms.

I definitely sensed that I was reading a book by professional librarians ... this is not just a book about how to throw some text onto the Internet or onto a CDROM. Rather it covers the whole area of how to organize large quantities of information of all types in ways that make it most accessible to users.

The most useful part of the book for me is the guide to the structure and use of the Greenstone open-source digital library software, which has great potential for organizing and distributing (via Internet or CDROM) libraries of all sorts. The software site... includes some documentation but this book is far more detailed, for those wanting to go beyond the basics. The Greenstone site includes links to examples such as the New Zealand Digital Library Project ...The book includes an introduction to XML and related topics. Greenstone stores and processes XML data so the reader will have to understand XML to some degree to be able benefit from the subsequent explanation of how to use Greenstone. As a newcomer to XML I thought that the presentation was good for the amount of space that could be devoted to it, but I still had a hard time following some of the later material.

The only problem I had with the book was that it had an uneven mix of broad strokes and technical detail. I found even much of the detail interesting (including a good introduction to Unicode) but I wished that the space had been devoted instead to a slower-paced, fuller explanation of the Greenstone architecture and how to build on it.

How to Build a Digital Library
This work would be more aptly entitled: "How to Build A Digital Library Using Greenstone Software", since it is largely a primer and manual for Open Source software. The publishers present the work as a book and a website. The website's technology is useful, allowing the reader to search words and phrases.

The choice of example projects for digital libraries given in the opening Orientation section are laudable, centering as they do on the support for human development, improvement of scientific communication, and preservation of indigenous cultures.
The authors provide a valuable cross-fertilization of ideas, which comes from a computer science perspective.

The main focus of this book is the fact that the digital library can be whatever we as librarians envision. A major objective is to use technology to replace repetitive human intervention. Surely this is a most valuable attainment for any organization. There are significant insights throughout the book that deal with user interfaces and how search engines operate on the Internet. Perhaps the strongest and best thread that runs throughout is the role of open standards. Bursting out of the chapter on Standards and Protocols, are excellent, non technical descriptions of major industry and formal standards like TWAIN, MPEG, Unicode, XML, OEBPS, and library standards, like Dublin Core, OAI, and Z39.50 on which the interconnecting webs of library systems are based. The authors, however, have most difficulty describing library standards, for example, MARC and AACR. The authors, however, are most at home with the technical aspects of Greenstone and provide an excellent overview of processes like indexing using optical character recognition, and searching free text using phrases and key phrases. They ask intriguing questions, such as, "Is the digital library an institution or a piece of technology?" though they falter in finding answers on occasion.

The approach of the authors is humorous and humanistic, helping to put technology into perspective within varied disciplines. The approach to communication is personal. Whimsical characters are used to illustrate points, such as, the King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland

There are factual errors, which illustrate the main weakness of the book and may throw the main theses into some doubt. In stating that the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme originates in England, demonstrate a lack of research on the part of the authors. Their failure to include a librarian as an editor is a definite faux pas. Factoids such as, "A recent edition of the big red books was published in 1998", betray their lack of understanding of conventional libraries. They do not appear to know that the Library of Congress updates authority databases continually and publishes their major products online on a regular basis and in various formats.

They frequently can be seen struggling to provide opaque descriptions of simple library processes and terminology. The understanding of basic concepts of librarianship would have been clearer had the corpus of established library knowledge been consulted more extensively. There are questionable assertions, like "Placing like books together adds an element of serendipity to searching".

They ultimately fail to make the connection between the eminently effective and efficient operation of worldwide library systems and the librarian in her "conventional" library. In fact the technology relies squarely on the co-operative spirit, the strongest, most fundamental characteristic of the librarian. They fail to link the systems with this mainspring of libraries, which facilitates sharing and fosters "interoperability" -- the sine qua non of library systems.

A conclusion they seem to be drawing is that there is no place for the librarian in their vision of the future digital library. This is a provocative question: could they possibly be right? The value of traditional cataloging is questioned.

An inescapable conclusion drawn is that the information set on which the work is based is selective, to say the least, and leads to a narrow and somewhat idiosyncratic view of libraries. There are some strange choices, like the hapless Charles Ammi Cutter, while the bulk of classics of modern technical librarianship are missing. Absent are luminaries of the technical library world, like Mai Chan, Roy Tennant and Henriette Avram. Clifford Lynch is relegated to a single entry in the bibliography.

Although the reader is left to fill in the blanks, the work is good read for those contemplating developing or working in a digital library. The book assists librarians to use technology to do more and do more efficiently. Overall there are important insights for the people who run libraries, however, the work reflects a patronizing view and has serious deficiencies. The reader must use with care to avoid reinventing some basic wheels.

Kathleen Crewdson, Ian Dew, NextLibrary
April 22, 2004