PSNC Digital Libraries Team

Year 2009 appeared to be the record year in terms of the number of newly started digital libraries. Yesterday on dLibra project home page, 16th entry concerning 2009 has been added to the list of dLibra installations. It means that in 2009 there were started 4 more digital libraries than in 2008 (see http://dlibra.psnc.pl/biblioteki/). Moreover, from the information that we receive it appears that 2009 is not finally “closed” – there is still a chance to increase the number of newly started digital libraries in 2009 by several entries.

Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) can also be proud of the record – in 2009 the total number of digital objects available through DLF increased by around 150 000 – it is twice as much as in comparison with 2008, when this number increased by around 75 000!

Since today the DLF has its own Facebook site! Now you can become the DLF fan and join discussions about the DLF development.

Microsoft has launched a huge advertising campaign which aims at increasing the number of users of the Microsoft’s search engine called Bing – competitive solution to search engines by Google or Yahoo.

The tagline itself says about a new approach to searching. According to Microsoft representatives, contemporary search engines return results suffering from ‘information overload’. Bing, in contrary to other search engines, wants to be perceived as a decision search engine, which eliminates information overload and gives a new quality of searching.

All interested in comparison of search results of Bing and Google are invited to visit Bing vs. Google which on a single browser’s screen displays search results both from Bing and Google, for example: http://www.bing-vs-google.com/?q=federacja+bibliotek+cyfrowych. Effects? Two first search hits are identical. And the rest? Please rate it yourself. In our opinion Bing results are more diverse therefore seem to be more interesting. We invite all to check how Bing search engine works, for example by checking resources availability of the digital library they use.

Yesterday Google announced an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Culture, allowing this company to digitise up to a million of public domain objects, located in Rome and Florence National Libraries. The selection of objects for digitisation will be made by librarians.

While announcing this agreement, Google also referred to Europeana, showing its support for this initiative:

Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission’s Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world’s historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

In this context it is worth to notice, that the creation of Europenana was initiated as activities in some sense competitive to the Google Books project, which was initially focused on mass digitisation of books, newspapers etc. written only in English.

TED (acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a series of meeting, on which the invited speakers have 18 minutes to present their idea for changing the world, which was evaluated by the organizers as an “idea worth spreading”. TED conferences are organized once a year in California, USA, and the recordings of speeches are available at TED websites. The TED meetings are extended by the TEDx initiative, which is focused on organization of similar conferences around the world. This year for the first time a Polish TEDx meeting was organized – TEDxWarsaw. It was held on the 5th of March, and since yesterday the video recordings from this meeting are available. For the 28th of May TEDxPoznań meeting is planned.

In February this year, during the TEDUniversity event there was a 5 minute “lecture” of Time Berners-Leeon open data. This lecture illustrates with really interesting examples how important is to publish the source data in the Internet, instead of publishing just papers/reports prepared on the basis of this data. This lecture is a supplement for the Tim Berners-Lee speech from the TED2009, in which he called for wide publishing of source (raw) data in a way allowing its automated reuse (the Linked Data standard). We recommend you to see both these speeches:

• TED2009: Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
• TED University 2010: Tim Berners-Lee – The year open data went worldwide

Such approach is also an important direction of the development of digital libraries. Presently in project such as Europeana, the automated reuse of metadata describing digital objects distributed in many digital libraries is implemented on a large scale. The next step can be a stronger semantic integration of this metadata, as for example shown in the “Thought Lab”. It is a prototype service allowing advanced search and exploration of a slice of information available in Europeana, which basis is the automated semantic integration of the metadata. Another example are the works in the DRIVER II project in the area of so called “enhanced publications”, which are complex objects connecting both scientific papers and source data used in this papers. Examples of such prototype enhanced publications can be found at one of the project websites.

The family of Java technology grows stronger in the field of internet multimedia solutions. This refers to the JavaFX – a new programming platform, which offers many interesting features, broad applicability and in particular good support for Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Until recently, the leading provider of RIA`s multimedia technologies was Adobe and its Flash technologies. In 2006 Microsoft proposed a new solution – Silverlight and then in may 2007 Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) announced its first competetive solution based on Java technology. In this way, the world first heard about JavaFX.

From developer point of view the JavaFX is simply a new scripting language, in which programming multimedia and graphics is much easier. In practice it means that, fully integrated with Java, JavaFX gives the ability to improve standard applications with new attractive multimedia solutions – images, animations, movies etc. Although competitors offers pretty much the same, the main advantage of JavaFX is its broad applicability – it can be used to implement RIAs as well as standard desktop applications, mobile applications, games, graphics presentations and multimedia presentations on TV platforms.

Sample capabilities of the JavaFX can be found on the official website: http://javafx.com/samples/
Recently platform was also used on the official website of Vancouver 2010: http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-medals/geo-view/

PSNC Digital Libraries Team also decided to use some of the JavaFX goodies. New version of dLibra system (5.0) as well as recently announced dMouseion will offer new image browsing plug-in utilising JavaFX technology.

One of the project from Europeana group – Europeana Connect is currently preparing several surveys and usability tests to evaluate new elements on the Europeana website. If you are interested in improvement of Europeana sign up as a Europeana test user. In order to join you need to fill in a small survey with information about yourself and your use of the internet and mobile phone.

dLibra also needs some testers! dLibra 5.0 is developed in a bit different way than a previous version. If you are interested in taking a closer look at things which will be available in 5.0 take a look at our dlTeam repository which is using dLibra 5.0. Software still may contain some bugs, if you spot any – let us know!

source: http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/news.php?area=News&pag=26

Lucene 3.0.0 was released on 25 November 2009. Lucene is an open Java framework that is used for indexing and searching text in dLibra software. Lucene 3.0.0 is the first release with Java 5 as a minimum requirement. The API was cleaned up to make use of Java 5’s advantages. You can find many optimizations and new features in the latest Lucene, though it is not fully compatible with earlier releases due to many changes. The most important are near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter, new query types, per segment searching and caching, improvements in wildcard searching, improved Unicode support, high-performance handling of numeric fields and many more. Detailed information on changes in Lucene framework is available here.

We are planning to use Lucene 3.0.0 in one of the future versions of dLibra software. It will help us improve indexing and searching performance.

On the 16th of February 2010 in the ROARMAP registry a policy of the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics PAS regarding the compulsory archiving of all published manuscripts in the IBB PAS institutional repository was registered. It is a 145th entry in this database and the first entry from Poland. Congratulations!

IBB PAS institutional repository is available at http://eprints.ibb.waw.pl/.

Between 16th and 18th February 2010 in Veria Central Public Library (Βέροια – city located in Middle Macedonia region in Greece) a training for ACCESS IT project was conducted. The training led by Adam Dudczak and Marcina Werla from PSNC DL Team covered wide range of topics related to digitisation, creation of digital libraries and aggregation of metadata for Europeana and other purposes. The training was divided into following sections:

1. What is all this digitisation about and which objects should be digitised?
2. How to digitize objects?
3. How to create a digital repository?
4. How to describe digital objects?
5. How objects and metadata from digital repositories can be reused?
6. How to (and why) prepare a repository for Europeana?
7. How to set up a metadata aggregator?
8. Should I know something more about digital preservation?
9. Why to evaluate accessibility and usability of digital libraries?
10. What comes next?

The training had 15 participants representing Greece, Serbia and Turkey.

In the ACCESS IT project these persons will create in their countries centres of competence on digital libraries, trying to cause the increase of the amount of cultural heritage available on-line and visible in Europeana. On the basis of materials prepared for the training and conclusions from discussions and practical exercises an on-line course will be prepared. It will be the basis for wide training action for cultural institution employees in three mentioned countries. This training connected with certification is planned to reach to several thousands of people causing the increase of knowledge and practical skills in the digital libraries area.

The training was described by regional press (1, 2, 3) and on the Flickr profile of the Veria Central Public Library some photos from the training were published.

Veria Central Public Library is one of the largest public libraries in Greece. It takes many initiatives related to European cooperation and to the promotion of reading. Particularly worth to notice and recommend is the idea of Magic Boxes – a way to arrange the library space for the youngest readers, which was implemented in Veria Central Public Library at the end of 2008.