PSNC Digital Libraries Team

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.

Iławska Biblioteka Cyfrowa (IBC), run by the Municipal Public Library of Iława (Poland), was recently made available on-line. IBC aims to build an open digital collection of materials concerning the Iława district. These are mostly articles from local and national magazines and books, manuscripts, maps, postcards or photos. Currently available are more than 800 objects, divided into three main collections: “Articles from national magazines,” “Articles from regional magazines” and “Books”. Thanks to the agreement with several publishers, the IBC can publish for free digital copies of articles from regional newspapers.

Iławska Digital Library is another local digital library, similar to Nowohucka Digital Library and Digital Library of Wejherowo. It is worth to take care of the visibility on the web in case of such  small digital libraries. Presented resources are unique and strongly connected with local themes. Therefore, it is difficult to find them for users who have no awareness of the existence of such library. It is much easier to find large digital libraries, such as the WBC or KPBC, because they publish not only local material but also materials generally related and important to Polish or European culture.

Issue 3/2009 of the PIONIER Magazine, published by PIONIER Consortium and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center is available on-line in the PSNC Digtial Libraries Team Repository. This issue is devoted mostly to digital libraries.

Silesian Digital Library published recently materials from didactic workshop titled “Web 2.0 – narzędzia, wpływ na biblioteki i społeczny obieg informacji” (Web 2.0 – tools, influence on libraries and social information circulation) organized by the Institute of Librarianship and Information Science of the MCS University during the “Library and information” conference on 20 and 21 of November 2008. These materials were published as a so called “group publication” (i.e. with complex internal structure) connecting presentations from particular speeches merged into a PDF document, and audio and video recordings from these speeches.

Silesian Digital Library uses the dLibra software, and the publication described above is an interesting example of the multimedia possibilities of this software. More multimedia materials available In Polish digital libraries can be found via the Digital Libraries Federation.

In the today’s issue of the “Przekrój” magazine (3/3369) you can find an article of Piotr Stanisławski titled “Narodziny e-książki” (“The Birth of the E-book”). It contains interesting introduction in the e-paper technology and presents positive and negative aspects of e-books. The article is also enriched with quotations of representatives of several large Polish publishers, referring to the future of e-books in Poland.

On the 39th page of the magazine, in a frame titled “Książki z komputera” (“Books from the Computer”) there is some information about internet websites with free e-books. The dLibra project developed by PSNC Digital Libraries Team is referred there as one of three places that must be mentioned in this context. The two other places are the Gutenberg Project and Polish Internet Library. Thanks for the esteem .

And by the way – the fact that Polish Internet Library is also mentioned in this context is yet another proof, that the opinion of Polish librarians about this library is much different than the opinion of readers…

Yesterday the Public Digital Archive of Agnieszka Osiecka was officially opened. It is the first so comprehensive digitized personal poetic archive in Poland, which will be available without any limitations to home users and scientific institutions. The archive is based on the dLibra software and is a part of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation.

Today the results of the Association of Polish Librarians prof. Maria Dembowska Youth Prize were announced. The domain of the contest are master theses from librarianship and scientific information. The winner of the first prize is Mrs Anna Wałek for her thesis titled „Digital libraries on the dLibra platform in Poland in years 2002-2007” done under the supervision of prof. UWr dr hab. Jadwiga Sadowska from Institute of Scientific Information and Librarianship of the Wrocław University.

Our congratulations to the winner!

One of the elements of the next workshop of the StartUp-IT project, titled “How to keep up with the product success and about the project management”, will be a presentation titled “Innovation, which was successful and the consequences”. The aim of the presentation will be the discussion about the change of customers/users attitude to an IT product, caused by the increase of the product popularity. The discussed issues will be covered with examples coming from the history of the development of dLibra Digital Library Framework created and maintained by the PSNC Digital Libraries Team.

In the last two days two interesting publications focused on digital libraries were published in Polish digital libraries. The first one is a shared work edited by Jadwiga Woźniak-Kasperek and Jerzy Franke titled “Digital libraries: projects, realisations, technologies (Biblioteki cyfrowe : projekty, realizacje, technologie)”. In this book you can find a chapter written by Władysław Marek Kolasa titled „dLibra” Digital Library Framework – platforma do budowy bibliotek cyfrowych, describing the dLibra software developed by the PSNC Digital Libraries Team.

The second publication is titled “Standards in the process of  digitization of cultural heritage objects (Standardy w procesie digitalizacji obiektów dziedzictwa kulturowego)” written by Grzegorz Płoszajski. This book is based on the internal report of the Technical Standards of Digitized Objects Working Team, a part of the Digitization Team appointed by the Polish Minister of Culture and  National Heritage on the 24th of April, 2006.

Both books are written in the Polish language – if you know it, we encourage you to read those books!