Newsletter Issue 6

Editorial | Summer School on Preservation | ELAG 2006 Workshop

DELOS Digital Library Manifesto | Multilinguality in the European Library

Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries | DELOS Researcher Exchange

ELAG 2006 Workshop: The Technological Route to a European Digital Library

The ELAG 2006 Conference, held in Bucharest, Romania over 26-28 April 2006, hosted a workshop on the European Digital Library (EDL) which has been generally welcomed by libraries, archives, museums, publishers, right holders, universities and research organizations in their replies to an on-line consultation launched by the European Commission at the end of 2005 as part of its initiative “i2010 – a European Information Society for growth and jobs”. The main purpose of this workshop was to stimulate discussion on some of the main technical topics related to digital libraries, and how those topics may affect the implementation of the EDL.

Questions and comments from the floor

Workshop’s Objectives

The chief topics of discussion during the workshop can be summarized as follows:

• What is a digital library, after all ?
• What could be the architecture of the EDL ?
• Which tools and services should be provided by the EDL ?
• Is there a role for a “European Digital Librarian” in the EDL ?

Workshop Outcomes

It has to be noted beforehand that the last point, although very interesting, was not discussed for lack of time. For the other points the general consensus was that from the point of view of technology, the development of a prototype EDL could start immediately, or as soon as the organizational and political issues had been solved. The participants agreed that the technology issues relating to EDL were actually the same as those pertaining to a “Digital Library” in general. With reference to some of the concepts developed in the “DELOS Reference Model for Digital Libraries”, it was agreed that three main user concepts or actors came to the fore in the context of a digital library:

• The end-user
• The digital library application developer
• The librarian

The latter, it was generally agreed, could be sub-divided into three sub-roles: (i) end user librarian, acting as cataloguer and curator of the library, and interfacing and supporting the end-users of the library; (ii) digital librarian (or DL designer) who exploit his/her knowledge of the application semantic domain to define, customize, and maintain the Digital Library, so that it is aligned with the information and functional needs of its end-users; (iii) system librarian (or DL system administrator) who generates an instance of a Digital Library by using the tools and the components available from a DLMS Factory, i.e. from the set of (internal) services and tools that allows the instantiation of a digital library.

A conceptual framework with users

With these definitions in place, the meeting moved to the issue of an architecture which could be sub-divided into the users on one side, the content on the other, and a DMLS in between them. Though conceptually simple, in reality the architecture is much more complicated in terms of functionality, but basically all the functions can be related to one of the three areas mentioned. Participants agreed upon a general set of architectural principles. Chief among these were that the EDL should be a loosely coupled “federation” of many different DLs; the peer-to-peer Service-Oriented Architecture seemed the most suitable; the EDL should recommend (enforce) “standards” for participating in the federation; it should have a central index (to provide better services), while also allowing distributed indexes; it should also make its (external) services available as Web services.

Taking into account the fact that the European Commission is looking at the present TEL system (The European Library) as the starting point for EDL, discussion finally turned to those aspects not currently present in the TEL system, which would enhance the emerging EDL. These could be summarized as: EDL should provide: value-added over Google; a European combined thesaurus/authority; multilinguality. It should support: fee-based access to information and services; collection navigation within EDL and creation of “virtual collections”; annotation and collaboration tools. It should also ensure EDL is accessible from any search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc.); and capitalize on the availability of structured metadata.

Conclusions

The conclusions and the issues debated during this ELAG workshop overlapped considerably with the issues and recommendations that came out of the Brainstorming meeting organized by DELOS in December 2005 which was set up to discuss the questions posed by the Commission about the establishment of a European Digital Library.

Vittore Casarosa, ISTI-CNR

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