Tutorials

ECDL2008 featured a full day of tutorials on Sunday 14 September 2008. Each tutorial covered a single topic pertinent to ECDL's list of relevant topics in detail.

Thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries 1 - morning session (9.00-12.30)
Structure and use in knowledge-based assistance to users
Dagobert Soergel

This introductory tutorial was intended for anyone concerned with subject access to digital libraries. It provided a bridge by presenting methods of subject access as treated in an information studies program for those coming to digital libraries from other fields. It elucidated through examples the conceptual and vocabulary problems users face when searching digital libraries, and showed how a well-structured thesaurus / ontology can be used as the knowledge base for an interface that can assist users with search topic clarification (for example through browsing well-structured hierarchies and guided facet analysis) and with finding good search terms (through query term mapping and query term expansion — synonyms and hierarchic inclusion). It touched on cross-database and cross-language searching as natural extensions of these functions. It also mentioned the use of more richly structured ontologies, including Semantic Web applications. The tutorial covered the thesaurus structure needed to support these functions: Concept-term relationships for vocabulary control and synonym expansion, conceptual structure (semantic analysis, facets, and hierarchy) for topic clarification and hierarchic query term expansion). It introduced a few sample thesauri and ontologies and some thesaurus-supported digital libraries and Web sites to illustrate these principles.

Thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries 2 - afternoon session (13.30-17.00)
Design, evaluation, and development
Dagobert Soergel

This tutorial was intended for people who have a basic familiarity with the function and structure of thesauri and ontologies. It introduced criteria for the design and evaluation of thesauri and ontologies and dealt with methods and tools for their development: Locating sources; collecting concepts, terms. and relationships to reuse existing knowledge; developing and refining thesaurus/ontology structure; software and database structure for the development and maintenance of thesauri and ontologies; standards such as RDF and TopicMaps; collaborative development of thesauri and ontologies; developing crosswalks / mappings between thesauri/ontologies. In summing up, the tutorial addressed the question of the amount of resources needed to develop and maintain a thesaurus or ontology.

Preserving Websites on a National Scale, with Demonstration in NetarchiveSuite - morning session (9.00-12.30)
Kåre Fiedler Christiansen

Preservation of the World Wide Web is of increasing importance for digital libraries. Requirements ranging from preservation of online publication by agreement to Legal Deposit laws require libraries to have a strategy for collecting, preserving and giving access to material published on the web. NetarchiveSuite provides a librarian-friendly interface for setting up and managing scheduled harvests of well-defined parts of the Internet, as well as preserving and giving access to the harvested material. The tutorial covered collection strategies of websites, quality assurance of your harvested material, and end-user access, using NetarchiveSuite as the tool for managing the harvests.

Installing, Maintaining and Running the NetarchiveSuite software - afternoon session (13.30-17.00)
Kåre Fiedler Christiansen

Experience shows, that after evaluating and identifying your needs for web harvesting, getting software up and running on your institution is a major task requiring planning, knowledge and skill. This tutorial aimed at presenting an overview of what is needed for an institution to implement and maintain the NetarchiveSuite software in a setup relevant to the institution. It covered needed hardware and software setup and investments, needed training for system maintainers and web curators, and how to maintain the system once it is running.

A librarian interface for Fedora and Greenstone
David Bainbridge and Ian H. Witten

CANCELLED

This tutorial was designed for librarians, archivists and other digital library content creators and managers who want to build and manage a variety of digital content, either at the personal or institutional level. It would also be of interest to students and researchers, in any area of digital libraries, who are interested in the practical details of building digital libraries. Collections was to be built from HTML documents; Word, PDF and PostScript documents; images in various formats; MP3 audio files; MARC records; and more.
Hands-on work would focus on a graphical user interface (GUI) that participants should install as part of the tutorial. Guided by practitioners in the field, this software interface is the result of over a decade of research and implementation. The GUI comes in two varieties: one working with Fedora (called FLI), the other with Greenstone (GLI)—both prominent open source digital library toolkits. The interfaces share a common workflow model, and much of what is applicable in one is transferable to the other. The example collections built should use a mixture of the two interfaces.
Standards that promote interoperability, such as OAI-PMH and METS, would also be reviewed and examples demonstrated. For instance, metadata harvested through OAI-PMH would be combined with source documents in Greenstone using GLI. Data exported from DSpace would be ingested into Fedora and vice versa using FLI via the FedoraMETS format.

Preservation Planning with Plato
Hannes Kulovits and Andreas Rauber

The rapid technological changes in today’s information landscape have considerably turned the preservation of digital information into a pressing challenge. A lot of different strategies, i.e. preservation actions, have been proposed to tackle this challenge. However, which strategy to choose, and subsequently which tools to select to implement it, poses significant challenges. The creation of a concrete plan for preserving an institution’s collection of digital objects requires the evaluation of possible preservation solutions against clearly defined and measurable criteria. Preservation planning aids in this decision making process to find the best preservation strategy considering the institution’s requirements, the planning context and possible actions applicable to the objects contained in the repository. Performed manually, even evaluating a rather small number of possible solutions against requirements takes a good deal of time. Plato, a web based, interactive software tool, supports and partly automates this process. This tutorial showed by means of Plato, how to create such a preservation plan.