25. Digital library project in USA

इस ब्लॉग्स को सृजन करने में आप सभी से सादर सुझाव आमंत्रित हैं , कृपया अपने सुझाव और प्रविष्टियाँ प्रेषित करे , इसका संपूर्ण कार्य क्षेत्र विश्व ज्ञान समुदाय हैं , जो सभी प्रतियोगियों के कॅरिअर निर्माण महत्त्वपूर्ण योगदान देगा ,आप अपने सुझाव इस मेल पत्ते पर भेज सकते हैं - chandrashekhar.malav@yahoo.com

25. Digital library project in USA

P- 01. Digital Libraries*

By :Jagdish Arora, Paper Coordinator

Multiple Choice Questions

0 / 1 Points

Question 1: Multiple Choice

In which year the Project Gutenberg was started

•   1970
•   1971
•   1871
•   1975

1 / 1 Points

Question 2: Multiple Choice

The concept of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) was first discussed at a 1987 meeting in

•   Russia
•   New York
•   London
•   Ann Arbor, Michigan

0 / 1 Points

Question 3: Multiple Choice

The digital library activity was initiated by

•   Dr Michael Hart
•   Jack Mills
•   Gulick and Urwick
•   Gilberths

1 / 1 Points

Question 4: Multiple Choice

The OAIster began at the University of ________________

•   Michigan in 2002
•   California in 2005
•   Stanford in 2010
•   Manchester in 2008

0 / 1 Points

Question 5: Multiple Choice

_____________Started in August 1991, also known as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) e-print service.

•   OAI
•   ArXiv
•   DOI
•   DOAJ

2 / 5 PointsFinal Score:

True or False

0 / 1 Points

Question 1: True or False

ArXiv Started in August 1994, also known as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

  True

  False

0 / 1 Points

Question 2: True or False

The digital library activity initiated by Dr Michael Hart in the year 1975 through the project Gutenberg.

  True

  False

1 / 1 Points

Question 3: True or False

The major objectives of library are to collect, process, preserve and disseminate information based on the user need.

  True

  False

1 / 1 Points

Question 4: True or False

The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations was established in 1996, directed by an informal steering committee.

  True

  False

1 / 1 Points

Question 5: True or False

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) developed from a meeting held in Santa Fe in 1999, which was initiated by Paul Ginsparg (arXiv, Los Alamos National Lab.), Rick Luce (Los Alamos National Lab.)

  True

  False

3 / 5 PointsFinal Score:

1.0 Introduction:

The main objectives of library to collect, process, preserve and disseminate information based on the user need. Today we are in the Information technology dominated world themajor library entirely depends on information and communication technology. The collection between the traditional library and digital library varies. The format of digital collection is varies such pdf, txt, html opf, prc, lit, mobi, irf, irx and etc. In the 90s www got popular due to the simplicity and usage in all the fields particularly sharing of information to the scholarly community. The digital library provide access to world entire collection through distributed networks to the user desktop, which is not at all possible by the traditional library. The various digital libraries and the associated access to network based capabilities are integral parts of the digital library.

The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) was the result of a community-based process which began in the late 1980s with informal discussions between researchers and funding agency in USA. These discussions progressed to planning workshops designed to develop research values and agendas and culminated in the National Science Foundation (NSF)/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research in Digital Libraries Initiative announced in late 1993. Based on the recognized achievements of DLI and the promise of additional Federal investment in digital libraries, Digital Libraries Initiative phase-II (DL-II) was announced in the year 1998. DL-II project supported by NSF, DARPA and NASA along with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LC), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as primary sponsors

2. Digital Library initiative phase I (DLI-I)

The digital library initiative Phase -I (DLI-1) started in the year 1994 with the funding support from National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DRAPA) and national Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The US Government spend around $ 24 million for the period of four year from 1994-1998 to six major universities. These universities concentrate on develop digital library architecture, technologies and standard procedure for capturing, processing and organising the information, develop search, browse and visualisation interfaces and etc.

The major six universities participated in the first phase of DLI-1(1994-1998)are the following:

2.1 University of Michigan

This project focuses on the collection of earth and space sciences and intended to serve a variety of users. The key contribution of the project includes agent based digital library architecture. The agent represents an element of the DL, i.e a collection or service. The external collaborators are IBM, Elsevier Science, UMI International and Kodak

2.2 University of California, Berkeley (The Environmental Electronic Library)

The UC Berkeley Digital  Library project  is part of the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative and part of the California Environmental Resource Evaluation System. The project’s goal is to develop the technologies for intelligent access to massive, distributed collections of photographs, satellite images, maps, full text documents, and “multivalent” documents

2.3 University of California at Santa Barbara (The Alexandria Digital Library)

The goal of the project is related to distribute digital library for geographically referenced information. The information indexed based on geographical location in addition to indexing by other attributes. The prototype web called Alexandria Digital Library developed to search the data set based on text and visual query language. The collection includes digitised maps, images and other geographical information related to Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles. The project partners with National Centre for Geographical Analysis, Digital Equipment and Corporation and Xerox.

2.4 Carnegie Mellon University (The Informedia Digital Video Library)

Focus of this project is to develop search and discovery interface for the video medium. The project called Informedia Digital Video Library, its aim is to integrate speech, language and image understanding technologies to support both the creation of and retrieval from the digital library. They used the software called Sphinx-II developed by Carnegie Mellon University to recognise the speech, automatically transcribe narratives and dialogues from each video. The project supported by industrial partner such as Bell Atlantic, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Incorporation and etc.

2.5 University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (Federated Repositories of Scientific Literature)

The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was developed the information infrastructure to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. A large test bed of scientific literature was developed for evaluating its effectiveness under significant use, and researching enhanced search technology. The test bed of Engineering and Physics journals was based in the Grainger Engineering Library. The article files into the digital library on a production basis in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) from engineering and science publishers. The National Centre for Super- computing Applications (NCSA) developed software for the Internet version in an attempt to make server-side repository search widely available.  The Research section of the project used NCSA supercomputers to compute indexes for new search techniques on large collections, to simulate the future world, and to provide new technology for the Testbed section.

2.6 Stanford University (Infobus)

The Stanford Digital Libraries project is one participant in the 4-year, $24 million Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994. In addition to the ties with the five other universities that are part of the project, Stanford also has a large number of partners.  Each university project has a different angle of the total project, with Stanford focusing on interoperability. The collections are primarily computing literature with strong focus on networked information sources, meaning that the vast array of topics found on the World Wide Web are accessible through  this project as well. At the heart of the project is the test bed running the “InfoBus” protocol, which provides a uniform way to access a variety of services and information sources through “proxies” acting as interpreters between the InfoBus protocol and the native protocol.

3. Digital Library Initiative Phase-2 (DLI-2)

Digital Libraries Initiative Phase- 2 (DLI-2) is a multiagency initiative which seeks to provide leadership in research fundamental to the development of the next generation of digital libraries, to advance the use and usability of globally distributed, networked information resources, and to encourage existing and new communities to focus on innovative applications areas. The success of the original DLI-1 programme and the continued IT research interest allowed the NSF to continue to spearhead the development of the DLI-2 research programme. More sponsor agencies joined with DARPA, NASA and the NSF in the DLI-2  programme, including the National Library of  Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LOC), the National Endowment for the humanities  (NEH), the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian  Institution (SI), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

If intent in the first phase was to concentrate on the investigation and development of underlying technologies, the second phase (1999-2004) is intended to look more at applying those technologies and others in real life library situations. Second phase aims at intensive study of the architecture and usability issues of digital libraries including  the  vigorous  research  on:  a)  Human-centred  DL  architecture     b)  Content  and Collections-based DL architecture and  c) Systems-centred DL architecture d) Development of DL test beds 

3.1 Test beds are developed at following universities

1. University of Arizona –High Performance Digital Library Classification Systems: From Information Retrieval to Knowledge Management
    
2. University of California Berkeley
   Re-inventing Scholarly Information Dissemination and Use
    
3. University of California Davis
   A Multimedia Digital Library of Folk Literature
    
4. University of California Santa Barbara
   Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype
    
5. Carnegie Mellon University
   Simplifying Interactive Layout and Video Editing and Reuse
    
6. Columbia University
   A Patient Care Digital Library: Personalized Search and Summarization over Multimedia Information
    
7. Cornell University
   Project Prism at Cornell University: Information Integrity in Digital Libraries
    
8. Eckerd College
   Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network (DARWIN)
    
9. Harvard University
   An Operational Social Science Digital Data Library
    
10. University of Hawaii at ManoaShuhai Wenyan classical Chinese Digital Database and Interactive Internet Worktable
     
11. University of Illinois, ChicagoDigital Library for Human Movement
     
12. Indiana University Indianapolis/BloomingtonA Distributed Information Filtering System for Digital Libraries
13. Indiana UniversityCreating a Digital Music Library
     
14. Johns Hopkins UniversityDigital Workflow Management: The Lester S. Levy Digitized Collection of Sheet Music, Phase Two
     
15. University of KentuckyThe Digital Atheneum: New Techniques for Restoring, Searching, and Editing Humanities Collections
     
16. Universuty of Massachusetts, AmherstWord Spotting: Indexing handwritten manuscripts
     
17. Michigan State UniversityFounding a National Gallery of the Spoken Word
     
18. Oregon Health Sciences UniversityOregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology -Tracking Footprints through an Information Space: Leveraging the Document Selections of Expert Problem Solvers
     
19. University of PennsylvaniaData Provenance
     
20. University of South CarolinaA Software and Data Library for Experiments, Simulations, and Archiving
     
21. Stanford UniversityStanford Inter lib Technologies
     
22. Stanford UniversityThe Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
     
23. Stanford UniversityImage Filtering for Secure Distribution of Medical Information
     
24. University of Texas at Austin A Digital Library of Vertebrate Morphology, Using High-Resolution X-ray CT
     
25. Tufts University A Digital Library for the Humanities
     
26. University of Washington Automatic Reference Librarians for the World Wide Web

3.2 The following projects with undergraduate emphasis are ordered alphabetically by institution.

1. University of California Berkeley
Using the National Engineering Education Delivery System as the Foundation for Building a Test-Bed Digital Library for Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education

2. Columbia University
Columbia Earths cape: A Model for a Sustainable Online Educational Resource in Earth Sciences

3. Georgia State University
Research on a Digital Library for Graphics and Visualization Education

4. University of Maryland
Digital Libraries for Children: Computational Tools that Support Children as Researchers

5. University of North Carolina, Wilmington
A Digital Library of Reusable Science and Math Resources for Undergraduate Education

6. Old Dominion University
Planning Grant for the Use of Digital Libraries in Undergraduate Learning in Science

7. Swarthmore College
The JOMA applet project: Applet support for the Undergraduate mathematics Curriculum

8. University of Texas at Austin
Virtual Skeletons in Three Dimensions: The Digital Library as a Platform for Studying Anatomical Form and Function

3.3 International Collaborative Projects

In addition to the domestic DLI-2 projects there is an international co-operative series of projects.

1. National Science Foundation (NSF) - Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (US-UK): International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research and Application Testbeds
    
2. NSF- German Research Foundation (DFG) (US-Germany): International Digital Libraries Research
    
3. Network of Excellence in Digital Library System (DELOS) /NSF Working Group Reference Models for Digital Libraries: Actors and Roles
    
4. NSF/European Union (EU) Digital Libraries: Future Directions for a European Research Programme

4.0 Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP)

The Library of Congress (LC) has been a key leader in the use of automation to promote inter-library collaboration and in developing standards such as MARC and 239.50, The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is a five-year program to assemble a core digital collection of American historical and cultural primary source rnaterial. These collections, collectively referred to as 'American Memory', derive from heterogeneous resources and are intended to serve a range of users including scholarly researchers and school children. Most of the books and papers have been encoded in SGML with embedded links to the images of original pages. However these are also converted to HTML to support a wider user group. The American memory collections are also linked to the INQUERY search systems to offer both browsing and full text searches.In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and colour pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable texts.  To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.

In 1995, in conjunction with the launch of the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program, the Library brought together leading history and social studies K-12 teachers and librarians to consider how archival on-line resources could best be used in the nation's schools.  The participants at this Educator's Forum validated earlier findings: that while the primary sources were in great demand, for teachers to be able to make effective use of them, they needed additional materials to frame the collections and the topics represented in the collections. In 1996, the Library of Congress developed The Learning Page - a gateway to the digital collections, which provides contextual material, search help, sample lesson plans and activities, special presentations, and descriptions of the digital collections for K- 12 school teachers and media specialists. 

5.0 The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). NDLTD support electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide. The concept of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) was first discussed at a 1987 meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, organized by UMI and attended by representatives from Virginia Tech, the University of Michigan. The result of several years of intense collaborative work, the ETD db software that emerged from Virginia Tech in 1996 provided a complete ETD submission package from beginning to end. Maintaining its leadership role, Virginia Tech also coordinated development and implementation of a distributed digital library system, so that ETDs from all participating institutions could be accessed easily. The system that was developed allowed browsing and searching based on institution, date, author, title, keywords, and full-text, as well as downloading for local reading or printing of ETDs worldwide. This early effort to create a global digital library provided the conceptual framework for what became the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. 

The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations was established in 1996, directed by an informal steering committee. As its scope became international, the organization kept the acronym NDLTD, but changed its name to the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. In 1998 interested institutions began meeting annually for what would become a series of symposia on electronic theses and dissertations sponsored by NDLTD and designed to help universities initiate ETD projects.

In 2003, the NDLTD incorporated as a non-profit charitable organization, with a set of bylaws. Today, the NDLTD’s members include more than 200 universities around the world, as well as partner organizations, including: Adobe, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Joint Information Services Committee, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Proquest/UMI, and Theses Canada—all working toward the goal of unlocking the benefits of shared knowledge for all.

6.0 National Science Digital Library System (NSDL)

To stimulate and sustain continual improvements in the quality of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) program in 2000. The resulting digital library is intended to serve the needs of learners belonging to a broad user audience such as K to 12, undergraduate, graduate, and life-long learning in both formal and informal settings. Envisioned as the premier portal to current and future high-quality SMET educational content and services, this virtual facility will enable seamless access to a rich array of interactive learning materials and resources, distinguished by the depth and breadth of the subject matter addressed, and valued for its authority and reliability.

Initial development of the NSDL program began in late 1995 with an internal concept paper for the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). Mogk and Zia examined the opportunities and challenges in evaluation and dissemination that would be implied by a national digital library for science education. Subsequently, the idea was explored and developed further through a series of workshops and planning meetings over the next several years. Beginning in 1998, two rounds of prototype projects were supported through the Special Emphasis: Planning Test beds and Applications for Undergraduate Education program conducted under the auspices of the multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase 2 (DLI-2) program.

More than 60 projects have been funded since 1998 in three areas

a)      The collection track for offering contents (e.g. national biology digital library, digital mathematics library, experimental economics digital library);

b)      The service track for providing technologies and services (e.g. University of Arizona’s GetSmart e-learning concept map system);

c)      The core integration track, for linking all contents and services under a unified framework.

Open Archive Initiative (OAI) based content creation and metadata harvesting is one of the critical components in NSDL, which has the potential for improving the standards and sustainability of all projects involved. The NSDL programme takes a grass-roots approach to inviting community input and consensus building through various committees and working groups. 

7.0 Digital Library for Earth System Education (USA)

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) mission is to “improve the quality, quantity, and efficiency of teaching and learning about the Earth System, by developing, managing, and providing access to high-quality educational resources and supporting services through a community-based, distributed digital library” launched in 2001. DLESE has emerged to support the specific educational needs of the geoscience community within the larger NSDL network. The National Science Foundation provided funding for the development of DLESE which is now operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Computational and Information Systems Laboratory and the NCAR Library. DLESE serves as a vehicle for the geoscience community to respond to the challenges of systemic educational reform and the changing technological landscape.

DLESE provides educational discovery features that enable users to search by grade level, educational resource type, and keyword also contains a resource cataloguer, and community oriented services, such as discussion forums for working groups and a community-posting tool. To ensure interoperability with the NSDL, support for the Open Archives Initiative harvesting protocol has been implemented. The DLESE collections grow through community contributions from individuals or institutions. The DLESE Program Center (DPC) enables the community to consciously and actively shape the intellectual framework of the DLESE collection by providing tools, components, and services that reflect DLESE policy, assure collection quality, and promote pedagogical innovation

DLESE has established relationships with science and science education professional societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Geological Institute (AGI), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and the emerging Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) and Earth scope efforts. These partners provide outreach opportunities for DLESE through their conferences and workshops. 

8.0 ArXiv (http://arxiv.org/)

Started in August 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov), also known as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) e-print service, is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. ArXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. It covers un refereed articles self-archived by the authors. The areas covered include physics and related disciplines like mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computer science and quantitative biology. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. Authors can submit their papers to the archive using the World Wide Web interface. They may also update their submissions, though previous versions remain available. Users can retrieve papers from the archive either through an online interface, or by sending commands to the system via e-mail. Users can also register to automatically receive an e-mail listing of newly submitted papers in areas of interest to them. Facilities to view recent submissions and to search old submissions are also provided via the World Wide Web interface.

Involvement of arXiv in the OAI: The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) developed from a meeting held in Santa Fe in 1999, which was initiated by Paul Ginsparg (arXiv, Los Alamos National Lab.), Rick Luce (Los Alamos National Lab.) and Herbert Van de Sompel (University of Ghent, Los Alamos National Lab.). ArXiv has continued to be actively involved in both management of the initiative and technical development of the protocol. 

9.0 CiteSeer (ResearchIndex) (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index)

CiteSeer (also known as the ResearchIndex) is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. It contains freely available, full-text research articles (journal pre-prints and papers where available, conference proceedings, technical reports) downloaded from the web. It indexes PostScript and PDF research articles. CiteSeer uses search engines, crawling and document submissions to harvest papers.

The articles are indexed by an Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI) system which links the records together through references cited within, and citations made to, an article. It provides links to related articles and can identify the context of a citation, allowing researchers to see what their peers have said about the cited work. CiteSeer computes citation statistics and related documents for all articles cited in the database, not just the indexed articles. CiteSeer locates related documents using citation and word based measures and displays an active and continuously updated bibliography for each document. It shows the percentage of matching sentences between documents. CiteSeer provides the context of how query terms are used in articles instead of a generic summary, improving the efficiency of search. Other services include full-text, Boolean, phrase and proximity search. It provides automatic notification of new citations to given papers, and new papers matching a user profile.

CiteSeer aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge. Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeer provides algorithms, metadata, services, techniques and software that can be used in other digital libraries. CiteSeer was developed at the NEC Research Institute by Steve Lawrence, Lee Giles and Kurt Bollacker.

10. Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) (http://www.ncstrl.org/)

The Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) is an international collection of computer science technical reports from Computer Science departments and industrial and government research laboratories, made available for non-commercial and educational use. Mostly NCSTRL institutions are universities that grant PhDs in Computer Science or Engineering, with some industrial or government research laboratories. The project is an international consortium with participation at many levels.

• The NCSTRL Steering Committee is responsible for determining the policy direction of the project and providing long-term oversight. Steering Committee membership includes representatives from the funding agencies, library community, and the North American and European computer science community.

• The NCSTRL Working Group is responsible for the operational oversight of the project. Working Group membership includes representatives from the Computer Science-Technical Report (CS-TR) and Wide area Technical Report Service (WATERS) projects, and the working group is one of the D-Lib Working Groups.

• The Cornell Digital Library Research Group is responsible for support and maintenance of the current NCSTRL technology.

NCSTRL is based on two previous technologies for technical report libraries. Dienst is a protocol and implementation for distributed digital library servers. WATERS is a system that links distributed FTP report repositories via a centralized index. The NCSTRL architecture combines the power and flexibility of Dienst with the ease of installation of WATERS. The technology underlying NCSTRL is a network of interoperating digital library servers. The digital library servers provide three services: repository services that store and provide access to documents; index services that allow searches over bibliographic records; and user interface services that provide the human front-end for the other services. Search requests from users generate parallel protocol requests to the distributed index servers

11. NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) http://data.nasa.gov/nasa-technical-reports-server/

NASA's history with web-based DLs dates back to 1993, when a WWW interface was provided for the Langley Technical Report Server (LTRS). Prior to this, LTRS was simply an anonymous FTP server that distributed technical reports authored and sponsored by NASA Langley Research Center. However, LTRS provided access to only reports from NASA Langley Research Center, and not other NASA centres and institutes. Beginning in 1994, software used to create LTRS was shared with other NASA installations and “LTRS-like” DLs were setup. In 1995 that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) was set up to provide integrated searching between the various NASA web-based DLs.

NASA's technical information is available via the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) to provide students, educators and the public with the access to over 500,000 aerospace-related citations, over 300,000 full-text online documents, and over 500,000 images and videos. The types of information include: conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA. It is a part of the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program, whose mission is to collect, archive and disseminate NASA aerospace information, and locate domestic and international STI pertinent to NASA's missions and Strategic Enterprises. NTRS also collects scientific and technical information from sites external to NASA to broaden the scope of information available to users. NTRS's Simple Search searches for NASA information only and its Advanced Search can search for NASA and non-NASA information. It also facilitates browsing and weekly updates.

The NTRS integrates the following three NASA collections and enables search and retrieval through a common interface:

• NACA Collection: Citations and reports from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics period lasting from 1915 to 1958.
• NASA Collection: Citations and documents created or sponsored by NASA starting in 1958 and continuing to the present.
• NIX Collection: Citations and links to the images, photos, movies, and videos from the discontinued NASA Image eXchange (NIX).

The information found in the NTRS was created or funded by NASA and is unlimited, unclassified, and publicly available.

12. OAIster (http://oaister.worldcat.org/)

OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access digital resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAIster began at the University of Michigan in 2002 funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and with the purpose of establishing a retrieval service for publicly available digital library resources provided by the research library community. During its tenure at the University of Michigan, OAIster grew to become one of the largest aggregations of records pointing to open access collections in the world.

In 2009, OCLC formed a partnership with the University of Michigan to provide continued access to open access collections aggregated in OAIster. OCLC is evolving OAIster to a model of self-service contribution for all open access digital repositories to ensure the long-term sustainability of this rich collection of open access materials.Today, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors. Additionally, the OAIster records are included in search results for those libraries with WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start."

The records of the open access digital resources available via OAIster lead to a wide range of materials and include:

• Digitized (scanned) books, journal articles, newspapers, manuscripts and more
• Digital text
• Audio files (wav, mp3)
• Video files (mp4, QuickTime)
• Photographic images (jpeg, tiff, gif)
• Data sets (downloadable statistical information)
• Theses and research papers

Glossary

Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

The national archives of the United States, a federal agency established by Congress in 1934 to oversee the management of all federal records, including the public's right of access to documents and information not specifically exempted under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the independent researchbranch of the U.S. Department of Defense that funded a project that in time was to lead to the creation of the Internet. Originally called ARPA (the "D" was added to its name later), DARPA came into being in 1958 as a reaction to the success of Sputnik, Russia's first manned satellite. DARPA's explicit mission was (and still is) to think independently of the rest of the military and to respond quickly and innovatively to national defense challenges.

Digital library

A library in which a significant proportion of the resources are available in machine-readable format (as opposed to print or microform), accessible by means of computers. The digital content may be locally held or accessed remotely via computer networks. For a distributed example, see the Mountain West Digital Library established by the Utah Academic Library Consortium. In libraries, the process of digitization began with the catalog, moved to periodical indexes and abstracting services, then to periodicals and large reference works, and finally to book publishing. Abbreviated d-lib. Compare with virtual library.

Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI)

A multi-agency interdisciplinary research program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that provides grants to facilitate the creation of large knowledge bases, develop the information technology to access them effectively, and improve their usability in a wide range of contexts.

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

An independent federal grant-making agency created under the Museum and Library Services Act of 1996 to foster leadership, innovation, and lifelong learning by supporting museums, archives, and libraries of all types and by encouraging partnerships among them.

Memex

 The memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index" or "memory" and "extender") is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think" (AWMT). Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory". The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software. However, the memex system used a form of document bookmark list, of static microfilm pages, rather than a true hypertext system where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format

National Library of Medicine (NLM)

The largest medical library in the United States, administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Located in Bethesda, Maryland, NLM is home to over 7 million items, including one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. For the past 125 years, NLM has published the Index Medicus, a subject/author guide to articles published in 4,000 journals.

OCLC Online Computer Library Center

Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs". Founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog (OPAC) in the world.

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)

A standard method and protocol by which metadata is transferred/exchanged, with NSDL. Metadata provided must pass in terms of OAI validation (a provider's OAI repository correctly implements OAI-PMH), and XML schema validation (meets the requirements of a designated XML schema).

ProQuest

ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based electronic publisher and microfilm publisher. It provides archives of sources such as newspapers, periodicals, dissertations, and aggregated databases of many types. Its content is estimated at 125 billion digital pages. Content is accessed most commonly through library internet gateways, with navigation through such search platforms as ProQuest, CSA Illumina, Dialog, Datastar, Chadwyck-Healey, eLibrary and SIRS. ProQuest is part of Cambridge Information Group.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

Established in 1986, SGML is an ISO standard governing the rules for defining tag sets that determine how machine-readable text documents are formatted. It is widely used in preparing machine-readable text archives.

Super- computing

A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation (or both).

Did you know?

NLM (National Library of Medicine) is home to over 7 million items, including one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. It also provides public access to an online version of its MEDLINE bibliographic database at no charge under the title PubMed.

OAIster began at the University of Michigan in 2002 funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and with the purpose of establishing a retrieval service for publicly available digital library resources provided by the research library community.

Today, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors. Additionally, the OAIster records are included in search results for those libraries with WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local quick start.

NASA's technical information is available via the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) to provide students, educators and the public with the access to over 500,000 aerospace-related citations, over 300,000 full-text online documents, and over 500,000 images and videos.

Project Gutenberg started in the year 1971 at the Materials Research Lab at University of Illionois by Dr Michael Hart.

concept of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) was first discussed at a 1987 meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, organized by UMI and attended by representatives from Virginia Tech, the University of Michigan.

Interesting Facts

Digital Object Identifier DOI) - Developed by association of American Publishers and corporation for National Research Initiatives to provide a method by which a digital object can be reliably identified and accessed.

In the year 1945, Dr Vannervar Bus, Director of the US office of Scientific Research Development wrote an article titled  “As we may think” in the Atlantic Monthly used the word memex- a crude version of today’s digital library.

Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library.

ArXiv was started in August 1991, also known as Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) e-print service, is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers.

Points to ponder

• Mercury introduced the concept of a reference server, which keeps information about the information stored on the servers, the fields that could be searched, the indexes, and access restrictions.

• American Memory was a pilot program that, from 1989 to 1994, reproduced selected collections for national dissemination in computerized form.
• In 1965 JCR Licklider, a researcher at MIT wrote a book titled Libraries of the future that discuss the usage of digital library.
• The Stanford Digital Libraries project is one participant in the 4-year, $24 million Digital Library Initiative, started in 1994.