Paul Corriere's List: Digital Library Articles

Abstract

In this article, an effort is made to take advantage of the inherent semantic wealth existing within Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSHs) in order to provide more efficient subject-based information retrieval in digital libraries. To formally express such wealth, an ontology schema is presented that is capable of modeling the semantics of LCSHs into adequate ontologies. Finally, in order to show the way towards exploiting such ontologies in favor of the development of more effective subject-based information retrieval in digital libraries, a prototype system is presented. The system contains an ontology modeling the LCSHs that are employed within a digital library of theses and dissertations. Serving as a proof of concept, the prototype describes a system capable of making the expressiveness of the underlying ontology readily available to end users while at the same time retaining simplicity and ease-of-use.

Over the past few decades, the explosion of digital and digitised documents and the addition of a purely digital facet to the documentary lifecycle have been forcing memory institutions from all sectors to address the same questions that the growth in analogue production necessitated in the early 20th century: Can/should all documents that pass the initial test of appraisal also remain stored indefinitely? What are the requirements for long-term preservation? At what point (if ever) do digital collections become too large to handle? And how can we decide what gets deleted? Individual institutions and collaborative research efforts alike have adopted a wide range of practices in their attempt to tackle these questions. We would expect the current phase of trial-and-error to move slowly towards a set of somewhat more uniformly adopted governing concepts and practices.