How to Build a Digital Library

How to Build a Digital Library reviews knowledge and tools to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. A resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries.

The Second Edition reflects developments in the field as well as in the Greenstone Digital Library open source software. In Part I, the authors have added an entire new chapter on user groups, user support, collaborative browsing, user contributions, and so on. There is also new material on content-based queries, map-based queries, cross-media queries. There is an increased emphasis placed on multimedia by adding a “digitizing” section to each major media type. A new chapter has also been added on “internationalization,” which will address Unicode standards, multi-language interfaces and collections, and issues with non-European languages (Chinese, Hindi, etc.). Part II, the software tools section, has been completely rewritten to reflect the new developments in Greenstone Digital Library Software, an internationally popular open source software tool with a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries.

Author Biography

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. David Bainbridge is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Optical Music Recognition from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand where he studied as a Commonwealth Scholar. Since moving to Waikato in 1996 he has continued to broadened his interest in digital media, while retaining a particular emphasis on music. An active member of the New Zealand Digital Library project, he manages the group’s digital music library, Meldex, and has collaborated with several United Nations Agencies, the BBC and various public libraries. David has also worked as a research engineer for Thorn EMI in the area of photo-realistic imaging and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1991 as the class medalist in Computer Science. Is a senior lecturer, specializes in the areas of human-computer interaction, open source software and digital library education.