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By Michael Day - November 2002
Michael Day reports on the 2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving held in Rome on the 19th September 2002 [1].
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On the 19th September 2002, around 50 people gathered in a lecture theatre at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for the 2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving, an event held in association with the 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL). The workshop was jointly organised by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien).
The workshop was a follow-up to the first workshop, held in Darmstadt on the 8th September 2001 in association with ECDL 2001. The Darmstadt workshop, entitled "What's next for digital deposit libraries," had included presentations on the Web archiving activities of selected legal deposit libraries, including the Library of Congress and the national libraries of Denmark, Finland, France and Sweden [2]. The Rome workshop had a wider focus and concentrated on three main themes: technologies, collection policies and platforms for collaboration. It supplemented a session on Web archiving in the main programme at ECDL 2002 that included papers describing parts of the experiments undertaken in France [3] and Austria [4].
The workshop began with a welcome from Catherine Lupovici of the BnF on behalf of the joint organisers. Twelve presentations followed, the morning session being given over to presentations mainly on technical issues. Raymie Stata of the Internet Archive gave the opening presentation. He described how the Internet Archive had amassed a large amount of data since they started crawling and harvesting the Web in 1996. The total collection is currently in excess of 120 Terabytes and is growing steadily, as each snapshot retrieves an additional two billion pages from around 40 million sites. The Internet Archive has a broad crawling strategy in that it tries to cover as many sites as possible but does not attempt to achieve complete coverage of all sites collected. The large and growing size of the Web makes the Internet Archive an expensive operation, especially with regard to the high bandwidth required for crawlers and the ongoing cost of storing terabytes of additional data. In order to give some user access to the collection, the Internet Archive had launched a public interface called the "Wayback Machine" [5]. This allows users to view older versions of Web sites collected by the Internet Archive, accessed by individual URLs. Enhanced access to the full database is available to researchers (e.g. for statistical or linguistic research) on application to the archive. The Internet Archive had also collaborated on developing special collections in association with organisations like the Library of Congress, for example on the September 11 Web Archive [6].
Throughout the morning session, there were three presentations on Web archiving experiments undertaken in France. Patrick Ferran of Xyleme gave the first of these, describing issues relating to smart crawling and the storage and querying of XML databases. Xyleme had its origins in an INRIA research project concerned with the collection and warehousing of XML data [7]. It was now (since 2000) an independent company providing XML-based products to companies in the news, publishing and financial services sectors [8]. Ferran described the distributed "smart crawler" that had been developed by Xyleme to collect XML data on the Web, but which is also able to manage HTML. In an attempt to save bandwidth, the crawler calculates page rankings and the change frequency of pages and can be focused on particular Web sites. Once the data has been collected, it is kept in a native XML repository, the Xyleme Store, which can then be interrogated using the Xyleme QL (query language). Xyleme makes an attempt at the semantic integration of different XML DTDs by using automatic classification techniques to cluster them into different application domains.
Morgan Cundiff (Library of Congress) then described some experiments undertaken by the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress on using the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) for the description of Web sites. METS is an XML Schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for digital library objects [9]. It is an open standard, developed largely by the library community and is modular and easily extensible. After a brief introduction to the basic structure of METS with reference to extension schema, Cundiff described how both the Library of Congress and OCLC [10] were interested in using METS to support the preservation of Web sites. He then gave a demonstration of how a simple Web site (text and images only) encoded in METS could be retrieved via the "METS-Viewer" software.
The following two presentations returned to the French experiments. Grégory Cobéna of INRIA (the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) described how the French research team had approached the computation of Web page importance. Researchers at INRIA and Zyleme had developed an algorithm that allowed page importance to be calculated at the same time as a Web crawl was being undertaken, thereby removing the need to compute page importance offline. This is described in more detail in a short paper by the INRIA and Xyleme researchers [11].
Julien Masanès of the BnF gave the next presentation on archiving the 'deep Web.' The BnF project had adopted a twin approach to collecting the Web. While the surface Web would be collected automatically using crawler programs, those parts of the Web inaccessible to the current generation of crawler programs - the so-called 'deep Web' - would be subject to a more traditional deposit strategy. In order to test the deposit strategy, a team based at the BnF evaluated and selected over 100 sites (of all types) that would be suitable for deposit. The Web site owners were then contacted with a request for deposit. Only 50 of these signed the deposit agreement and, of these, only 34 actually made a deposit (via FTP or on physical media). This relatively low response suggests that there may be a need for tighter legal deposit rules. Masanès also described the processes of ingest, validation and metadata creation. He noted that successful ingestion sometimes required a kind of migration.
Donna Bergmark of Cornell University gave the final presentation of the technical session. She described how a parallel crawling program had been adopted for the automatic collection of Web resources on science and mathematics for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The crawler used was Mercator, produced by Compaq's Systems Research Center (now part of HP) and written in Java [12]. The NSDL researchers used Mercator to test the automatic generation of collections of high-quality Web resources. The technique used was focused crawling, which uses analyses of link structure and content to indicate the relevance of pages to certain subject areas. For the NSDL experiments, centroids (broadly, the highest weighted terms extracted from the results of a Web search) were generated for each topic area and matched to the documents downloaded by a Web crawl [13]. The experiment resulted in a test collection of Web documents that could be used for detailed statistical study. More information on the outcome of these experiments is available in a paper given on the main programme at ECDL 2002 [14].
The first session of the afternoon provided updates on selected Web archiving projects. The first presentation was by Deborah Woodyard, the Digital Preservation Coordinator of the British Library (BL), on its "Britain on the Web" pilot - formerly known as "Domain.uk." This small-scale project had involved the collection of 100 Web sites of relevance to the UK. BL staff selected the sites in 2001, concentrating on those perceived to have long-term historical or cultural significance, e.g. those related to the 2001 UK General Election or the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Large-sized Web sites, those with potential copyright problems and those in the government domain were excluded. Web site owners were contacted and if a favourable response was forthcoming, the sites were periodically captured using Web site copying software. It was hoped that the pilot could be scaled up in the future and the BL had applied for additional funding to do this.
Hans Liegmann of Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB) gave the next presentation on the submission and delivery interfaces that DDB had implemented for online publications. Ways of submitting documents to DDB were largely based on (or adapted from) the traditional deposit model. In general, publishers would 'push' their documents to the DDB. There were variants in this model for different types of published material. For the collection of Online Theses, universities would provide the DDB with metadata about new theses and DDB would then 'pull' the relevant documents onto the deposit server. E-journals from Springer-Link would be provided to DDB on physical media for copying to the deposit server. More recently, DDB had developed a generic submission and delivery interface that allowed publishers to submit documents and metadata to the library. While few documents had been received so far, many lessons had been learned through developing this process.
Birgit Henriksen of the Royal Danish Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek) then gave an update on the Danish project netarchive.dk [15]. The Royal Library had been collecting selected Web publications as part of legal deposit since 1998 and had been involved in the Nordic Web Archive project. Netarchive.dk was a project that started in 2001 to test different archiving strategies and the usability of the resulting collections for research. In order to do this, a case study was made of Web pages associated with the 2001 Danish municipal elections. For legal reasons, the netarchive.dk participants could not run a Web crawler over the Danish domain, so they made agreements with the producers of selected Web sites and then collected the sites using various software packages. In future, Henriksen suggested that the law needed to be changed so that harvesting the .dk domain could be covered by legal deposit. She finally proposed a mixed collection strategy for Denmark based on one major 'event' being selectively archived each year, together with four automatic snapshots. She noted that some news and media Web sites would need to be collected on a more frequent basis. Henriksen ended by noting that collaboration on both national and international levels would also be important.
Neil Beagrie of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) gave the final presentation in this session. This was entitled "Developing research and community collections for the Web" and began by describing the UK context, noting that the UK Web was a relatively large domain and that, to date, there had been few attempts made to preserve it. The BL and JISC had undertaken some pilot projects, while a small number of organisations (like the British Broadcasting Corporation) had instituted their own Web archiving initiatives. Beagrie went on to explain JISC's interest in Web archiving in its roles as a provider of services and as a funding body responsible for research projects. JISC was, therefore, proposing a pilot Web archive that would collect JISC project Web sites from early 2003. JISC's work in this area was being informed by a feasibility study being funded jointly by JISC and the Wellcome Trust. This would be published later this year.
The final session of the conference dealt with two proposals for collaboration. First, Andreas Rauber of Vienna University of Technology gave a progress report on the European Web Archive initiative. This is a consortium of national and research libraries and other organisations that had collaborated on the production of an Expression of Interest (EoI) for an Integrated Project under the European Union's 6th Framework Programme. Rauber gave an outline of the motivations for the project and described some of the areas in which work was proposed. Michele Kimpton of the Internet Archive then gave the final presentation of the workshop on a proposed Internet Archive Consortium. This would be means for the Internet Archive to collaborate with national libraries. National libraries would define criteria for selection, collection and access while the Internet Archive would provide technical support and develop new tools.
To sum-up, the workshop provided a good review of the existing state of Web archiving initiatives. There continue to be technical developments, particularly in the development of Web crawler technology. Some of these developments are not primarily motivated by Web archiving requirements - the experiments with the automatic collection of Web resources for NSDL are a case in point - but remain relevant. Other research, e.g. experiments at Stanford University on crawling the deep Web [16], may also have implications for future Web archiving strategies.
The workshop also emphasised the growing importance of collaboration for Web archiving. The nature of the Web means that the task of collecting and preserving it is daunting. Even if all of the technical problems can be solved, the global nature of the Web and the difficulty of defining 'national' domains make it hard to know who exactly should be responsible for its preservation. National libraries undoubtedly have a role, but there will also be a need for much wider collaboration, for example with computing scientists, research libraries, archivists and records managers, funding agencies, standards organisations, publishers, art galleries, etc. Managing an ongoing collaboration between these diverse types of organisation will be difficult but may be the only way to ensure the success of Web archiving programmes.
Presentation slides from the workshop are available on the BnF Web site [17]. A shorter workshop report has also been published in D-Lib Magazine [18].
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Michael Day
Research Officer
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: m.day@ukoln.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1225 383923
Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
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For citation purposes:
Day, M. "The 2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/ecdlws2/>
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By Angela Spinazze - November 2002
Angela Spinazze reports on a CIMI symposium on the Handscape Project which is exploring potential use scenarios for mobile (hand-held) computing in museums. Further material on the Handscape Project's research is also available in this issue.
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Handscape is a research project funded by Intel Corporation and conducted by CIMI and the Human Computer Interaction Group (HCI) at Cornell University [1] . The project is concerned with exploring potential use scenarios for mobile (hand-held) computing in museums.
To date, the nature of mobile computing projects in museums has typically been one-off, test the new technology type projects, conducted in isolation, with the results shared internally with project participants. Generally speaking these were road tests, with no intention of continuing beyond the test period. Throughout the museum community there was little communication and little interest in sharing findings on the impact of these technologies.
The Handscape project is trying to change this approach through an open dialogue with the community within which our research is taking place. Towards that end, a symposium was held on 24 June 2002 to mark the end of the first year of Handscape research. The symposium was presented free of charge, in Hillsboro, Oregon, at Intel Corporation's Jones Farm Conference Center.
The day began with a presentation by Professor Geri Gay, Director of the HCI Group at Cornell University and Michael Stefanone, a PhD student associated with the project. Professor Gay's remarks focused on the history of mobile computing in cultural environments, and her research over the past ten years in those environments. She was followed by Michael Stefanone, who presented the Handscape research to date.
This opening session was followed by an invited group of six speakers who presented case studies of mobile computing projects in museums, and new products in development for the cultural community. The afternoon involved a "day in the life" exercise, wherein participants worked in small groups to storyboard potential scenarios.
Cultural heritage professionals, representing institutions and applications developers from North America and the UK, participated in the event. The symposium agenda, list of participants and select presentations are available from the CIMI web site [2].
After the morning break, a group of six invited speakers presented their perspectives on mobile computing in museums. The speakers were Steve Ruddy, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Alexander Sherman, Field Museum of Natural History, Tom Paschkis and Scott Guerin, wiVID Systems, Inc., Sherry Hsi, Metacourse Inc., C. Ward Bond, Talking Signs, Inc., and Leonard Steinbach, Cleveland Museum of Art.
The first two speakers participated in Handscape this year. Mr. Ruddy presented the impressive history of mobile computing undertaken by the Royal Botanic Gardens over the past ten years and some of their plans for the future, and Mr. Sherman presented a prototype gallery guide system that the Field Museum tested in 2001.
Mr. Paschkis and Mr. Guerin offered visitors a look at the past, the form of their first foray into mobile computing back in 1998 as well as a glimpse into the future and their new system - a flexible tool for developing, delivering, and accessing content for and to museum visitors.
Ms. Hsi is an experienced HCI researcher and has been working for several years with the Exploratorium on their hand-held computing research. She presented their most recent research involving the museum's Electronic Guidebook.
Mr. Bond discussed the needs of visitors with disabilities and some of the very straightforward ways, such as wayfinding, in which museums could use mobile technologies to enhance experiences for these museum visitors.
Mr. Steinbach of the Cleveland Museum of Art demonstrated results, in the form of multimedia files, from a project involving the Museum and students of the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Finally, the afternoon provided participants with a chance to be creative and share their ideas on how they would like to see mobile computing advance within the museum environment. Starting with some of the results from our research, participants were assigned to discussion groups and asked to construct a "Day in the Life" scenario. To assist participants with this exercise, several questions were posed, such as:
After several hours of deliberations, conversations, and negotiations, each group presented their scenario. The results were a refreshing set of potential scenarios for wayfinding and social interaction across a group of museums on a university campus, interactive exhibits that turned into on-line games, celebrity-guided tours (such as the Madonna tour of Kew Gardens), and a treasure hunt for families.
As the symposium came to an end, both participants and the Handscape project team agreed to keep the conversation going so that more exchanges like this one could take place. A list serve was created for participants to keep up to date with Handscape activities and to solicit feedback from the group. And, the WhiteSite will soon have a calendar of upcoming application launches so that anyone involved in designing and developing these types of applications can find out what is happening and where. If your institution is planning to deploy a mobile computing application and you would like others to know about it, we would be pleased to include the event in this new calendar.
Requests to join the list serve or postings of application launch dates on the calendar can be sent to Angela Spinazze, Handscape Project Manager [details].
Angela Spinazze
Consultant
ATSPIN consulting
3270 N. Lake Shore Drive, Suite 5E
Chicago
Illinois 60657
USA
Tel: +1.773.281.1515
Fax: +1.773.442.0071
URL: <http://www.atspin.com>
Email: ats@atspin.com
Angela Spinazze has worked within the cultural heritage community since 1986. Her consulting focuses on informatics and content architecture- related issues. She has worked with clients on issues including knowledge management, digital libraries, mobile computing, strategic planning and implementation of new technologies, integrated access to collections and related research and virtual (Web-based) collections, process re-engineering, data migration, and visual literacy. Most recently, she has been involved with the Este Court Archive, a Culture 2000 Project to provide unified access to the dispersed collections amassed by the Este Family during the Renaissance. She is also working with The University of Notre Dame and its investigation of developing a digital visual resources collection. She also works with CIMI as manager of the Handscape Project.
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For citation purposes:
Spinazze, A. "Understanding Visitor Expectations and Museums as Mobile Computing Environments", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/hssymposium/>
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By Marieke Guy - November 2002
Marieke Guy reports on a symposium seeking to bring together key organisations in the field and discuss the state of the art in digital imaging.
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On a hot Thursday morning in late June I travelled down to London for the JISC International Digital Image Symposium. The presentations were all held at One Great George Street, a very stylish building in the heart of Westminster, and handily right next to St James Park. The symposium itself was organised on behalf of the JISC's Images Working Group and was an endeavour to bring together key organisations in the field and discuss the state of the art in digital imaging.
After registration and coffee Jane Williams, who at the time was the Chair of the Images Working Group and the head of JISC Assist (she has since left), started the ball rolling with a brief introduction to the JISC and their mission to fund projects that would allow seamless access to resources at any time.
The first session of the day covered delivery and digital asset management and was chaired by Catherine Grout, Programme Director for the JISC Information Environment. In her opening Catherine looked back at the JISC's changing approach to digital images. The JISC started thinking about images over 5 years ago and Catherine herself is responsible for the strategy for distributed image services. To encourage debate and activity the JISC Images Working Group was set up and currently deals with an image population of 500,000+. Although at present the preponderance seems to be in humanities images Catherine feels the future will be in images for medicine. To end her presentation Catherine highlighted some of the main digitised image collections (JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) [1], The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) [2], licensed collections (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) [3] and The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) [4]. She also mentioned brokered-access activities supported by the JISC.
Oya Rieger, manager of the Library Office of Distributed Learning at Cornell (the 10th largest research library in the world) followed with a presentation on imaging to asset management. In her role at Cornell she deals with over 3 million images. She looked at changes in user expectations, information landscape and to distributed learning.
Following Oya, Paulo Buonora of the Italian State Archives, Rome, then gave an introduction to various digitisation projects with which he had been involved, such as Imago II. Paulo was very open about the successes and failures experienced and raised contentious issues such as whether the technology used to view images would be obsolete too soon, and admitted that at times he wondered if they would have been better off using microfiche instead. He also acknowledged that at the start of the project, (over 5 years ago now), they had not followed any rules or standards and had actually destroyed the original TIFF images; a mistake that would take a lot more justifying today.
Debbie Campbell, from the National Library of Australia, then discussed delivery and digital asset management in the light of her main project, Picture Australia [5]. The presentation covered a number of contentious issues such as the need for persistent identifiers. Picture Australia currently does this with the hope of migrating to an international solution when it arrives.
The last speaker before the panel session was Simon Grant of the Tate Gallery [6], London. He is Head of Information and Systems for the Tate's four sites. Simon spoke about current work at the Tate, which he called the Tate's insight initiative, an attempt at creating collections content and digitising the entire Tate collection of 55,000 works. The project has cost around £1 million. The Tate are also looking at developing their image management system (IMS) and using it as a model. They have recently worked on an indexing schema based on Collage and also on moving to an asset management and content management system. One other area that the Tate is very interested in is the picking up of customer information through personalisation.
The panel discussion touched on a number of the areas that had been raised by the speakers. An interesting debate arose about whether projects should see their digitisation as final or as something only for that time and that they would be going back to redo things in time. The phrase used was quick and dirty versus standards and quality. Debbie Campbell felt that you need to put digitisation into context and that sometimes it is important to include images that are not that great but have important historical value. If you are going for a 'quick fix' you should try to automate the process of redoing. Oya Rieger said that it was not Cornell's intentional to go back and redo work but a project can only do its best at that moment. The most important thing is to get images out there and get audiences interested.
There was also a brief discussion on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and whether more organisations are intending to add referencing to their images. It is now possible to use postcodes to link images together. One delegate asked is this what users really want? Another explained that archaeology projects are moving ahead in this area and the Digimap Project [7], European Council of Information Associations (ECIA) [8], and the Alexander project are worth looking at if the area interests you.
After lunch we reassembled in the presentation room for an afternoon of metadata and technology. The chair for the first session was Seamus Ross, Director of Humanities Computing and Information Management at the University of Glasgow.
Howard Besser, an associate professor at Berkeley, began the session as the keynote speaker. He gave a whirlwind tour of important recent activities in the world of image metadata. His talk covered the key problems we are facing: namely discovery, longevity and interoperability, and a hundred and one other areas of interest. Howard explained what an important role standards have in helping with the key areas as well as veracity, provenance and recording in a consistent manner. He followed on from the previous panel session by asking how you avoid creating everything again over time. Although he could offer no easy answer metadata obviously has an important role to play. Howard also began a brief discussion of the different types of metadata scheme currently used including MARC, Dublin Core (DC) and the making of America (MOA II) leading on to Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) [9] and slipped in tuppence worth about Computer Based Imaging retrieval (CBIR).
The following speakers, who talked on different aspects of metadata, were intending to cover material from the general to the specific.
Merillee Proffitt of the RLG Cultural Materials Initiative [10] talked about RLG Cultural materials and metadata standards. She introduced RLG 101, a non-profit corporation based in the U.S. that holds world-class collections of cultural materials. Some of the challenges that RLG have faced include diverse descriptive practices, meaningful integration across projects, digital representation of materials (surrogates), reliable distributed infrastructure, multiple audiences, international rights and responsibilities. A lot of these problems have been solved using METS, a metadata scheme which is useful for structural (sequential) metadata.
The next speaker was Michael Day from UKOLN. He talked about a metadata review carried out for the Focused Images for Learning and Teaching (FILTER) project, which had looked at selected metadata initiatives relating to images. The initiatives had been divided into a number of sections: Cultural heritage (AMICO, SCRAN, SPECTRUM [11], Visual Resources Association (VRA) [12]), digitisation (National Information Standards Organization (NISO) [13]), geospatial (Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) [14]) and educational (IEEE Learning Technology Standardisation Committee (LTSC), Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) [15]). Michael explained that the main conclusions drawn from the review were format diversity which is really a healthy sign because metadata schemes need to be fit for purpose and images tend to be highly heterogeneous.
Paul Shabajee, a research fellow at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) [16] working on the ARKive Project [17] then talked about metadata, resource discovery and repurposing. His main point was that although metadata is fundamental to resource discovery in large or distributed data sets it is not enough by itself. He suggested various scenarios in which the use of raw metadata would not help users to find an image. The issues covered are fundamental to any type of cross-disciplinary repurposing and cross- searching. Paul found that there is no easy answer; he himself is looking to shared ontologies and the semantic web.
The panel session discussed Paul's various scenarios when metadata would not be enough. Howard felt that they all were answered in different ways. For example in one scenario a user tries to find all instances of birds that fly; because flying is taken for granted with birds this metadata would not have been stored. One way of approaching the problem would be in the design of the user interface. The panel also discussed the problems of interpreting metadata schemas and the fact that ultimately metadata does not matter to certain people, the consumer does not care.
After a quick coffee break we began the technical/blue skies session chaired by David Dawson of Resource.
Ed Bremner from Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) [18] began the session by talking about next generation image file types. He confirmed our feelings that technology has moved on (for example with music formats we have moved from wax to 78 to LP to CD to minidisk and DVD) but that image standards are actually less of a problem than metadata standards. He asked us to consider how 'standard' our current image standards actually are and concluded that they are not very standard; (for example with the TIFF format are we talking about baseline or extended?) So with this in mind do we need new file types for digital images? Ed explained that arguably no we did not, because users do not care and the current files are satisfactory. The current archiving standard is fairly satisfactory as a TIFF but it would be useful to create a delivery standard. This standard should really be a quality open standard with general support, improved compression, contain secure metadata tagging based on xml, have international rights management, be zoomable and streamable, and have multi-layer error resilience. Ed's suggested answer to all these criteria is JPEG 2000.
Next Paul Child, Project Manager of Artworld [19], presented on the use of scaleable vector graphics (SVG). The Artworld project is storing learning and teaching resources in XML and the object catalogue will deliver objects in SVG. SVG is a non-proprietary language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML and covers 3 types of objects: vector graphics shapes, images and text. His presentation gave some of the background to its use and looked at Cocoon an XML publishing framework.
The subsequent speaker was Rob Mildren, Project manager for Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) [20] (not to be confused with SCRAN!), a heritage lottery-funded project that digitises wills and testaments in Scotland 1500 - 1900. Rob talked about the implementation of a quality control system recently set up by SCAN where all QC is carried out within 24 hours of digitisation, 30% of images are checked, and retakes are completed within 24 hours. Quality control metadata is also recorded and the results are documented and retained. These processes are all highly automated. SCAN's plans for the future include more content and performance improvements and reducing the time of digitisation. They also intend to start using JPEG 2000.
Shigeaki Iwai, a digitisation consultant for the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) [21] reconsidered the digital imaging methods used for library and museum materials. He looked at the imaging of rare materials, different types of scanners, different types of digital camera and the related issues. The most important of these was the safe preservation of originals, consideration of light and heat, imaging speed, image quality and economics.
The panel discussion considered how digital imaging projects can move forward with the technology they use. After the close of the first day of the symposium a gathering with buffet and drinks was held at the Café Royal, near Piccadilly Circus.
For the first session of the second day a considerably less jovial group of delegates congregated in the auditorium: England had lost to Brazil in the world cup that morning. However spirits were soon lifted by some hearty discussion into what exactly user needs are and how we can carry out evaluation.
The session was chaired by Jane Williams and the first speaker was Max Marmor, Director of Collection Development for ArtSTOR [22]. Max gave an introduction to ArtSTOR, which is a user-centred digital image library that is academic- and museum-based. It is related to JSTOR which concentrates on journal storage.
The second presentation was given by Seamus Ross, Director of Humanities Computing and Information Management (HATII) who had chaired the previous day's metadata session. Seamus talked about user needs analysis to impact assessment and started off by asking the question why evaluate? Some answers he gave were to establish what is being achieved, to justify investment, enhance current position, consider interface design, inform future developments and measure project impact (e.g. on teaching, research, lifelong learning). Seamus explained that evaluation is not done in the abstract and that we need a set of criteria established well before the start of a project. Evaluation depends on the scope of project, aims, time and resources. Seamus also discussed methods of evaluation, which include observation and focus group discussion. He suggested we use multiple methods.
Margaret Graham, Principal Lecturer at the University of Northumbria, then gave a talk on images and users which looked at a small user survey funded by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) [23]. The survey's purpose was to discover the information-seeking behaviour of image users. Margaret explained that there are many diverse image collections in the UK and that describing images is a difficult task primarily due to a professional skills shortage. It seems that digitisation alone does not make image collections easier to manage. In the Visual Information Seeking Orientated Research (VISOR) study, 4 types of search were identified: specific, semi-specific, conceptual/abstract and vague. Images were selected on a number of different criteria including saliency, quality, recency and accuracy. The main conclusions arrived upon by the survey were that users need further training in the use of tools, that funding was needed to allow cataloguing to be carried out alongside digitisation and that there needs to be more investigation into CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval).
The final speaker for the session was Susan Haigh from the National Library of Canada who talked about evaluating user satisfaction. The National Library of Canada has been working on Images Canada [24], a site similar in scope to Picture Australia. Susan discussed some of the assumptions they had made about their users at the start of the project. Many had been very wrong. For example they had assumed that users would understand the relationship between searching and metadata. In fact users had very little comprehension of what metadata was. Users were not interested in multiple views of the same object and did not appreciate the concept of a gateway. They did not want to view too many images and 6 thumbnails per page were enough. There was also some discussion of bilingual issues.
In the panel discussion it was suggested that evaluation is important but questions were asked about how far we should go on implementing something based on that discovery. The reasons for this are many but centre on money and the fact that often the user is wrong (but you have to listen to them anyway). One conclusion drawn from the presentations was that it is important to share lessons but current models put us under pressure to be successful. Delegates felt that sharing mistakes is just as useful, if not more so, than sharing successes.
In the final stretch before lunch Bernard Smith Director General for the Information Society [25], European Commission, gave a keynote speech on trying to make Europe into a knowledge state. Bernard explained that cultural sectors need to define quality standards as well as strive for preservation and access. If quality was not defined soon by institutions then the Brussels quality framework would be enforced. Bernard also introduced Framework 6 (FP6), which begins a move away from project thinking to initiative thinking. For FP6 there have been 15,000 expressions of interest so far, proposed projects are strong on preservation and there is a lot of interesting material on digital imaging, but, so far, little on digital libraries.
After lunch Debbie Campbell chaired the final session of the symposium on the use of images in learning and teaching.
Jill Evans, project leader of Bristol Biomed [26], kindly stepped in for Catherine Grout as the keynote speaker and gave an interesting presentation on the issue of sustainability for short-term projects. Her current project Biobank was a JISCfair call and is looking at depositing images and finding a more sustainable model for Biomed. Part of the reason for the Biobank bid was that Jill had begun to worry about her project becoming obsolete and full of out of date resources with continuation funding being hard to find. Most digital image projects are aware that quality is costly and that over time they will have problems filling in the gaps in their collections. Jill feels that the traditional approach is not working. One option that Biobank has come up with is looking for internal solutions rather than external solutions. Biobank could embed the resource in the community itself and get the community to take ownership. Users themselves will then add metadata and images. Naturally this has quality implications and the way round this will be to have distributed teams of 'trusted evaluators'. Jill explained that this approach would be a trade-off between quality and accessibility and does raise a number of pertinent issues: which is the most important: a timely resource or an impeccable resource that is out of date? Can any system ever be self-sustaining? And should quality ever be compromised? Jill suggested that if a resource contains images that are mediocre or of poor quality it is not a huge issue to users. Users would say that having an image is the most important thing, above quality, especially for learning and teaching. Image resources should be community peer-reviewed against agreed standards and criteria.
Phill Purdy, manager at VADS then gave a presentation on new developments in the Promoting Image Collections for Learning and Teaching in the Visual Arts (PICTIVA) project. He demonstrated a new lightbox facility, which provides multiple personal image sets for users to retain, annotate, distribute and manage. PICTIVA is also implementing user login/registration and trying out CBIR to allow users to find similar images against the parameters of colour, contrast and shape.
Elaine Mowat, Tertiary Education Officer for SCRAN then provided lots of interesting ways that the resources at SCRAN had been use in learning activities. SCRAN materials are copyright cleared for educational use and you can technically do anything you like to them. Elaine explained that SCRAN's approach to learning is to encourage emotional engagement. Their resources have been used in this way in interactive handouts, online tutorials, virtual field trips stories and case studies, group discussions and brainstorming, as images of the week, and in paper-based materials.
The final speaker of the symposium was Charles Merullo of Hulton Getty. The Hulton Archive [27] is one of the largest collections of photography and illustrative material in the world. It contains over 40 million images including prints, engravings, cartoons, illustrations, maps, periodicals and other ephemera. Charles talked us through some of the fascinating items in the collection and suggested ways in which they could be used in learning and teaching.
The panel discussion covered how we can get teachers to teach with digital images. It was felt that we need a robust set of images that relate to courses along with sets of tools and resources and help for teachers themselves.
At the end of day two it was agreed that the Digital Image Symposium had been a huge success and covered many of the key issues that arise for projects creating digital images resources today. Although many areas (such as quality versus quick and dirty, the benefits of CBIR, the use of evaluation and what metadata schema should be used) will continue to be discussed time and time again, conferences such at these bring the fundamental questions to the foreground. After all…"Good questions outrank easy answers."
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Marieke Guy
QA Focus/NOF-digitise Advisor
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath, BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Marieke Guy is QA Focus/NOF-digitise Advisor, within the Policy and Advice Team. She is currently on maternity leave.
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For citation purposes:
Guy, M. "JISC International Digital Image Symposium, 20-21 June 2002", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/digimsym/>
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By Brian Kelly -November 2002
Brian Kelly describes a new service which enables readers to provide feedback on articles published in Cultivate Interactive.
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The title of this e-journal is Cultivate Interactive. However to date the interactive features have been limited, providing little more than a facility for sending em,ail to authors of articles or the editorial team. Recently however we have deployed a Web-based system for providing feedback on articles. In this article we describe the service, including details of how to use the service, how it can be used, the advantages and disadvantages of the service we are using and how the service is managed by the Cultivate Interactive editorial team.
There is a need to provide a richer feedback mechanism for Cultivate Interactive. The mechanism should aim to stimulate debate by providing a means for readers to comment on the content of articles and to encourage debate. In addition a feedback mechanism could be used by the Cultivate Interactive editor to support the editorial role (e.g. to flag changes made by the editor such as removing links which have become broken). A feedback mechanism could also be used by the author of an article to provide an update on developments or to inform readers of errors or inaccuracies in the original articles or of developments which were predicted but which did not happen.
The Cultivate Interactive e-journal has very limited funding and for the purchase of feedback software. Technical resources for the installation of open source software is also limited. We have therefore chosen to use an externally-hosted tool. As is the case with other types of externally-hosted software such as Web usage tools [1] there are potential dangers with this approach, due to the lack of control over the software. However there are also advantages, especially for projects with limited funding and a finite lifetime. Provided the potential dangers are acknowledged and strategies for dealing with them if they arise are developed, this approach is worth considering.
Cultivate Interactive has chosen to make use of the Crit annotation system [2]. Crit is a well-established system, which has been running since 1997.
We have updated the template for article in Cultivate Interactive. There is now a link to Crit from the bottom of each article, as illustrated in Figure 1. By following this link reader can submit comments or read comments which others have provided.
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| Figure 1: Accessing The Crit Annotation Service |
Once you have followed the link to the Crit service the article will still be displayed. However at the top right hand corner of the page is a "Comment" link which enables you to provide a comment on the article, as illustrated in Figure 2.
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| Figure 2: Creating An Annotation |
To read comments which have been submitted you should scroll to the bottom of the page. If an annotation has been made you will see a link, as shown below.
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| Figure 3: Viewing An Annotation |
As well as reading and making annotations this service can also be used to find out about links to the page.
Crit also provides another potentially useful service - information on links to the article, as provided by Google.
As has been mentioned there is a need to be aware of potential dangers in the use of externally-hosted software. There is also a need to be aware of dangers when providing access to annotation services.
There is a risk that the Crit service could cease to exist as has happened with a number of Web sites following the dotcom crash. If this happens it is likely that annotations will be lost. In addition there is a danger that the Crit Web site could be taken over by, potentially by a pornographic Web site!
It could be argued that, in light of this risk, the Crit service should not be used. However there are always risks in life - even when driving to work. In this case we are taking the same approach as we do when driving - we are aware of the risk, but feel that it is unlikely. Even so, we will still take a cautionary approach.
In this case, we ensure that access to the Crit service is managed, through use of a server-side include (SSI). If the Web site is removed, we can remove the link to the service by updating a single file. We also provide advice on use of the service together with warnings of potential dangers [3].
Crit also provide a downloadable version of the software [4]. If the service is felt to be useful we will consider installing the software locally, which will remove one of the potential risks.
We hope that this will provide a useful service for Cultivate Interactive readers. We will monitor use of the service. If the service is successful we will consider extending it to other Web sites.
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for
UKOLN
which is based at the
University of Bath
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For citation purposes:
Kelly, B. "Providing Feedback On Cultivate Interactive Articles", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/annotations/>
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By Brian Kelly -Autumn 2002
Brian Kelly describes how you can read Cultivate Interactive on the bus or train using the Avantgo service.
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Cultivate Interactive can now be read on hand-held devices (often referred to as Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs) such as Palms and Pocket PCs. This can be done from a page on the Cultivate Interactive [1] Web site as illustrated in Figure 1.
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| Figure 1: The Initial Interface |
This service may be of value to Cultivate Interactive readers who use a PDA. It will allow readers to read articles while on the move or away from a networked computer. It is also environmentally-friendly, as hard-copy output (sometimes referred to as "dead trees") is not needed.
The service makes use of a commercial company called Avantgo. Avantgo provides a freely service for providing access to digital information to PDAs. A valuable aspect of Avantgo's service is that it can be used to transform piblically-available Web sites into a form suitable for viewing on a PDA. The service is available without charge, although users will need to obtain a username and password from the AvantGo Web site [2].
As well as getting a username and password you will need to install the AvantoGo software. Again this software is available free-of-charge. AvantGo provide details of the software and the technical requirements to run the software on your PDA [3].
Once you have obtained your username and installed the software on your PDA simply follow the appropriate link from the Cultivate Interactive Web site as shown in Figure 1. You can choose to download a single issue or the entire Web site.
After logging in to AvantGo you will then see the screen illustrated below.
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| Figure 2: The AvantGo Interface |
You have the choice of choosing the maximum size to be downloaded, whether to include images and the frequency of syncing (just once is advisable as the Web site is normally only updated when a new issue is published).
Once you have confirmed the option the Cultivate Interactive Web site will be installed on your PDA after the next synchronisation. An example of the interface on a Palm PDA is given below.
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| Figure 3: Viewing Cultivate Interactive On A PDA |
We hope that this will provide a useful service for Cultivate Interactive readers.
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for
UKOLN
which is based at the
University of Bath
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For citation purposes:
Kelly, B. "Read Cultivate Interactive On Your PDA!", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/avantgo/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |