Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. We set out the requirements for these tasks and describe a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts.

创建数字图书馆的人员需要收集原始资料，必要时添加元数据，并设计和构建新的馆藏。我们阐述了这些任务的要求，并介绍了一种新的工具，它以交互方式支持这些任务，使用户能够轻松地从各种类型的电子文件中创建自己的馆藏。这个过程包括选择要收录的文档，确定合适的元数据集，为每个文档或每组文档分配元数据，根据文档格式、可搜索索引和浏览设施设计馆藏的形式，构建必要的索引和数据结构，并使馆藏可供他人使用。此外，不同的情况需要不同的工作流程，系统必须足够灵活以应对这些需求。虽然该工具是针对Greenstone数字图书馆软件的，但其基本思想在更普遍的情况下应该是有用的。