Iraq’ s Digital Library Dilemma: OpenSource Digital Objects Repository architecture, tools, and interface

project

Authors

G Benoit

Simmons College, GSLIS

300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02113

Email: benoit@simmons.edu

Falah Rashid

Mustansiriya University, Baghdad, Iraq and Simmons College

GSLIS, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02113

Email: falah.rashid@simmons.edu

The loss of Iraqi libraries and the dispersion of their contents call for digital library solutions that

encompass many organization, access and preservation needs, among them the technical,

staffing, and language encoding needs for record production, and user needs to search and

annotate in multiple scripts and languages. Such digital assets management (DAM) system must

be able to handle multiple languages, flexibly integrate professional and local standards to

ensure continued integration of the records and digital objects, and should facilitate record

production and using digital materials in cultural preservation and education. To these ends, we

describe only part of a larger solution - the architecture of a DAM system, “auroraDL”, and

propose how the structure will enable us to study the redevelopment of Iraq’s information

instruction.

:الخالصة

ان فقدان المكتبات العراقية لمحتوياتها يستدعي منا ايجاد الحلول السريعة التي تشمل العديد من الحاجات ومن بينها الحاجات الفنيةباالضافة الى ذلك يدمج أي نظام ادارة.والكوادرية والترميز اللغوي للسجالت وحاجة المستخدم الى البحث بلغات وخطوط عديدة

لالصول الرقمية للمعايير المهنية والمحلية لضمان تكامل السجالت ويجب ان يسهل تكوين السجالت واستخدام المواد الرقمية فيبناء نظام –وللوصول الى هكذا نتائج قمنا بشرح جزء واحد من حلول اآبر . المحافظة على الثقافة والتعليم DAM ( المكتبة الرقمية )

(aroura DL) واقتراح آيف يمكننا هذا البناء من دراسة اعادة تطوير توجهات المعلومات في العراق.

:بيان المشكلة

ان الفقدان الناتج للمكتبات ومحتوياتها في العراق يستدعي دراسة آيفية بناء المجاميع وآيفية اعادة بناء البنية التحتية من اجل الوصولان القضايا السياسية وتاثير نقص الكادر المتدرب ومعرفة المعايير وتنظيم المواد والقلق حول آلفة انظمة ادارة. الى المعلومات

.المحتويات في العراق يدفعنا الى االخذ بنظر االعتبار العديد من الحلول الخاصة بنظام ادارة الموضوعات الرقمية

هناك حاجة الى عقد مؤتمرات علمية لمناقشة القضايا الفنية وخطط التحول من. المشكلة اآبر من مجرد مشروع انشاء مكتبة رقمية وبينما). منصات(المكتبات التقليدية الى المكتبات الرقمية والمكتبيين االختصاصيين المتدربين والبرامج التي تعمل في البرامج المتعددة

.ترغب وزارة التعليم العالي بتوفير آل المواد بشكل رقمي في آل انحاء العراق اليوجد اجماع في هذا الموضوع

Problem statement:

The resulting loss of libraries and their contents in Iraq calls for us to consider how to rebuild the

collections and how to restructure information access. Although the Iraqi Ministry of Higher

Education desires to see all materials available in digital form for the entire country, there are

considerable political, acquisition, and training issues, such as the lack of trained staff,

knowledge of standards and organization of materials, and concerns about the cost of proprietary

content management systems, lead to considering several digital object management system

solutions.

This poster focuses on a multi-lingual suite of digital object repository software tools to facilitate

standards-oriented record creation, multli-lingual searching, and greater integration of digital

objects for education that are platform-independent; for the different groups in Iraq, it

demonstrates a new approach to ingesting and organizing digital objects. The products that were

developed, called “auroraDL”, are part of an open source, easy-to-tailor integrated suite, written in

Java, to help librarians, and especially non-technical staff, create records according to Visual

Resources Association Core descriptors, integrate standard and locally-generated agent and

subject descriptors, to tailor the system behavior to regional and domain-needs as a first step in

removing known technical, political, and other roadblocks. Consequently, use of this project’s

tools will enable us to study the redevelopment of Iraq’s information infrastructure. A test

collection has been created to demonstrate this DAM solution’s functions as well as Arabic-

language training tools to be used in Iraqi libraries, with the goals of expanding access to digital

resources, maintaining standards in descriptors, and supporting user-annotation to add value to

the surrogate records.

Specific needs:

Iraq’s technical infrastructure and regional differences affect the creation and use of digital

libraries in Iraq. There is a great interest (Yale, AATA) and various perspectives were considered:

Alexandra Library Project, Chinese Heritage Library Project, Greenstone and Genesis, the Iraqi

Libraries Network test project, Iraqi Virtual Science Library, and Arabic and Middle Eastern

Electronic Library (Ameel), among others. Ultimately, the political infrastructure, staff needs, and

end-user needs argued for developing a new solution, because the otherwise popular Greenstone,

which is dependent upon the MS Windows Arabic operating system, did not address the various

needs.

While digital object records need to conform to several professional and industrial standards in

developing areas especially ought to be flexible enough to support non-standard local customs,

such as local descriptors, agents without name authority records, etc. A second issue we

addressed is how to handle historical and current administrative and object metadata in multiple

languages and scripts for Arabic, Syriac, Assyrian, Chaldean, Kurdish languages, Turkmen, and

Armenian. We considered, too, a system to for librarians, educators, and experts to increase the

value of these records with scholarly annotations in any UTF-8 or UTF-16 supported language,

which are searchable.

Solutions:

The authors programmed in-house using a combination of Java for the application (Benoit, 2008),

full-text parsers and search engine, XML and MySQL, to create a suite of tools

(http://gslis.simmons.edu:8080/auroraDL/) for record creation by library staff and collection-

building by end-users to run on using the open source Apache webserver and Tomcat servlet

container, and various user-controlled resource files to be platform-independent, scaleable and

which will support these and other needs. The application is pre-loaded with materials for art

education created by the Boston Public Library and supports:

Application of VRA Core 4.0 metadata (to ensure interoperability of the records)

Mixed language and mixed script support in RDBMS, resource files, and records

UTF-8 and UTF-16 support for full-text annotations and searching

Modularized programming

Add and remove work modules as needed, such as interfaces for creating EAD-compliant

archives records,

Tailorable resource files that populate interface tools, such as dropdown boxes, with subject

headings, local descriptors, etc.) to enforce various ISO standards, MIME types, VRA Core

and DC descriptors

Share expert- and user-created collections for education by facilitating annotating records

and building theme-specific or learning-outcome specific collections. Our multilingual

search engine supports several retrieval set interfaces and making collections of objects

from the retrieval sets.

Architecture and Demonstration user site:

Information about the project in Arabic is at

http://gslis.simmons.edu:8080/auroraDL/arb/arabic1.pdf. Project software and documentation:

 http://gslis.simmons.edu:8080/auroraDL/about.html

Future research based on this project:

1. Would facilitating record creation affect the creation of preservation and educational materials

in Iraq?

2. Would facilitating creating user-defined, user annotated collections be useful in education?

3. Would facilitating expert annotations contribute to preserving digital objects?

4. Will full-text annotations combined with standard and local descriptors increase the usefulness

of these records?

5. Will full-text annotations combined with standard and local descriptors improve automatic

classification of new record, suitable to any information context, but possibly facilitating Iraqi

digital library collections.

References

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