MARISTELLA AGOSTI, MICHELINE BEAULIEU, CYRIL CLEVERDON, HANS‐PETER FREI, NORBERT FUHR, DAVID HARPER, PETER INGWERSEN, MICHAEL KEEN, RAINER KUHLEN, STEPHEN ROBERTSON, ALAN SMEATON, KAREN SPARCK JONES, KEITH VAN RUSBERGEN and PETER WILLETT
Sir, We write to record our debt, and that of our colleagues, to one of the founding fathers of information retrieval, Gerard (Gerry) Salton, who died on 28th August 1995 in…
Abstract
Sir, We write to record our debt, and that of our colleagues, to one of the founding fathers of information retrieval, Gerard (Gerry) Salton, who died on 28th August 1995 in Ithaca, ny at the age of 68. Information retrieval was established as a new academic discipline by a small number of pioneers, Gerry among them, who recognised the need for, and the research challenges presented by, the automated indexing, storage and retrieval of text documents. He brought academic rigour and scholarship to establishing the foundations of this discipline, and we acknowledge his influential contributions to the theory, experimental methods, and practice of information retrieval.
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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the trends for digital library education in Europe. It addresses two questions: what are the roles for digital librarians? How should they…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the trends for digital library education in Europe. It addresses two questions: what are the roles for digital librarians? How should they be educated?
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis is based on the results of the project “European Curriculum Reflections on Library and Information Science Education” and the proceedings of the Workshops on Digital Library Education, held in Italy in 2005 and in Croatia in 2006.
Findings
Three approaches to education for digital library are described: the emergence of the concept of “memory institutions”; the library‐based approach to knowledge management; and the isolation of IT from library and information science (LIS) schools.
Research limitations/implications
The roles of the digital librarian are suggested, and the structure of a course for digital library education is proposed, but further research is needed on the definition of the digital library concept.
Practical implications
A digital librarian should have a combination of technological and librarianship competences.
Originality/value
The paper addresses the issue of education needed for digital librarians in Europe.
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Paolo Manghi, Michele Artini, Claudio Atzori, Alessia Bardi, Andrea Mannocci, Sandro La Bruzzo, Leonardo Candela, Donatella Castelli and Pasquale Pagano
The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present the architectural principles and the services of the D-NET software toolkit. D-NET is a framework where designers and developers find the tools for constructing and operating aggregative infrastructures (systems for aggregating data sources with heterogeneous data models and technologies) in a cost-effective way. Designers and developers can select from a variety of D-NET data management services, can configure them to handle data according to given data models, and can construct autonomic workflows to obtain personalized aggregative infrastructures.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper provides a definition of aggregative infrastructures, sketching architecture, and components, as inspired by real-case examples. It then describes the limits of current solutions, which find their lacks in the realization and maintenance costs of such complex software. Finally, it proposes D-NET as an optimal solution for designers and developers willing to realize aggregative infrastructures. The D-NET architecture and services are presented, drawing a parallel with the ones of aggregative infrastructures. Finally, real-cases of D-NET are presented, to show-case the statement above.
Findings
The D-NET software toolkit is a general-purpose service-oriented framework where designers can construct customized, robust, scalable, autonomic aggregative infrastructures in a cost-effective way. D-NET is today adopted by several EC projects, national consortia and communities to create customized infrastructures under diverse application domains, and other organizations are enquiring for or are experimenting its adoption. Its customizability and extendibility make D-NET a suitable candidate for creating aggregative infrastructures mediating between different scientific domains and therefore supporting multi-disciplinary research.
Originality/value
D-NET is the first general-purpose framework of this kind. Other solutions are available in the literature but focus on specific use-cases and therefore suffer from the limited re-use in different contexts. Due to its maturity, D-NET can also be used by third-party organizations, not necessarily involved in the software design and maintenance.