Description: This paper discusses improving access to web archives through innovative analysis of PDF content. Abstract: In 2008 five United States institutions collaborated to archive the U.S. federal government Web presence: the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, the California Digital Library, the Government Printing Office, and the University of North Texas (UNT). Their objective was to document the changes coincident with the shift in leadership of the U.S. executive branch. The five partners identified key resources from the U.S. .gov Top Level Domain and completed crawls from September 2008 until March 2009. The resulting End of Term (EOT) 2008 Web Archive, a 16 TB dataset, was distributed to partners interested in providing local services and access to the archive. The UNT Libraries investigated Portable Document Format (PDF) files, a class of content many information professionals associate with the traditional notion of “discrete documents”. Over four million unique PDF documents were extracted from the Archive and a series of metadata and information extraction processes were conducted for each document. Additionally, derivative raster images of the first page of each document were created. These metrics were ingested into a database for further analysis, which brought to light previously hidden characteristics of the ...

Description: This presentation paper is based on the University of North Texas Libraries' digital libraries' implementations experience. It discusses various scenarios and strategies for integrating controlled vocabularies in the uncontrolled digital library world.

Description: This paper discusses maintaining quality metadata. Quality is a multidimensional concept. The two aspects of digital library data quality are the quality of the data in the objects themselves, and the quality of the metadata associated with the objects. Because poor metadata quality can result in ambiguity, poor recall and inconsistent search results, the existence of robust quality assurance mechanisms is a necessary feature of a well-functioning digital library. Recognizing the strategic benefit of quality metadata as a means of ensuring long term access to its digital resources, the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries employ a number of metadata quality assurance procedures, tools, and associated quality assurance mechanisms. This paper discusses issues related to digital resources management and describes how UNT approaches metadata quality issues at various levels of the digital resources life cycle.

Description: This paper discusses meeting the demands of digital scholarship. The synergies of numerous emerging trends such as the development of open standards and open source software, geometric growth of blogs and podcasts, peer-to-peer networking, cross discipline collaborations, etc. provide new directions for scholarship. Likewise, digital libraries and supporting technologies have now matured to the point where their contents are incorporating complex and dynamic resources and services. Powered by network capability and fueled by digital developments, research is becoming more data intensive in almost every discipline. The rapid pace of development poses new threats and problems. Many of these innovations, for example, may have come at the expense of simplicity, sustainability, and other commonly understood applications in the life cycle management of digital resources. Based on the University of North Texas Libraries' "Portal to Texas History" implementation experiences, this paper provides a general overview on the emerging trends and innovative usage of digital library technologies. This paper provides an overall scenario in the areas of aggregating a variety of digital formats; deploying, maintaining, and archiving digital contents; and other innovative uses of digital library technologies.

Description: This paper discusses metadata quality. Maintaining usable digital collections necessitates maintaining high quality metadata about those digital objects. An effective metadata management approach can help institutions improve consistency, clarity of data lineage and relationships so that institutions can better use, reuse, and integrate resources. The metadata quality characteristics depend on various factors, including: type of resources, user perspectives, needs and priorities, which vary across groups of users. The metadata quality issue is particularly acute if there are multiple institutions participating in collaborative digital projects, where a high level of interoperability is an important element. This paper demonstrates metadata quality assurance mechanisms by examining different quality assessment criteria, including metadata record completeness, consistency, accuracy, provenance, conformance to expectations, and other known substantive factors.