May 26-28ICNEE 2003 ARCHON: BUILDING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS THROUGH EXTENDED DIGITAL LIBRARY SERVICES Hesham Anan, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair,et al. Digital Library Group Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA 23529

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Outline Motivation. Overview. Archon Architecture. Equation and Formulae Searching. Reference Linking. Conclusions and Future Work.

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Motivation Lack of a federation service that: –provides an unified interface to diverse collections in the physics –supports metadata that differ in richness, syntax, and semantics Lack of services tailored to physics students and researchers needs

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Overview Archon is a federation of physics digital libraries. Its architecture provides the following basic services: –a storage service for the metadata of collected archives; –a harvester service to collect data from other digital libraries using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) ; – a search and discovery service; –and a data provider service to expose the collected metadata to other OAI-PMH harvesters.

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Overview For Archon we have developed a range of services especially for physics collections such as: –a service to allow searching on equations embedded in the metadata, and –a cross-archive citation service –A focus library for personal use

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Archon Architecture

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Overview

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Overview

May 26-28ICNEE 2003

May 26-28ICNEE 2003

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Focus library Created web service to allow students and teachers to create personal collections. These services use Web Services standards including the use of SOAP requests and response in communication between the clients and the services. Examples of these services include: –Search Service –Book Shelf Service

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Focus library Book Shelf Service –allows each user to have a set of personalized collection which is subset of the overall archives –enables teachers to collect course materials and package it in a personalized collection –enables students that are doing research in a topic to make a special collection that contains all the related documents in that collection. Search Service –provides access to all search functionality without the need to use the Archon interface –allows each user (e.g. teacher) to provide customized client for the collections that can have special features according to a course’s needs.

May 26-28ICNEE 2003

May 26-28ICNEE 2003

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Equation and Formulae Searching Students remember equations Can be used to search for relevant papers Issues –How to input equations: Select form set of choices Textually identify subject Select by categories –How to display equations Preprocess and create gif files Overlay latex, the like in text with gif files

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Equation and Formulae Searching

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Equation and Formulae Searching

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Reference Linking Comon tasks for students: –Prepare bibliography –Starting with one paper read other relevant papers and prepare report Archon provides: –the references information for a document –links from the references to their corresponding documents. Archon reference linking service provides reference-linking service among member collections and to outside collections

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Reference Linking we use multiple rules to match citations and documents based on what kind of the information is present – use CERN software. In cases that a reference fails to match any document in our collections, we compute the similarity between the citation and documents to find possible links.

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Reference Linking

May 26-28ICNEE 2003

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Reference Linking

May 26-28ICNEE 2003 Conclusions and Future Work Collections have overlapping holdings, need strong de-duplication service Expand the personalization effort to allow students and researchers to integrate the DL information into their writing of reports and papers Test a role based access system that allows for each contributing collection to have different policies for different organizations Fully automate the update process of various services for continuous harvesting from member collections