D-Lib Magazine
November/December 2012
Volume 18, Number 11/12
Table of Contents
Editorial
In This Issue
Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us
doi:10.1045/november2012-editorial
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The continuing maturation of the digital library field is on display in the current issue of D-Lib. We feature an extensive consideration of contextual metadata for cultural objects, visual interfaces for cultural heritage collections, the infrastructure needed to build upon and leverage open access, crowdsourced georeferencing for map library collections, and a look at Pinterest as a social curation site of relevance to digital libraries.
Our first two articles, both by Beaudoin, consider the role of context in the digital preservation of cultural objects. Such context is particularly important in the case of physical objects for which the digital representation is already one step removed from the object in question. The first article explores the topic in detail, including an overview of the published literature, and the second article proposes a framework for recording contextual metadata and shows the application of that framework to digital surrogates of a painting and of a bridge.
We stay with cultural heritage in the third article, by Algee, Bailey, and Owens. They report on Viewshare, a visualization platform developed by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. Its use at the National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives is used as an extended illustration of its use as a prototyping tool for collection management and the benefits that can bring both to collection managers and to external users.
Our fourth article in this issue, by Knoth and Zdrahal, looks at the need for large-scale repository aggregation to take advantage of the growing availability of open access publication. They present the CORE (Connecting Repositories) system as providing the level of infrastructure needed to provide services at multiple levels of access, including raw data and collection level analysis in addition to individual papers.
Articles five and six in this collection of six articles look at some of the growing social aspects within digital libraries. Fleet, Kowal, and Přidal describe Georeferencer, a collaborative online project that enables crowdsourcing for georeferencing historical map images. Georeferencing is the labor-intensive operation of aligning historic maps with real-world location, greatly increasing their utility and discoverability. The many advantages of crowdsourcing this activity are examined through multiple Georeferencer implementations.
Finally, Zarro and Hall look at Pinterest as part of their investigation of social medial sites vis-à-vis libraries, archives, and museums. Pinterest is currently the third most popular social media activity in the U.S. and the authors use it to illustrate the potential development of social media by the digital library community, among others.
About the Editor
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Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Management Technology and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.
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