Digital Libraries & JeromeDL

Digitial Libraries have been growing in number and strength since the term was originally popularised in the early 1990s. There is something intrinsically human about our desire to catalog and organise our intellectual work into meaningful and sharable collections. More recently, many universities and indeed countries are building academic repositories of books, papers, theses and teaching materials.

Sebastian Kruk has been working on a semantic digital library within DERI for the past while, and recently has put together an evaluation version of their JeromeDL system. If you wish to check out what this system is all about he also has an introductory presenation that outlines how library resources can be enhanced for browsing and retrieval with various semantic empowered services inclucing social annotations.

There is also a guided evaluation available on http://q.digime.name/ which steps you through some tasks, prompting you to provide feedback at various stages. This is probably the best place to start, and will give you an opportunity to reflect on what you think of digital repositories and to contribute some thoughts on how they might be improved, along with getting to play with the system using the accompanying guided instructions.