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April 2011
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DIGITAL LIBRARY OVERVIEW
by NEERAJ KUMAR RAI DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE DELHI UNIVERSITY

Overview The Wellcome Library is founded on the collections of Sir Henry Wellcome[1] (1853-1936), an American entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector. Sir Henry established a pharmaceutical company in England which became the Wellcome Trust, now a charity that funds research to improve human and animal health. Sir Henry's interests were broadly centred on the history of human health, and his collections of artefacts, rare books and manuscripts reflected this.

Part of the Wellcome Collection, the Wellcome Library provides insight and information to anyone seeking to understand medicine and its role in society, past and present. One of the world's major resources for the study of medical history, the Wellcome Library provides access to a growing collection of contemporary biomedical information resources as well as historic sources including early printed books and serials, historic manuscripts, archival collections, artworks and audio-visual materials, as well as a digital image library. The Library is free and open to the public.

In 2009, the Wellcome Library embarked on a five-year transformation strategy to create a groundbreaking digital library, allowing online open access to its collections, and building its profile as a major cultural destination as well as a world-class academic research library.

To support these aims, the strategic plan identifies three work strands:

Targeted collecting. Reflecting the major challenges identified by the Trust. Strategic digitisation. Making our collections accessible to all. Expert interpretation. Placing collections in their cultural and historical contexts. At the heart of this transformation[2] will be the Wellcome Digital Library (WDL). It will seek to meet growing user expectations of free online access to resources and make use of web tools to allow users to contribute to, manipulate and use content according to their needs. The Digital Library will not only make the Library's content accessible to a world-wide audience, but will also incorporate content from other libraries, making it a true global resource.

To demonstrate the viability of the digital library the Library is carrying out a digitisation pilot programme and building an infrastructure to support it. The aims are to:

build a sustainable and expandable mechanism for creating, storing and delivering data; digitise key library holdings relating to one of the Trust's major challenges as set out in the strategic plan[3]; digitise important third-party content which complements its holdings; use innovative web tools to encourage discovery and use of these collections; and explore commercial partnerships for cost-effective digitisation of other parts of the collection. The theme of the pilot is modern genetics and its foundations. It will provide a documentary record of modern genetics not only from a scientific perspective, but also from political, economic, technological, social, cultural and personal viewpoints. Although heavily biased towards recent history, it will include over 1 million page images of material that allows the post-war story of genetics to be seen in context. It will encourage a broad spectrum of users to discover, engage with and use this content.

The pilot will provide a model for a programme of themed collecting, digitisation and interpretation which can be extended across the other global health themes at the heart of the Trust's strategic plan. Furthermore, by selecting a topic currently under-represented in the interests of medical historians, it will demonstrate our ability to influence, rather than simply respond to, the medical humanities research agenda.

Ancillary strands of the project will involve the incorporation of theme-specific third-party content from other libraries, addition of existing digitised content from our own collections, the inclusion of born digital archival content and the investigation of new business partnerships to support digitisation.

The pilot began in Summer 2010, with the commencement of the digitisation element and development of the infrastructure, and will run to the end of 2012. Ingest of external content is expected to continue into 2013.

2. Target audiences Three key target audiences for the WDL have been characterised, as follows:

Browsers. Non-specialist, public users who approach the site by following general links from Wellcome Collection, or by general web searching on (for example) broad concept terms such as “history of medicine” or “history of genetics”. These users will be drawn in by highly visual, intriguing and eclectic material – in other words, the online equivalent of a Wellcome Collection exhibition visitor. Discoverers. Non-academic users who are nevertheless pursuing a relatively well-defined research enquiry. Examples include teachers seeking material relating to National Curriculum objectives; journalists seeking material on specific subjects or family historians researching particular individual medical practitioners/researchers. These users will generally identify the material from the Library's collections via a Google search on their specific subject, or from a link on another site. Researchers. Scholars, generally at undergraduate level or above, searching for specific material relating to individuals or subjects and seeking to use our collections as a primary resource for academic study, and who come to our site because of our reputation as a leading resource for the history of medicine and bioscience. Quantifying potential increases in each of these user categories is difficult, given that:

there is relatively little digitised or interpretive content on the Library web site at present; and there is currently no mechanism for surveying online users and hence segmenting the existing audience. Developing robust methods for measuring and evaluating online users will form part of the development process for the WDL.

3. Measuring success The programme aims to develop a number of specific outcomes measures for these user groups, including:

Browsers. Web links/references to WDL interface. Discoverers. Media mentions, downloads of educational resources. Researchers. Citations for WDL content. In addition, the success of the pilot project will be measured by using targeted focus group and survey evaluation to measure user satisfaction with the content and performance of the WDL. These will form the qualitative user targets for the project.

Lastly, success will be measured through the following technical targets:

Material types. To successfully digitise, ingest, store and deliver printed books, manuscripts, images, sound and video files, as well as born-digital archive material. Quantity. To demonstrate the ability to expand to hold at least 10 million page images or digital objects. Costs. To achieve digitisation and other procurement costs that are in line with or below benchmarks for comparable projects. Performance: to cope with up to 3,200 users/9,000 page views per day, with up to ten concurrent users per minute, and an image (1 MB) display time of 5 s or less. 4. Infrastructure development overview Key to making this pilot successful is establishing a robust, scalable, and fully integrated Digital Library systems infrastructure, fit for the purpose of managing, protecting, and disseminating digital assets to a high standard. Some of the components required for this are already in place, whilst others require development work or need to be procured. The Library will establish the technical foundation for the digital library through the procurement and implementation of the following systems:

Search and discovery system. To encourage users to engage with our content. Digital delivery system (DDS). To deliver content to users in flexible and intuitive ways. Digital asset management (DAM). To manage the digital objects that are created. Workflow tracking system (WTS). To manage and track the creation of digital content and to aggregate and convert metadata. Search and discovery One of the key aims of the digital library is to provide a seamless experience for users when searching the Library's content – all of which will be discoverable, and (where digitised) accessible via a single search interface.

The WDL will be accessed from the Library web site[4], which will serve as the portal to newly developed search and discovery mechanisms and a curated list of “topics” pointing to hand-selected digital content of high relevance.

The primary search system currently in use is Encore[5] – a cross-search system that provides searching across the Library's collections (physical, digitised and born digital) using descriptive metadata from the Library's catalogues. The Library is looking at ways to improve the range of content accessible through the single search interface, including the provision of full-text search. As the Library intends to digitise large numbers of books and other optical character recognition (OCR') able materials, full-text searching is an essential component to the search and discovery layer.

Browsing and discovery will be facilitated by the addition of interpretative content to the site, and the ability for users to quickly access the most relevant content for particular topics. A combination of curated content (items chosen by Library staff), and automatically selected content (using canned searches, for example) will be made available for a range of relevant “history of medicine” topics. This will enable the “browsers” and “discoverers” to learn more about the “history of medicine”, easily find content that can be reused for teaching and learning, and to showcase the breadth (and depth) of material held at the Wellcome Library.

Digital delivery system When a user chooses to view digital content attached to a particular record, the DDS will serve that content up in a variety of ways (page turning/scrolling, thumbnail views, direct downloads, etc.). In order to do this, the delivery system will request content from the DAM, convert this to dissemination formats (on the fly where required), and store these in a cache. XML files conforming to the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) will be used to inform the DDS of unique IDs to enable requests for files from the DAM or to identify files in the cache, list the logical and/or physical structure of multi-page content, and provide information on access permissions. The DDS will not include a search function (this will be handled by the search and discovery layer described above).

The Library will procure a new system in Summer 2011. The key features that the DDS will support include the following:

Deliver and display digitised and born digital content in a range of multi-media formats, including still images, video, audio and electronic documents, such as PDF and word processed text, allowing personalised views. Provide Web 2.0 features, such as sharing and collaboration tools. Utilise METS and METS/ALTO to inform the display and delivery of specific types of content, and to display metadata as required. Support authenticated user access. Utilise the Wellcome JPEG2000 file format profile[6] and convert to dissemination formats on the fly as required. Implement an open application programming interface for third-party access to content. Interoperate with the Library's DAM system to retrieve master images. Interoperate with the Library's search and discovery layer. Digital asset management The DAM ingests all digital assets, along with their descriptive and administrative metadata, to ensure the long-term integrity of the master files, providing administration, security and format migration functions. The DAM assigns and stores administrative metadata related to the files (including unique identifiers). The Library already has a DAM system called Safety Deposit Box[7] (SDB) that was procured to manage born digital content.

In early 2010, the Library carried out a feasibility study (Henshaw et al., 2010) to determine whether SDB could be used for a much larger body of digitised material, investigating the ingest and delivery issues such use would entail. The results were positive, and in Summer 2010, the Library commissioned a set of detailed user requirements setting out the extensions and modifications that would be required to meet the needs of the digital library programme. The development work itself is anticipated to begin early in 2011.

Key requirements for the development of SDB as a single repository for all the Library's digital assets include the following enhancements:

Support the batch ingest of metadata and images. Interoperate with other Library systems including the WTS and with the DDS. Workflow tracking system In order to digitise and ingest digital content at the scale the Library wishes to achieve, it became clear that a system would be needed to help manage the end-to-end process. The WTS will play a key role in ensuring that digital content is created, quality controlled and ingested into the DAM accurately and efficiently. Expressed simply, it will provide an interface and database to enable tracking, monitoring and reporting activities, calling third-party applications and holding aggregated data. The WTS will also output XML files to specified schemas (particularly, METS for the DDS).

For the purposes of this system, “end-to-end” is defined as the process from first preparation/selection of content to be digitised or ingested up to the point that content is made accessible to the delivery system. The workflow will be different depending on the origin of the content, and three different “work streams” have been identified that will be managed by the WTS (see Table I for a summary of the activities that make up the work streams). The WTS will be procured in Spring 2011, and the full set of user requirements is available online[8].

Conclusion The Library has a duty of care to preserve its content – whether physical or digital – for the long-term in a sustainable way, ensuring that resources are available to users on a permanent basis. But alongside this custodianship is the Library's responsibility to actively meet the needs of users by providing content and tools that are of real value to them. This requires a combination of technological planning, user evaluation and experience-based judgement on how these needs will indeed be met. The technical development of the WDL is entirely geared toward realising these aims.