Bibliothèque numérique | EPFL Graph Search

Une bibliothèque numérique (virtuelle ou en ligne ou électronique) est une collection de documents (textes, images, sons) numériques (c'est-à-dire numérisés ou nés numériques) accessibles à distance (en particulier via Internet), proposant différentes modalités d'accès à l'information aux publics. Les documents peuvent être très élaborés, comme les livres numériques, ou beaucoup plus bruts. Elle peut aussi être définie comme un ensemble de collections mises en ligne pour un public précis. Définition La Digital Library Federation (DLF) propose la définition suivante : « Les bibliothèques numériques sont des organisations qui fournissent les ressources, incluant un personnel qualifié, pour sélectionner, structurer, offrir un accès intellectuel à, interpréter, distribuer et préserver l'intégrité de, et assurer la pérennité, des collections de travaux numériques afin qu'elles puissent être aisément et économiquement accessibles à une communauté définie, ou à un ensemble de c

Digital Libraries

Thuy Le Nguyen

Digital libraries are libraries in which collections are stored in a digital format (the metadata at least). Digital libraries are now being made publicly available. However, building good user interfaces to query heterogeneous libraries requires to have a good knowledge on the type of available information (e.g. which attributes are useful for filtering). In this project, we harvest (using the Z39.50 and OAI-PMH protocol) and analyze (in terms of useful attributes for querying) four important digital libraries: Nebis (five million items), Infoscience (sixty thousand items), CiteSeer (seven hundred thousand items) and The European Library (one and a half million items).

2007

Capturing and Analyzing User Behavior in Large Digital Libraries

Jérôme Caffaro, Giorgi Gvianishvili, Ludmila Marian, Martin Rajman

The size of digital libraries is increasing, making navigation and access to information more challenging. Improving the system by observing the users’ activities can help at providing better services to users of very large digital libraries. In this paper we explain how the Invenio open-source software, used by the CERN Document Server (CDS) allows fine grained logging of user behavior. In the first phase, the sequence of actions performed by users of CDS is captured, while in the second phase statistical data is calculated offline. This paper explains these two steps and the results. Although the analyzed system focuses on the high energy physics literature, the process could be applicable to other scientific communities, with and international, large user base.

2010

How to Orient Oneself in Thinking in the Digital Era: A mixed-methods ethnography of researchers' navigational practices on Gallica

Simon François Dumas Primbault

The birth and development of digital libraries—broadly understood as curated collections of electronic documents accessible online on dedicated platforms with tools for search and consultation—have radically transformed research activities. Consequently, traditional practices observed in physical places of knowledge such as libraries and archives—searching catalogues, browsing through shelving, taking notes—have been supplemented with a series of digital practices developed by researchers to browse websites and databases— searching by keywords, filtering results, navigating through links. The ambition of this project is to reclaim a spatial understanding of digital libraries through the investigation of navigation as a fundamental information practice for researchers. Taking Gallica as a case study, this research situated at the crossroads of ethnography, data science, and digital humanities strives to shed light on how researchers “orient themselves” within a digital corpus. Bridging the gap between the ethnography of the digital—the qualitative study of scholars’ practices through observations and interviews—and digital ethnography—the quantitative analysis of navigation traces—, it developed mixed methods combining interviews with topological analysis of navigation paths extracted from server logs. This exploratory study led to promising findings on researcher’s navigation within the Dewey classification, on the role of “pivotal literature”, and on a first sketch of a variety of “regimes of navigation” clustered based on their topological features. More importantly, this research illustrates a perfect case of heuristic dovetailing between a quantitative approach enhanced by digital tools, and a more traditional qualitative approach. Along the course of this ongoing project, emphasis has been put on a reflexive critique of the nature of the data processed, the implications of every step of the pipeline, as well as their link with actual practices observed and objectified by researchers themselves.

2022

How to Orient Oneself in Thinking in the Digital Era: A mixed-methods ethnography of researchers' navigational practices on Gallica

Simon François Dumas Primbault

2022