D-Lib Magazine

September/October 2011
Volume 17, Number 9/10

Editorial

Useful & Interesting

Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us

doi:10.1045/september2011-editorial

In reviewing, selecting, and editing articles and assorted other items for D-Lib, our goal is to provide the community with current and useful information on digital library developments. Through a combination of the articles and the 'small plates' in the News & Events section, we aim for a mix of the immediately practical (news you can use) and the somewhat more theoretical (consider this trend in your future planning). The current issue is no exception and we hope you find it both interesting and useful.

The first three articles in this issue focus on geospatial data. Libraries have always managed this type of information, but the last few years especially have seen great improvements in mapping and related software, including its availability and affordability, plus an enormous increase in the amount of data that is being collected and which needs to be managed and preserved. Our lead article, by Shaon and Woolf, looks at sustained availability of environmental data in the context of interoperable Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), using the EC Inspire Directive as an example. The second article, by Oehrli et al., describes the problems of applying traditional library search systems to cartographic data and the development of a new and powerful geosearch tool to address those problems. Our third and final geospatial-related article, by Neatrour and colleagues at The University of Utah, looks at automatically enhancing general digital collection place name metadata with lat/long coordinates in order to provide map-based interfaces to the collections.

Our final two articles look at the digitization of translations and the usefulness of clustering topics for end users. Gauthereau-Bryson and colleagues from Rice University report on the issues they encountered in the digitization of multi-lingual historical materials in the Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP), a collaborative effort to develop a common interface across multiple scholarly collections covering the Americas from 1492 up to the early twentieth century. Finally, Hagedorn and her co-authors report on their project to test the effectiveness of topic modeling for searching by end users, applied against a special instance of the HathiTrust Digital Library. We hope you find these five articles both useful and interesting and, as always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

About the Editor

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.