Design and Evaluation of Maintenance Tools for Distributed Digital Libraries

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This targeted research project is investigating and developing tools and social protocols to make more feasible the management and maintenance of distributed digital library collections in which authors put material into the library and librarians (collection managers) organize and annotate it for the library patrons. While such "author-based" approaches enable a digital library to grow rapidly, they can create confusion as resources are added, deleted, or changed without warning. In the case of web sites that are pointed to, noticing when those web sites go away, are rehosted, or change their underlying structure is very time consuming. Additionally, when changes are made to the content of the resources, the collection manager must decide if the new version is still suitable for the collection and, if so, whether the document needs to be recategorized. Towards the goal of improving the ability of collection managers to maintain distributed digital libraries this project is developing: i) algorithms and heuristics for identifying resources no longer available; ii) methods for identifying the relocation of resources; iii) methods for categorizing and evaluating the significance of changes to resources; and iv) tools supporting social mechanisms (between resource authors, library managers, and library patrons) to contend with document changes. The project plan includes the evaluation of identification and categorization algorithms based on technical and social metrics. These evaluations answer whether the algorithms correctly identify network and server problems, whether resources that have been moved are successfully located, and whether ratings of significance of change match those of human evaluators.