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Flexible design for simple digital library tools and services

Published: 07 October 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The design of Digital Library Systems (DLSes) has evolved over time, both in sophistication and complexity, to complement the complex nature and sheer size of digital content being curated. However, there is also a growing demand from content curators, with relatively small-size collections, for simpler and more manageable tools and services for managing content. The reasons for this particular need are driven by the assumption that simplicity and manageability might ultimately translate to lower costs of maintenance of such systems. This paper builds on previous work in order to assess the flexible nature of the proposed design approach ---the explicit adoption of a minimalistic approach to the overall design of DLSes. A two-axis evaluation strategy was used to assess this proposed solution: a developer-oriented survey assessed the flexibility and simplicity; and a series of performance benchmarks were conducted to assess the scalability. In general, the study outlined some possible implications of simplifying DLS design; specifically the results from the developer-oriented user study indicate that simplicity in the design of the DLS repository sub-layer does not severely impact the interaction between the service sub-layer and the repository sub-layer. Furthermore, the scalability experiments indicate that desirable performance results for small- and medium-sized collections are attainable.

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SAICSIT '13: Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference
October 2013
398 pages
ISBN:9781450321129
DOI:10.1145/2513456
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 October 2013

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Author Tags

  1. DSpace
  2. digital libraries
  3. minimalism
  4. simplicity

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SAICSIT '13
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  • Amazon
  • Rhodes Univ.
  • IBM

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SAICSIT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 89 submissions, 54%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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