Digital Libraries Based on Full-Text Retrieval.
Ian H. Witten, Craig G. Nevill-Manning, Sally Jo Cunningham · 1996
: Because digital libraries are expensive to create and maintain, Internet analogs of public libraries---reliable, quality, community services---have only recently begun to appear. A serious obstacle to their creation is the provision of appropriate cataloguing information. Without a database of titles, authors and subjects, it is hard to offer the searching and browsing facilities normally available in physical libraries. Full-text retrieval provides a way of approximating these services without a concomitant investment of human resources. This presentation will discuss the indexing, collection and maintenance processes, and the retrieval interface, to public digital libraries. Creating a publicly-available digital library presents some interesting challenges, particularly if the library is intended for serious professional work rather than casual browsing. First, the raw material: the collection must comprise text that can be placed in the public domain. Second, the selection of mate...