Abstract:

Digital libraries (DL) are powerful and efficient tools for content management (acquisition, storage, indexing, access, and maintenance), content enrichment, and structuring, as well as effective content search, filtering, and dissemination. Their rise over the past decade has given researchers and readers more opportunities to access, manage and organize the data they research or study. In this paper we present a technological solution that supports the National Library “Ivan Vazov” – Plovdiv in online storage, retrieval, curation, and observation of its valuable cultural and historical artifacts. The National Library “Ivan Vazov” – Plovdiv is the second largest library in Bulgaria and serves as the second national repository for Bulgarian literature. It holds a valuable and unique collection of books and periodicals, a historical archive, a rich repository of manuscripts and Revival literature, unique collections of rare and valuable publications.

The prototype produced to manage the digital collections of the National Library “Ivan Vazov” – Plovdiv is a web-based software environment and includes not only basic modules such as a metadata management and presentation functional module (incl. specific services), a metadata model management module, administrative services, linked to the media repositories, and a user data repository, but also specific services, i.e. advanced search applied simultaneously in the metadata and the digital objects’ content; selection of library units through ordered or alphabetic lists or calendars; access to the environment through different devices, etc.

A very specific aspect of the platform’s search function is that it must take into account the peculiarities of optical character recognition (OCR) applied to Cyrillic texts. Most of the digitized materials, those of high cultural and historical value and expired copyright, are predominantly from the period before the Bulgarian language’s last Orthographic Reform of 1945, which poses a number of problems to the accuracy of OCR and which the platform’s search algorithm must take into account in order to achieve results as accurate as possible.

The paper presents the descriptive structures for different objects used. Our focus is on the library users’ flexible and efficient access to multimedia representations of cultural and historical artifacts, the support of rich functionality for content interaction and real-time adaptable and interactive end user centric visualization and its learning needs. In this study we demonstrate the power of intelligent content curation and context-based DL content usage for research and e-learning.

Keywords:

Digital Library, Intelligent Content Curation, Context-based Content Usage, Research and e-learning.