The Next Generation Electronic Library – Capturing the Experience

Abstract

The first wave of digital library research and implementation had to do with advancing the infrastructure for organizing and accessing the vast stores of archival and emerging information abundant in all media (text, image and video). Current research ambitions relate to the application of cognitive technologies for extracting the information content from within the linear media (e.g., the quotation from a book, the crescendos of a symphony, the underwater scenes within a movie, the clip from last night’s TV news) and indexing it for subsequent fullcontent search and retrieval. Information accessibility is increasing through interoperability of resources and information content is growing through contemporaneous indexing and incorporation of content as it is created. Automated subject identification and classification techniques for the sub-documents will evolve to improve browsing by subject over searching by keyword. Natural language technology will be applied to comparison of retrieved documents so that duplication of content is eliminated or minimized in the resultant set, when desired.