An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library
Services
Maurizio Calderamo
1
, Simona Ibba
2
, Filippo Eros Pani
2
, Francesco Piras
1
and Simone Porru
2
1
SoSeBi Srl, Via dell' Artigianato, 9, 09122 Cagliari, Italy
{calderamo, piras}@sosebi.it
2
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari,
Piazza d'Armi, 09123 Cagliari, Italy
{simona.ibba, filippo.pani, simone.porru}@diee.unica.it
Abstract. The future scenario in which libraries will work will see an increas-
ing centrality of the Internet and of services provided through it, in order to
meet the needs of physical and virtual users, which remotely access the library.
SoSeBi srl, an innovative company located in Sardinia (Italy), and the Depart-
ment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Dipartimento di Ingegneria
Elettrica ed Elettronica, DIEE) of the University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) in-
tend to create a product at the forefront of the evolution of an ever-expanding
sector, Information Retrieval, where general-purpose products like search en-
gines, digital archives and social networks are competing. These products are,
and will continue to be, a significant presence in our digital lives. Therefore,
the objective of this research project is to create a software that responds to the
users' tastes, that encompasses the Web 2.0 paradigms, and that is in close con-
tact with technology innovation.
1 Introduction
In the last decade, libraries have gone from a heritage mainly made of paper, to a
hybrid one, combining printed resources to multimedia materials of different kinds:
music, audiovisuals, databases, electronic books, audiobooks, websites.
The evolution towards digital libraries, where reference services and loan of digi-
tal content can take place, is one of the means needed to meet the current and future
needs of the citizens, more and more used to peruse digital contents of various types
[1]; [2]. An especially important branch of the digital content area is eBooks, which
have become increasingly widespread in Italy since the end of 2010. Despite the still
small percentages compared to the paper book market, it is going to become a new
reading support in the future. eBook is meant to represent the textual work, while the
device used to read it is a different, separate topic. Currently, technology offers sev-
eral types of eBook readers (called e-readers), from new-generation mobile phones
(smartphones) to tablets (for example, the iPad), to readers specifically thought and
designed with this purpose, among which Amazon Kindle is the most prominent
example. An increasing number of Italian libraries is developing the need to provide
reference and loan services for eBooks.
Piras F., Ibba S., Calderamo M., Pani F. and Porru S.
An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library Services.
DOI: 10.5220/0006156300030013
In European Project Space on Computational Intelligence, Knowledge Discovery and Systems Engineering for Health and Sports (EPS Rome 2014), pages 3-13
ISBN: 978-989-758-154-0
Copyright
c
2014 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
3
The presented project, financed by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia with Eu-
ropean funds (Single Programming Document 2007-2013 - P.O. FESR 2007-2013 –
Line of Activity 6.2.2.d – Interventions to support competitiveness and innovation,
under the Regional Committee Resolution no. 33/41 of 08/08/2013), has the aim of
implementing a Web-based application geared towards bibliographic cataloging and
reference services in libraries, with innovative functions of semantic search, man-
agement of digital contents and the creation of a social network. The proponents also
intend to cover the study of future interaction methods among libraries, eBooks, and
eReaders.
The creation of the Web application will stem from the strategic partnership be-
tween SoSeBi Srl
1
and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
(DIEE)
2
of the University of Cagliari. The purpose of this choice to use the results of
fundamental research as well as of industrial research to elaborate an innovative pro-
totype, unique in the domestic market for its features.
The software prototype is designed to have a high-flexibility modular architecture.
In this way, the different functions can be independent, and not hinder the essential
core of the management program in their development. The new software product
aims to be a reference point in the Italian market of management software for librar-
ies, in terms of innovation and completeness of integrated functions. A new-
generation application will be created, with an innovative vision on the very concept
of “automation program for libraries”. The application will become a precursor to a
general development trend for this type of software, anticipating and seizing the op-
portunities in the market in the coming years.
This paper is structured as follows: the second section describes the context in
which the proposed project lies, while the section following it describes activities and
objectives in detail. In the fourth section, the schedule of the project is outlined, espe-
cially concerning the activity of digital content management. The last section hosts
our final observations about the project.
2 Context of Research Proposal
Hundreds of thousands of libraries exist throughout the world, of varied sizes and
types. The libraries of Italy are estimated to be between 25,000 and 30,000, and the
main ones (around 16,000) have a profile in the Italian Libraries Database (Anagrafe
delle Biblioteche Italiane, AIB)
3
of the Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of
Italian Libraries (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico, ICCU)
4
. The collection and
verification of the data is continuous, also thanks to contributions by Regional gov-
ernments, Universities, organizations and cultural institutions that work with ICCU.
Currently, those 16,000 public libraries (of which 52% belong to local organiza-
tions) provide basic services, also called “public reading”, that have gradually grown
and become a well-received reference point for thousands of citizens, together with
other established public services. Thanks to innovation and automation, many of
1
SoSeBi. srl, http://www.sosebi.it/.
2
DIEE, University of Cagliari, http://dipartimenti.unica.it/ingegneriaelettricaedelettronica/
3
AIB, http://anagrafe.iccu.sbn.it
4
ICCU, http://www.iccu.sbn.it
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those libraries now offer their services through the Internet, for example as remote
support or online, digitized versions of part of their collections. The most widespread
and important of those services is the free browsing of the Online Public Access
Catalog (OPAC)
5
.
The Italian IT companies in this sector that market products and services, and that
also produce and supply certified applications to be used in the library network of the
National Library Service (Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale, SBN)
6
, managed by
ICCU with agreements with the Regional governments, are only 15 in number.
As regards the investments in the library sector, according to a nationwide analy-
sis, it is noteworthy to mention that investments in general, thus including those per-
taining to automation, have dwindled lately due to the economic-financial crisis.
In Italy, the presence of SBN strongly affects figures and features of the market.
The adoption of the SBNMARC
7
protocol has, in fact, forced the companies that
wanted to keep being competitive to pursue that direction in their development. The
tendency of many public institutions (especially at the regional level, subsequently
involving local organizations) was to adhere to SBN, since the communication func-
tion is becoming a vital aspect for any software aimed to succeed in Italy
The technological evolution of the current software systems suffered from a slow-
er “innovation pace”, due to the low margins offered by the market. Currently, the
market is in a phase of “almost-maturity” in technology.
The most important aspect addressed recently is the integration of the information
from catalogs in libraries with the information directly available on the Internet. The
development now is focused on OPAC, and, more generally speaking, on the search
tools available now, in comparison with all-purpose search engines used on the Inter-
net (starting, obviously, from Google).
The solutions are many, but they all tend to take into account several needs. On
the one hand, the need to expand and widen the information that can be searched
(enrichment, federated search, access to databases); on the other hand, the presenta-
tion, that borrows typical systems of the Internet (tag cloud, conceptual associations,
users' comments, and so on). They follow two tendencies, sometimes coexisting: the
creation of portals and collections (usually customizable) of resources that crowd one
page, and the proposal of a very lean and simple, Google-like, interface. As it had
begun to happen in the early years of the World Wide Web, some international pro-
ducers became specialized in building tools that complement or overlap with the
actual OPAC, and promote those tools as solutions that can be adopted even by users
of other systems, as third-party products. Furthermore, the high specialization and
specificity of library standards are a significant technology barrier to the entry of new
competitors.
3 Description of Research Project
The proposed project is a software devised for the net, entirely web-based, with the
5
OPAC, http://opac.sbn.it
6
SBN, http://www.sbn.it
7
SBNMARC, http://www.iccu.sbn.it/opencms/opencms/it/main/sbn/evoluz_indice_sbn/pagina_147.html
5
An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library Services
5
management of all data outsourced in the SoSeBi server infrastructure. It will be
supplied to users as a service (Software as a Service, SaaS), according to the increas-
ingly widespread method among IT services that lets the customer be in the position
of using the software without having to deal with what is “behind” it. The customer
will access the platform in the same way they access a website, using a simple brows-
ing program, and all the data they will enter and the related elaboration received will
be handled by SoSeBi through an advanced company technological infrastructure.
The technology used for the software part of the server will be Microsoft's .NET
framework, the ASP.NET language on Windows Server platform. Hardware-wise, a
cutting-edge server will be used as the base technology, with an Intel multiprocessor
and a large quantity of dedicated RAM, combined with a data redundancy system
(discs in RAID 1 configuration and backup on external unit). Using this technology,
it will be possible to switch to a more powerful infrastructure at a specialized national
supplier. Internet connectivity will be of a 2 Mbit/second guaranteed minimum band,
which could scale up to 100 Mbit/second on demand.
Regarding product innovation, the objective is to merge four fundamental aspects
in one software. These aspects are expected to have a large development in the future.
1. Management of documents according to library science;
2. Management of digital contents and related access rights;
3. Social network;
4. Semantic search into electronic documents.
Some of those aspects, like the digital content management and semantics, have just
become a part of citizens' habits. This can pave the way for new scenarios in terms of
behavior and use of those technological tools.
The first distinctive feature will be the homogeneous integration of the four as-
pects stated above, called macro-functions. The dialogue method among the four
macro-functions will be innovative, and allow, for example, to integrate the tradition-
al library accuracy with Web 2.0 trends, namely reviews and tagging of books, and
social relations between users and libraries.
In particular, each macro-function will have the following functions.
1. Management of documents according to library science. Careful management of
bibliographic information according to library science standards and national in-
dustry rules. Certification of the application at Level 4 of the SBN dialogue proto-
col released by ICCU.
2. Management of digital content and related access rights. Integration with multi-
media content management platform, with eBooks, audiobooks, digital audiovisu-
als, images, digitized content. Their management includes a description of their
content, search, and viewing, also in streaming for audiovisuals. Access to con-
tents is regulated at the source by a copyright and Digital Rights Management
(DRM) control system, so that the legal and commercial boundaries established by
the publisher will be respected.
3. Social Network. Creation of a network of potential social relations among the
various actors allowed the use of the software: libraries and readers. The main
reason for the social network is the sharing of an interest in books, expressed in
different ways by the participants, where libraries showcase their catalogs, users
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comment and vote books. A functional ecosystem centered on books, where social
relations can be built and expressed, giving added value to the traditional catalog
search of a library.
4. Semantic search in electronic documents. Integration of a language analysis en-
gine (morphology, grammar, logic), and semantic disambiguation of texts. Use of
a semantic network made primarily of a thesaurus of concepts and relations that
would provide a conceptual representation of the language. Automatic categoriza-
tion of documents, interpreting their content, in certain categories. Extraction of
data from indexed texts, with normalization and transformation in metadata.
The activities covered in the project were anticipated by a feasibility study in order to
analyze the information needs related to the project, which was generally defined
during its planning stage. Among the objectives of the study were the following.
1. Find one or more architecture solutions related to the applications, the technolo-
gies and organizational solutions;
2. Propose technical-organizational solutions;
3. Provide the management with enough evaluation tools to decide on the operative
completion of the project.
3.1 Project Subdivision
The project covers a number of operation stages. Every stage of the working plan is
organized in Work Packages (WP), parallel phases in which operation objects are
reached with work group activity, through the production of expected Results and
Products and the application of a specific Methodology. The WP included in the
projects are six:
1. System Architecture
2. Content Management
3. Social Network
4. Semantic Engine
5. Fundamental Research
6. Experimentation
Below is a brief description of each phase in the development of the project.
3.1.1 System Architecture
The future scenario in which libraries will have to work will be analyzed. That sce-
nario will see an increasing centrality of the Internet and its digital services to meet
the needs of both physical users and virtual users, who access the library remotely.
Although several software development models exist, we chose to perform a
SWOT analysis limited to the Spiral and Agile [3] models, as major representatives –
in software engineering – of iterative methodologies and, especially in the latter case,
modern ones. The methodology will therefore be the Agile development model, since
it is more in tune with the new demands of the market/customers.
The architecture will have to possess a high flexibility, and will have to be able to
7
An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library Services
7
incorporate advanced functions, resulted from research, in a modular and incremental
way (for example, an evaluation of the adequacy of federated or plug-in based solu-
tions could be useful).
3.1.2 Content Management
An interesting topic to study in this field is certainly the management of the metadata
associated with multimedia objects. In this field, a significant role is given to ontolo-
gies, which define a formal, shared, and explicit representation of a conceptualization
of any knowledge area. They are powerful tools to describe the entities of any do-
main, and the relations among them. Consistently with this view, it is necessary to
guarantee an appropriate management of the semantics of metadata, so that the same
entities, properties, and relations of the domain with which the system interacts are
denoted.
The guiding purpose of this study lies in the definition of the semantics of metada-
ta associated to multimedia contents by using an ontology. In particular, it is neces-
sary to consider the possibility of defining specific ontologies for the domain of inter-
est in an automatic or semi-automatic way. Alternatively, given an existing ontology,
for example manually written by domain experts, the possibility of expanding that
ontology with new metadata automatically extracted from a known set of multimedia
documents can be considered.
3.1.3 Social Network
The functionality of the Social Network module must be defined taking into account
the dialogue between readers and libraries, introducing the well-established tools of
library tradition into the Web 2.0: OPAC, loans, reference. It is necessary to improve
the dialogue between libraries and their users, providing an innovative service, which
will bring them into closer contact with the libraries, thanks to the Web 2.0. The idea
is to target Web users that not necessarily are also users of one of the libraries in the
network. They would be able to sign up to use the social function and communicate
on the Internet, sharing their taste and preferences; they could eventually become
users of a library, after having come into contact with its services through the social
network.
This macro-function is meant to bring forth a social evolution of the traditional
online catalogs, shifting the focus on the customers' views and their expectation in
terms of Web 2.0.
3.1.4 Semantic Engine
Semantic search is a field where many studies are focusing, considering the enormous
and ever-increasing volume of documents currently available (especially digital doc-
uments). Academic research in this field will be fundamental, because semantics is
still a young science, with a strong connection to Information Technology, and which
takes part to a heated debate with semantic Web. It will thus be necessary to develop
a precise outlook to understand what will become of the dialogue between semantics
of libraries and semantics of the Web. These two aspects, in fact, are going to become
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more and more interconnected in the future, given the increasingly faint line between
owned documents and accessible documents on the Web.
3.1.5 Fundamental Research
This phase will encompass all the activities at the DIEE of the University of Cagliari
oriented to fundamental research:
1. the definition and study of a metadata ontology for multimedia objects;
2. the definition and study of graph analysis techniques applicable to Social Net-
work;
3. the definition and study of recommendation techniques on Social Network;
4. the analysis and study of techniques and models of semantic analysis;
5. semantic classification from available information coming from thesauri, subject
indexes, summaries, and classifications.
The applied research will be based on the methodological results of this research,
guaranteeing innovative functions of the product..
3.1.6 Experimentation
The technical activities related to the creation of the software prototype will be veri-
fied and validated appropriately, regarding both code and execution. The verification
plan will be connected to the definition of software requirements according to the
Agile Methodologies. The draft of the validation plan will aim to allow the verifica-
tion of product requirements along the entire design phase. Once the whole system is
broken down into different modules, three test phases will be performed:
1. module test, to test the components of each module and verify the communication
of components belonging to the same module;
2. integration test, to test the integration and interaction mechanisms between each
module;
3. system test, to test the whole system and come to an acceptance test of the final
prototype.
4 Project Schedule
The project officially began on March 6, 2013, and its conclusion is estimated to be
on March 5, 2016. Currently, the prototype covered in the project is in its implemen-
tation phase.
Among the activities performed up to now, special attention was paid to the the
management of metadata associated to multimedia objects, leading to the definition of
a taxonomy of metadata for the representation of multimedia objects managed by a
digital library.
The approach we followed included the application of 3 distinct phases. The first
phase consisted of the analysis of metadata standards used as a reference to represent
information associated to multimedia content. In order to cover the reference domain,
9
An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library Services
9
made of multimedia objects of interest in a library sector, metadata standards that
allow the best and most complete description are used [4][5][6]: the choice fell on
the Dublin Core [7][8], XMP [9] e MAG [10] standards. The first provides a general
description that can refer to content of any kind (a feature that helped its large scale
usage); XMP focuses on more accurate and peculiar characteristics to multimedia
content, such as audio and video content, other than images, for which it uses Exif
metadata (specialized in digital images) [11]; MAG, instead, is an application profile
that, included in our taxonomy, allows to communicate with the Internet Culturale
portal without interoperability problems. The portal, in fact, uses MAG for the repre-
sentation of its contents. The data sheets of the Italian Central Institute for Catalogu-
ing and Documentation (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione,
ICCD
8
) offer the opportunity to perform a mapping between the metadata in our tax-
onomy and the PICO application profile used by the portal Cultura Italia, thus in-
creasing the interoperability of the system [12].
We also chose to consider some tags for the management of User-Generated Con-
tent (UGC) [13]. Those standard are often complementary, covering information that
they could not represent singularly, and sometimes redundant: in that case, a direct
mapping was performed.
As regards the second phase, a study on the resources to represent was carried out,
using the following sites as reference: Europeana
9
, Internet Culturale
10
, Cultura Ita-
lia
11
, Internet Archive
12
, Open Library
13
, and Project Gutenberg
14
.
The third phase involved comparing metadata taken from the standards analyzed
during the first phase with the data collected during the second phase. The purpose of
the comparison was to verify whether all the characteristics studied during the second
phase were represented by the metadata retrieved during the first phase.
Moreover, we studied how to enrich the available metadata in order to manage
some often neglected aspects, through a new study on the objects available at the
Mediateca del Mediterraneo (MEM)
15
of Cagliari, and through the study of the
copyleft licenses Creative Commons
16
and Copyzero X
17
. Topics such as the com-
pleteness of information on eBooks, the identification of documents as belonging to
gray literature, and the management of rights on the cataloged resources were ad-
dressed.
Thanks to the adoption of the MAG application profile, the taxonomy guarantees
the interoperability with the portal Internet Culturale, that grants access to the wealth
of public libraries and prestigious Italian cultural institutions. The presence of the DC
standard allows also to be Open Archive Initiative (OAI)-compliant, with the oppor-
tunity to exploit the interoperability protocol Open Archive Initiative Protocol for
8
ICCD, http://www.iccd.beniculturali.it
9
Europeana, http://labs.europeana.eu
10
Internet Culturale, http://www.internetculturale.it
11
Cultura Italia, http://www.culturaitalia.it
12
Internet Archive, https://archive.org
13
Open Library, https://openlibrary.org
14
Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org
15
MEM, http://www.comune.cagliari.it/portale/it/studisardi.wp
16
Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/
17
CopyZero X, http://www.costozero.org/wai/copy0.html
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Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [14], and ensuring the communication with another
important portal, Cultura Italia.
Fig. 1. The resulting metadata taxonomy.
The information network with which the system adopting the taxonomy will be
able to interface, and the set of metadata studied to cover the general, main infor-
mation and the specific information of multimedia content, will make its use suited to
a digital library aspiring to modernity. Such a library would become able to manage
often neglected pieces of information (gray literature, UGC, management and repre-
sentation of rights on the resource), and could become part of an information and
cooperation network with the most important cultural portals of Italy.
5 Conclusion and Prospects
This project is coherent with the strategic objective of the regional planning in Sar-
dinia, since it aims to implement innovative methods of the ICT sector in the library
industry, and it complies with the objectives described in the Regional Strategic Doc-
ument (Documento Strategico Regionale, DSR) 2007-2013
18
for Sardinia, which
states the necessity of promoting the adoption of ICT in order to fill the gap that
makes Sardinia less competitive in innovation, although the region stood out in Italy
for having started innovative initiatives ahead of its time, marking a sharp passage
from a traditional economy to an innovative economy, based on knowledge and inno-
18
Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Documento Strategico Regionale (DSR) 2007-2013,
http://www.regione.sardegna.it/j/v/17?&s=1&v=9&c=4756&na=1&n=10
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An Innovative Web Application for Advanced Library Services
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vation. The project is meant to become a part, albeit small, of the context of the com-
petitiveness of Sardinian companies, with its purpose to create a software for the
automation of cultural services.
The Italian production system is characterized by a high volume of very small-
sized companies in every sector, which work outside cooperation agreements or net-
works. This structural characteristic does not allow these companies to compete on
the markets of goods where price, which comes from production costs, is the main
factor to acquire and maintain market shares.
The limited availability of funding will strongly affect any new investments made
by libraries in goods and services, and will force them to question the worth of main-
taining current services, including computer-based services and the automation of
bibliographic catalogs. The market prospects regarding this particular aspect, that is
the reduction of management costs of technical services, could be favorable for those
companies that are committed to creating and supplying more effective software,
more competitive in terms of price, and technical support services that would help
institutions to save on service cost keeping the same or a higher quality level.
As regards the demand, the product to be created is clearly geared towards a target
of customers that have already completed the first steps in service automation, thus it
has to meet the needs of a well informed user base with high expectations in terms of
performance of management systems.
A new product with the features described in the previous sections has great mar-
ket prospects, especially in Northern Italy, where the demand for innovative products
is stronger and where more libraries, more resources, and more well-established co-
operation networks among organizations are located, to provide advanced services to
the citizen.
Acknowledgements. Simone Porru gratefully acknowledges Sardinia Regional Gov-
ernment for the financial support of his PhD scholarship (P.O.R. Sardegna F.S.E.
Operational Programme of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, European Social
Fund 2007-2013 Axis IV Human Resources, Objective l.3, Line of Activity l.3.1).
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