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Funding for the development of the Alexandria Digital Library middleware and the ADEPT Virtual Learning Environment, under the NSF DLI2 initiative, has now ended. Future support for enhancement and dissemination of the operational library infrastructure will be provided by the Davidson Library UCSB. ADL technology will be the starting point for designing a distributed geospatial library network funded by the Library of Congress Digital Preservation Initiative. Please see www.ngda.org for more information.
However, the educational evaluation component of the DLI2 project continues into 2005, and further work on the ADEPT software and its broader deployment are under way via a joint U.S. (NSF) and U.K. (JISC) funded project: DialogPlus - Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Learning and Teaching in Geography.
The ADL Cataloging tools consist of the Text Cataloger tool and the Geospatial Data tool. The Text Cataloger provides an input form that makes it easy to create textual and geospatial item-level metadata about library objects. The Geospatial Data tool generates the geospatial coordinates of a geographic area, which you specify by drawing a bounding box on a map.
The Text Cataloger tool is connected to a MySQL database. The Geospatial Data tool is connected to a Postgres database. The collection of library objects are hosted on a server. The following example workflow shows how these tools can be used.
Example Workflow
This example workflow describes steps a professor would follow to scan slides, create item-level metadata, and input geospatial coordinates suitable for ingesting the collection into ADL.
- Create the archival tiff
image by scanning the slide.
The tiff image is large (10.5 mb in this case) but is a lossless format. - Create jpeg
versions of the tiff image.
You need to create full, thumb and browse jpeg images. The full jpeg version is smaller than the tiff (248 kb in this case), and is suitable to use on web pages or in PowerPoint presentations. The thumb is 128 pixels and the browse is 512 pixels. - Annotate the image by creating an SVG
layer (optional). This requires Adobe's
SVG viewer.
You can create the SVG layer using Adobe Illustrator 10.0. The annotation layer is stored in a separate svg file. - Upload the images to the server.
- Input initial metadata into the Text Cataloger tool.
- Input the geospatial coordinates of the image into
the database using the
Geospatial Data tool.
The Text Cataloger tool has a button to launch the Geospatial Data tool but you must be in edit mode.
