CIDE (2007) Doumat
Online ancient documents in European national libraries, a survey
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Sommaire
.Résumé : Dans ce papier nous présentons notre étude des sites web de 45 pays Européens. Nous participons à un projet qui vise la mise en ligne des trésors du musée de la ville d’Alep en Syrie. Ce musé dispose de manuscrits, sculptures et des documents audiovisuels. Afin de pouvoir définir les critères et le cahier des charges pour ce projet nous avons décidé d’étudier ce qui se fait en Europe dans ce domaine.
- Keywords
- digital libraries, national libraries, online archives, comparison, survey
- Abstract
- In this paper we present our survey of the websites of 45 European countries. We focus our study on the availability of online digitalized ancient documents. We are working on the on line publication of digital reproductions of the treasures of Aleppo city museum in Syria. The objects have many types and their digitized reproductions cover a large range of media types (images, text, sounds, and video). In order to be able to put down the major guidelines of our system we decided to study the web pages of the European national libraries.
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Introduction
A large quantity of precious historical, cultural, and modern information exist in libraries, thus, to protect these cultural and historical treasures from being lost, and to make the whole information available to the public, they have to be put on the Internet. For that reason, many libraries have made web sites to publish digitalized books, images about rare books, facsimiles of the manuscripts and valuable pictures; or about historic sound and video registrations besides the books, periodicals and other documents. Nowadays millions of objects are being made available to the general public that were once only the province of the highly trained researcher. Students and researchers have unprecedented access to illuminated manuscripts, art, music sheets, photographs, architectural drawings, ethnographic case studies, historical voices, video, and a lot of other rich and varied resources in a digital form. Perseus Project [15] concentrates on digitizing the cultural heritage of Greco-Roman collections because they become more valuable as the past recedes. Accessing documents through the websites is often more simple and rapid than searching them in the library’s building. As [17] state, the issues of a digital library (DL) are as well preservation as access, outlined a framework for the development of digital libraries by proposing that DLs need to move beyond the “paper-based metaphors” that privilege the finding and viewing of documents to support new ways of doing intellectual work .Websites frameworks allow to expose digital images of rare and old protected documents that are not available as originals for the public, for instance users now can turn pages of ancient manuscripts in a realistic way (Figure 1 http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp2.html).
The emergence of the World Wide Web has given the opportunity to libraries, museums, universities, national or international projects, and other organizations to make their electronic contents of ancient or recent documents available to a growing number of users (researchers, humanists, scholars…) on the Web.
We are working on the on line publication of digital reproductions of the treasures of Aleppo city museum in Syria. The objects have many types and their digitized reproductions cover a large range of media types (images, text, sounds, and video). In order to be able to put down the major guidelines of our system we decided to study the web pages of the European national libraries. We choose these sites in order to have a representative and finite set of online libraries.
While access to online resources was greatly improved in the last decade, online archive and digital libraries are still remaining difficult to be used, particularly for students and beginner users [17], [11]. In [18], the authors work on building an information context around digital library resources and services; they aim at integrating the user participation in the creation of this context to facilitate information retrieval.
How we studied the websites
Many studies were done on web sites in general to evaluate them and put criteria for the best performance and usage. Some of them concern the libraries themselves: [10] publishes results online when comparing libraries in the USA depending on their geographical locations, sizes of their collection, services, organizational characteristics and other options.Others study the online digital libraries focusing on their ergonomics and technological solutions. In [14] authors propose three features to characterize a successful digital library design (finer granularity of collection objects, automated processes, and decentralized user contributions).
There are a lot of studies on web page usability; in general web sites’ quality depends on many criteria [1]:
- -Usefulness: the user waits that the site furnish him the services that he needs
- -Legibility: the pages have to be clear, easy to be understood and to be downloaded
- -Navigation: the site structure must be adapted to the logic of the user depending on his needs, and not on the internal organization of the data on line
- -Objectivity: the information have to be presented without marketing effects, and have to be exploited functionally
- -Reactivity: the user needs to get the information quickly, in order not to waste his time
For all these reasons, many ergonomic metrics were founded to evaluate the websites and to overcome their problems, in order to help the users to get what they want rapidly. The ergonomic evaluation consists of testing the website components to fix the usability problems; there are different criteria for the evaluation (Gary Perlman [8], Dominique Scapin [5], and ISO Metrics [1]). In the same concept, the following checklist, from IBM Web Design guidelines [9], allows to identify the main usability problems of a web site:
- -Is the purpose of the site clear?
- -Does the site clearly address a particular audience?
- -Is the site useful and relevant to its audience (public)?
- -Is the site interesting and engaging?
- -Does the site enable users to accomplish all the tasks they want or need to accomplish?
- -Can the users accomplish their tasks easily?
- -Does the information (content) and the order in which it is presented (organization) suite the purpose?
- -Is the important information easy to find?
- -Is all information clear, easy to understand and easy to read?
- -Do you always know where you are, or how to get where you want to go?
- -Is the presentation attractive?
- -Do the pages load quickly enough?
All these metrics centered on the agronomy of the websites in general, whereas in [19], the author posed some suggestions of how digital libraries should be designed from user’s perspective. Digital libraries should be able to offer users rapid information search, the access to important features of the original media, the interaction with other users or librarians, the ability to share and annotate documents and to support collaborative knowledge exchange and emergence.
Our study focuses on the online digital documents that are available on the European national libraries’ sites and the services around them. And we are especially interested in the digital archive that represents the cultural heritage, more than the digital libraries of recent documents. For this reason we have grouped the previous criteria about the digital library design, Websites’ quality, and ergonomic metrics together, we have used some of them and proposed others, to obtain the following list of our proper criteria:
- What are the main objectives of the website?
- Is the site presented in different languages versions?
- How many online documents are available?
- What types of media have been digitized (manuscripts, tapes, sculptures…) and how they are been presented on the websites (text, images, videos)?
- Financial model of the site (free, payment based)?
- Different user profiles?
- Does the site permit users to personalize the obtained information?
- Does the site offer a discussion space between users or between users and librarians?
- Does the site provide assistance (real time hints, expert contact, and chat with a librarian …)?
- Does the site contain search tools?
- Does the site include thesauri?
- Does the site provide image annotation tools?
- Are the site interfaces clear and do they care about the different users’ types?
- Are site creation date and pages updating date obvious?
The elements of this list will be detailed in the following sections. We apply these criteria on the websites of the national libraries of the European countries to measure their performance and their usage facility.
Studied European libraries
In our work, we gathered a list of 45 websites of European national libraries we organized these sites in an alphabetical order in the (Table 1). All these sites were visited in January 2007. [[Fichier:CIDE 10 Doumat1.png|600px|thumb|center|Table 1: European national libraries websites]
The survey
In this section we present the results of the evaluation:
Site objectives
We can summarize sites’ objectives in: “Registration, protection and access to national electronic resources on the Internet”
Several countries are creating their own digital national archives to ensure the preservation of contents of historical relevance to their cultures. In addition, libraries aim to provide information about the country printed publication, and about the publication that printed abroad in the country language, the works that are translated to other languages, and the publications about the country in foreign languages.
Besides offering information about their collections, the sites work also to adapt many services to the needs of the users: like ordering items from the library (documents copies, micro films…).
Languages
The adaptation of the site pages to native language and to other languages for the foreign audience is one of the important quality indicators of websites. According to our work, we couldn’t understand the contents of many sites, because they were presented in just the country language, which is not well known like (Slovak, Romanian, Moldavian, Croatian, Portuguese…). Fortunately most of the sites are presented in more than one language, however, we noticed that some of them don’t furnish the same information in the different versions of the website; usually the national language version includes more information, for example, the National library of France[[[Table 1]]{13}].
Moreover, we realized that lot of sites needs management for their Multilanguage; for instance, many sites have English version but the research tools and other information are in the original language; as the sites of (Austria [[[Table 1]]{3}], Belarus{4}, France{13}, Germany{14}, Hungary{16}, Italy{19}, Norway{30}, Serbia{36}, Slovenia{37}, Spain{39}, and Vatican City{45}).
The English has great importance and it is the dominant language in the websites that we had studied; we noticed that 80% of the sites use it as first or second language. For the other languages, 16% of the websites contain a French version, and a weak percentage of 1% for the Russian, German, Spanish, and Italian languages. Figure 2 represents percentages of websites’ languages of the analyzed European international libraries sites.
