Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
content. For example, the British Library's newspaper digitization
programme has created a fantastic resource which, by the end of 2009,
should be presenting nearly four million pages to the higher and further
educational community and around two million pages to the general
public.
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Yet not only are the URLs that define each newspaper page
lengthy and difficult to copy and paste, they alter according to the
university or college from where the user hails. Thus, if a lecturer from
the University of A wishes to send a reference to a news page to a
colleague at B College, he has no immediate way of doing so.
Breaking down boundaries and locating new users
Perhaps more importantly, floating, unstable URLs disrupt the process
by which search engines analyse and index individual web pages. Since
the majority of users will search for content not by typing a URL in the
address bar, but by entering a couple of search terms in Google,
blocking search engine access constitutes a wasted opportunity to assist
the discovery of a resource.
With sufficient technical planning, problems such as those cited
above can be avoided. A more fundamental problem involves the
sharing and cross-searching of related digitized resources that exist in
different places. For nearly any topic one might choose, one can find
numerous digitized resources of relevance scattered across the internet.
A good example is posters relating to World Wars 1 and 2. Posters
are an obvious target for digitization, given their fragility, manifest
visual appeal and historical importance as primary sources. A significant
number of cultural institutions have therefore initiated projects that
have included the capture of posters in their collections. Among them
are the Imperial War Museum, the University of Minnesota, the
University of Oxford, McGill University, the University of Washington
and many, many more.
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Yet there is no convenient way to search across
all these collections of posters; indeed, many users may not even know
of the existence of these digital collections. Take any other area, such as
medieval manuscripts, early photography, documentary films,
architectural drawings: painstaking trawling via Google will identify a
sprawling archipelago of thematically related digital content.
This is not a new problem. There have been numerous efforts to solve
the conceptual issues in bringing together such rich content, often
