Susanna Hall Information Retrieval System Analysis IST 616: Information Resources: Organization & Access Syracuse University School of Information StudiesAugust, 2011

The World Digital Library: http://www.wdl.org/

Contents:

What is the WDL?....................................................................................................... page 1The Digital Library Movement............................................................................................ 2Mission and Curatorial Vision ............................................................................................. 3Interface Design ................................................................................................................... 5Metadata............................................................................................................................. 12Production Workflow......................................................................................................... 15Usage & Participation Statistics......................................................................................... 16New Directions .................................................................................................................. 17References.......................................................................................................................... 19

What is the WDL?

The World Digital Library (WDL) is a quality-controlled primary source gateway system

publicly launched in April, 2009. It makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in

multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world,

including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs,

architectural drawings, and other historical cultural materials (“historical treasures”). The WDL

has been developed by the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by 59 partner institutions

in 36 countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private

foundations (including $3 million from Google). Based in Washington, D.C. It is intended for

use by educators, students, scholars, and a general audience. As of this writing, the WDL has a

total of 2,449 items in its collection, with its largest collections originating from three geographic

areas: Europe (1,116), Middle East and North Africa (524), and Latin America and the Caribbean

(337).

The Digital Library Movement

Digital libraries are popping up all over the world as libraries and cultural institutions use

new technologies to make their collections available to researchers, educators, and the general

public and to preserve valuable historical and cultural resources for future generations. It is an

incredible concept--the world’s treasures, in various multimedia formats, freely available online

to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Since the early nineties (using CD-ROMS

and, later, the Internet), hundreds of initiatives have been developed, launched, and maintained.

Institutions have had to establish new technical, metadata, and preservation procedures, resolve

copyright, public domain, and intellectual property issues, institutionalize their digital efforts by

forming consortiums of libraries, museums, universities, and other cultural institutions, and raise

significant funds for their work. The Digital Library Federation (DLF), created in 1995, is the

main organization in this field, with members from nearly fifty major academic libraries (mostly

in the U.S.), the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Public

Library, the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the Library of Alexandria (Egypt). The DLF

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played a significant role in the development of the METS metadata schema for digital library

objects and continues to energize and standardize this field through annual forums.

Many digital libraries are local or regional and housed within universities and major

cultural institutions. Their collections digitize holdings from one (or a few) libraries and make

them available online, although access is often restricted to university affiliates. Others focus

their efforts on providing widespread access to eBooks (Project Gutenberg, the African Digital

Library, and the International Children’s Digital Library). As this movement spreads, digital

libraries that focus on collecting multimedia items from specific global geographical regions are

growing. The Southeast Asia Digital Library, launched in 2005 and housed at Northern Illinois

University, has twenty-two partner institutions in the U.S. and Southeast Asia and offers items in

text, photograph, and video format. The Oceania Digital Library Project out of the University of

Hawai’i at Manoa is smaller, collecting the resources of three university libraries, yet including

text, photograph, video, and sound formats. Two major initiatives of this kind include the U.S.

Library of Congress’ American Memory Project / National Digital Library Program and the

European Commission’s Europeana / Digital Libraries Initiative, which present free access to a

mind-boggling variety of items, such as books, paintings, manuscripts, journals, spoken word

and sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music from their

respective regions.

Mission and Curatorial Vision

Digital library initiatives can have very different missions and curatorial visions. More

“traditional” digital libraries focus on documenting and preserving a collection for scholars and

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researchers; these essentially function as digital institutional repositories and their interfaces and

search functions closely resemble library catalogs. Other digital libraries--like the WDL,

American Memory, and Europeana--are created in order to facilitate discovery for the general

public, so their interface design, partnership building processes, and collection development

policies must all reflect this priority. The World Digital Library’s ambitious humanitarian

mission is to promote international and intercultural understanding, expand the volume and

variety of cultural content on the Internet, and narrow the digital divide between countries (this

last goal is met through helping to create digitization facilities in developing countries). Not only

does the WDL aim to work closely with partner institutions--traditional and nontraditional--all

over the world; it also aims to present its materials in a way so that users can discover and

explore connections between world regions and cultures through their historical treasures.

The curatorial vision of the World Digital Library is unique in that its geographic scope

covers the whole world yet its collection will be highly selective, including only “significant

primary materials” as determined by its partner institutions. This “quality over quantity” curation

process means that this library will contain only items of great importance from nine geographic

areas of the world rather than hundreds of thousands of items from each region. The results will,

in some ways, resemble internationally-curated exhibits at large art museums or thick Norton

anthologies of world literature, although the sheer number of institutional partners at WDL

makes the content selection process significantly more complex than it would be with a smaller

editorial team. The WDL will, in effect, create a digital “canon” of the world’s historical

treasures--some items will be included and valued and others will be excluded and remain

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inaccessible. It is the only digital library online right now that has this particular mission and

scope.

Interface Design

The World Digital Library’s user interface is brilliant and conforms beautifully to its

mission and curatorial vision. The homepage has three user-friendly elements: (1) a navigation

bar with a “home” icon/logo, a language selection bar, a browsing bar, and a basic search bar, (2)

a world map with nine geographical regions labeled with the name of the region, an interactive

image from the collection, and the number of items in the collection originating from that region,

and (3) an interactive timeline slider at the bottom that allows users to broaden or narrow the

timeframe within which they are searching so they can instantly see available items from a time

period in each of the nine geographical regions. (Figure 1).

Figure 1: WDL homepage

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This homepage is uniquely visual, and therefore stimulates a user’s curiosity and appeals

both to a “traditional” (highly literate) user who may prefer a text-based search and to a “non-

traditional” user who may not have a strong education or a high level of literacy or may prefer to

explore / browse the collection through visuals rather than text. This visual design focus is

consistently applied across the site: in the home page, browsing pages, results pages, and item

detail pages. Additionally, enhanced viewing options and state-of-the art zooming capabilities for

every item spark a sense of wonder and allow a user to examine images in startling detail.

Zooming in on these images in “pageturner” view gives one the exhilarating feeling of being in a

library’s archive and holding a book or map close to one’s face in order to examine the most

minute details of an image. The homepage, and the browsing and searching tools throughout the

site, are highly intuitive--they will require little to no instruction for most users who are familiar

with the basics of navigating a web page.

The entire WDL site is also fully multilingual--all navigation, metadata, and descriptive

text on the site can be searched in Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese (the

six official languages of the United Nations), plus Portuguese. The user experience is

“equivalent” no matter which language is chosen--this is not superficial multilingualism. In fact,

subject categories from the Dewey Decimal Classification system were chosen expressly because

the DDC is translatable into these seven languages through OCLC. This design choice has

ensured access for a wide population around the world, and WDL working committees continue

to research the possibilities of adding additional language capabilities to the site.

This interface design directly supports the mission of the World Digital Library--by

offering ease of access to comparative, cross-cultural treasures, the WDL clearly encourages

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users to explore, discover, compare, and build transcultural understanding through primary

source materials. For example, by simply typing “women” in the search bar, users can find and

examine items originating from Iraq (20), United States of America (18), Japan (16), Russian

Federation (7), Brazil (4), Georgia (4), Turkey (4), China (3), United Kingdom of Great Britain

and Northern Ireland (3), Tajikistan (3), Armenia (2), Haiti (2), Indonesia (2), Republic of Korea

(2), Venezuela (2), and twenty-four more countries. This is a fine resource for anyone interested

in comparative world history.

The browse and search functions at the World Digital Library also closely conform to the

WDL mission. In addition to the intuitive navigation bar, results pages have three features that

make browsing simple. First, the navigation bar remains present on every page so users can

quickly “start over” or “switch gears” or languages mid-search. Second, results pages place

breadcrumbs at the top so users can easily see and change the ways they have narrowed or

broadened their search. Third, results pages include a left-hand sidebar column that allows users

to “narrow results” by place, time, topic (DDC subject headings), type of item, or the institution

from which the item originated. The default setting on results pages is visual--a “gallery view”

that shows results, with a thumbnail image and brief descriptive text, in a three-column format

(this can be changed to “list view” for users who prefer text-based browsing). A purple camera

icon shows up when a curator video is available for an item. (Figure 2).

The WDL search bar is intuitive and simple. Exact match searching enables users to find

all items that contain their search word exactly as they spelled it. String searching allows users to

find all items that contain the letters they typed in any part of a word in the item’s description

(“World War II” > toward,“corn” > Cornelius). Predictive text allows for stemming and

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truncation searching--just stop typing after “psych” to view both available options, “psychology”

and “psychologist.” Unfortunately, because the WDL is in its infancy (it’s just over two years old

at this writing), searches may disappoint--a search for “Holocaust” brings up just one result, and

a search for “communism” comes up blank. This will improve as the WDL expands its collection

over time.

Figure 2: Partial results page for search: “women.”

No advanced search option exists at the WDL, which might surprise users who commonly

use advanced search on Google, newspaper websites, library catalogs, and subscription

databases. Though I have not been able to find documentation regarding this decision, I would

hazard a guess that the WDL team made a conscious decision to stick with a simple search

button in order to meet the searching needs of the widest possible constituency of users. The

search function in the WDL functions as an initial gateway--once users get to a results page, they

can narrow or broaden their search in the same ways they would if they had been using an

advanced search bar from the start (by using the “narrow results” bar and the breadcrumbs). If

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they see an item they like and click on it to get to an “item detail” page, they can then click on

any metadata category to find more items: of the same language, by the same author, in the same

time period, in the same collection, etc. These are generally considered to be browsing behaviors,

yet they also function as advanced search behaviors in my mind.

It is fascinating to consider the ways in which searching and browsing behaviors work in

tandem within any given website, catalog, or database. Like many users, I prefer to browse first

in any specialized collection in order to get my bearings and be able to understand the scope and

categories of the available content. On a newspaper site, I need to see the newspaper’s sections

(news, sports, science, opinion, arts). In the World Digital Library, I need to see the map, browse

and search bars, and timeline right away. Then, upon reaching a results page, I need to see all of

the options that will allow me to drill down and explore in more detail. The WDL site is

impeccably designed and organized to meet these needs, so a simple search box with predictive

text capability is sufficiently intuitive and efficient for a wide variety of users and requires no

instruction (it functions nearly as well as do Google or Amazon searches). Even as the collection

grows, I doubt the WDL will consider adding advanced or Boolean search options. Since the

“browsing” interface is so strong, the search function can afford to remain simple.

The WDL item detail page (Figure 3) continues the trend of clear organization. It displays

the navigation and breadcrumbs bars at the top and two columns of content below. The left

column includes (1) a prominent, enlarged thumbnail image of the item in the top left corner, (2)

a link to open the item in “pageturner” view, (3) a link that will download the item, (4) a social

media “Share” bar through which a user can print or share a link to the item page via email,

Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., (5) a “Listen to this page” link through which a user can hear a

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clear, computerized voice read the page’s text in any of the available languages, (6) a link to the

curator’s video, if available, and (7) thumbnail views of similar items for further exploration.

Figure 3: Item detail page for “Girl’s Day,” an 18th c. Japanese woodblock print.

The right column lists all of the metadata about the item, and each access point is enabled as a

link that will connect the user to other items in that category. The “standard set” of metadata

elements for the WDL includes the following access points:

• Title• Description: “What is this item and why is it significant?”

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• Creator (artist, author)• Publisher • Place of publication• Date Created (a specific date, a year, or a range of years) • Language (native language of the resource)• Place (country, state/province (if available), city (if available) • Time (a specific year or a range of years)• Topic (Dewey Decimal Classification, listed in “breadcrumb” order)• Additional Subjects (Controlled and Uncontrolled)• Type of Item (print, photograph, book, monograph, map, etc.) [Terms from controlled

vocabularies (e.g., LCSH) and uncontrolled vocabularies used to describe the resource]• Notes• Physical Description• Collection Title • Institution • Related Web Site (also called “External Resource”)

Finally, “pageturner” view is the screen in which the actual digital item is displayed. It is

designed to simulate as closely as possible the experience of physically holding the item in one’s

hands, in perfect light, and with the ability to magnify each image as though one’s eye was an

inch away. The user is able to view all pages of an item from this page--for multi-page items

(books, manuscripts), a lefthand scrolling column shows with tiny thumbnail images on each

page. This is especially helpful when the user needs to quickly “flip” through a 400 page book

and visually locate all of the images/plates. Users can also skip quickly to a specific page by

entering a number in the “Go To Page” field or just advance through the book page by page by

pressing the left or right arrows. Users can zoom in and out with incredible clarity and toggle in

and out of full page view to better ensure that more of a page will be visible when zoomed in

(Figure 4 does not show full page view). From a pageturner page, the user can download any

item in full in JPEG or PDF file. Every book in the WDL is available for download as a PDF file

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& all files can be printed. (Materials in the WDL are either in the public domain or have been

made available with special permission from partner institutions.)

Figure 4: Zoomed-in “pageturner” view of“Girl’s Day” woodblock prin

Metadata

All metadata in the WDL is original cataloging done by humans--namely, a dedicated

manager and a team of catalogers. This is part of a time-intensive process described in more

detail in the production workflow” section below. First, Partner institutions send a standard set of

“existing” descriptive metadata in MARC, MODS, or Dublin Core format and then WDL staff

import (and augment) it into a cataloging system developed specifically for the site using IFLA

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standards and “best practices” recommendations. Item descriptions are carefully crafted by

curators and experts on the WDL team. All WDL metadata is individually indexable by external

search engines in all seven WDL languages.

The standard set of metadata noted above is sufficient for a wide variety of users, and the

WDL is doing a commendable job overall in providing a comprehensive set of access points for

its collection. I especially appreciate the Dewey subject headings in “breadcrumb” form (i.e.

“Social sciences > Customs, etiquette & folklore > General customs”) that allow the user to

easily find similar items by broad or narrow subject category. As the WDL site continues to

develop and improve, I would make the following suggestions to refine the metadata schema to

improve access for an even wider variety of users:

• Consider adding more granular metadata: As the collection expands, potential new content characteristics could include genre, bias, and more historical, cultural, and sociopolitical contextual content (Taylor & Joudrey, 2009). Many users will not be knowledgeable or attuned to the complex histories of each of the geographical regions represented in the collection--including major events and cultural shifts such as wars, changes in national leadership and governance, colonialism, slavery, independence, social upheaval, inter-racial or inter-tribal relations, etc. This could entail developing more detailed guidelines for the writing of the item descriptions or it could be designed as a small series of separate access points. This would be a massive undertaking, and likely falls outside of the scope of the WDL mission and funding capacities. The “background” section of the WDL site notes that the item descriptions are already a place in which the WDL “breaks new ground” in digital librarianship, and that they are “designed to spark the curiosity of students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries” [my emphasis]--not to thoroughly educate users in the history of the world. However, the user need for more context remains. Perhaps this need could be filled in a simpler manner, such as the inclusion of a page of curated links to other reputable websites that can help users more deeply understand the complex and powerful contexts in which these items have been created and through which they have been deemed “significant.” (Perhaps the WDL team is considering a partnership with Wikipedia for this very reason.)

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• Add a one-three sentence “plain text description” below the original item description: Currently, these descriptions are aimed at highly literate readers. For example, in the description for “Two Jewish Women Standing, Facing Each Other, in Tunisia,” the following words are used: popularize, cultural anthropology, estimated, protectorate, and corpulence. These words will hinder reading comprehension access for users with limited education and/or literacy skills. “Plain text” descriptions would use simpler words and phrases to convey the same basic meanings. Literacy and reading specialists could be hired to develop a controlled vocabulary (preferred terms and authorized phrases) for this added element, and training would need be provided so all staff members who compose these new descriptions will do so with consistency. Even better, staff members at partner institutions could be consulted when descriptions are being drafted and revised, so both the original and “plain text” descriptions will be accessible to all users.

• Link a thesaurus to the site: No thesaurus of subject headings or controlled vocabulary is currently included or linked to from the site. I would recommend allowing users to drill down while browsing at least from the ten main Dewey classes to the hundred divisions (000-990) (see http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/summaries/). This could be added to the help page initially; ideally it would be integrated into the browsing and search functions of the site as a whole.

• Invite institutional partners to collaborate more thoroughly: The WDL has not yet published their administrative, technical, or rights management metadata or their authority files. Making these files available to partner institutions could help with WDL’s capacity-building work-- developing countries seeking to create their own digital libraries need this data. WDL is already working to develop a “distributed, online content creation system for metadata and translation that will enable partners to process more of their content locally” (Van Oudenaren, 2010). Additionally, the WDL would benefit from taking a less top-down metadata approach, and instead create the capability for volunteers and community members from many countries to aid in the process of creating metadata (perhaps through tagging or Wikipedia-type interfaces).

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Production Workflow

Since the WDL has a unique mission amongst its digital library peers, it is exciting to learn

about the process used to create such a site. Two recent powerpoint presentations--one from

Michelle Rago, the Technical Director of the WDL (2010) and the other from the WDL Technical

Architecture Working Group (Adly & Hamidzadeh, 2010)--elucidate this process and

recommend areas for improvement, change management, and scalability as the WDL moves

forward. The production workflow at the WDL is as follows:

• Content selection: (guidelines here) Partner institutions are encouraged to select items or

collections of items that best present their respective national cultures. Areas for

improvement: treatment of three-dimensional materials is not yet included in the

guidelines, however, in 2009, the WDL Content Selection Working Group proposed that a

“practical experiment with inclusion of 3-D materials” be attempted.

• Content transfer: Partner institutions send already-digitized content, which is unpacked,

stored, archived, and inventoried.

• Content processing: Review the quality of content, assign a WLD ID, name directories

and files. Areas for improvement: detailed guidelines (digitization, filenaming, object

structure) to be shared on the project site (http://project.wdl.org/) with partner institutions.

• Original cataloging: A metadata normalization process is used. Areas for improvement:

partner access to and review of metadata; develop tools for quality control to ensure

consistent use of terminology.

• Translation: Applies to site navigation and all descriptive text and metadata, including

transcript creation for curator videos. Initially, all translation for the WDL was done by a

contracted, externally hosted translation system managed by LingoTek, a translation

company based in Utah (Hamidzadeh, 2009). Now, the WDL is considering using a “wiki”

model for translation, which would engage volunteers to translate metadata (http://

www.wdl.org/en/about/faq.html). Areas for improvement: centralized management of

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translated content, partner review, and improved integration with controlled vocabularies

and authority files.

• Access: The WDL site is hosted by content delivery vendor Akmai Global Edge Network,

which stores multiple copies of the WDL site on 48,000 servers in 70 countries, thus

ensuring, for instance, that computers in Oceania do not have to communicate with a

single server in the United States. The site works on every major web browser. Areas for

improvement: reliability, scalability, access to users with low bandwidth (and ability to

transfer large files over low bandwidth), and higher quality access on mobile devices.

Usage & Participation Statistics

The WDL site was publicly launched on April 21, 2009, and on its first day, it racked up

“more than 7.1 million page views and a total of 615,000 visitors from every country in the

world” (Fineberg, 2009). By the summer of 2010, the site had “been visited by more than 10

million users, resulting in more than 72 million page views” (Van Oudenaren, 2010). The WDL

site has clearly enjoyed a warm public welcome, especially from the heaviest users from Spain,

the United States, China, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, France, the Russian Federation, Portugal,

and Colombia (Van Oudenaren, 2010). The Spanish-language interface has been the most heavily

used to date (see Figure 5). Ongoing assessment of user participation data and user feedback will

need to drive the outreach and marketing efforts of the WDL team in addition to its overall

design and development efforts.

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Figure 5: Rago, 2010.

New Directions

The evolving work of the World Digital Library is complex, and a formal organizational

structure has only recently been established. During the Inaugural Annual General Partner

Meeting in June, 2010, partners approved a charter that governs the WDL and provides for a

seven-member Executive Council, an institutional Project Manager, a project management staff,

and three major international working groups--Content Selection, Technical Architecture, and

Translation and Language (http://project.wdl.org/about/org.html). Other committees and working

groups include the Chinese Content Selection Working Group, the Mesoamerican Codices

Conference, the Arab-Language Regional Working Group, and the History of Arabic and Islamic

Science Advisory Committee (listed in the WDL General Partner Meeting agenda). No

documentation is yet publicly available from the 2011 General Partner Meeting, but I look

forward to reading about the ways in which the WDL continues to meet its mission through

partnership-building, capacity-building, content selection, technology and tools, outreach and

education, and the nitty gritty aspects of system architecture and maintenance, records

management, and site functionality and scalability.

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I find the WDL to be an exceptionally strong example of an information retrieval system.

Its user interface is gorgeously designed, highly intuitive to navigate, and more accessible than

almost any library catalog or subscription database I have used. Every detail of its functionality

has been designed in alignment with the WDL’s unique mission. The technical architecture of the

site is fascinating, and I would love to learn more about the technical recommendations being

considered by Noha Adly and Babak Hamidzadeh (2010), particularly the need to add additional

Web 2.0 features (such as social media and tagging) and the ongoing partnership discussions

with Wikipedia regarding linking individual WDL items to relevant Wikipedia pages. I look

forward to many years of exploring this incredible primary source site, and I plan to share it

widely with the faculty and staff of the Boston public high school at which I am the librarian.

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References

(2010). Best Free Reference Websites: Twelfth Annual List. Reference & User Services

Quarterly, 50(1), 19-24. Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

Adly, N.& Hamidzadeh (2010). “Achievements and Recommendations.” WDL Technical

Architecture Working Group (TAWG). Retrieved from project.wdl.org/meeting_2010/

adly.ppt

Fineberg, G. (2009). The World at Your Fingertips. Library of Congress Information Bulletin, 68

(5), 87-91. Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

Hamidzadeh, B. (2009). Build It, and They Will Come. Library of Congress Information

Bulletin, 68(5), 92. Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

Rago, M. (2010).“User Response & Development Priorities.” World Digital Library. Retrieved

from project.wdl.org/meeting_2010/rago.ppt.

Taylor, A. & Joudrey, D. (2009). The Organization of Information. 3rd ed.Westport, CT:

Libraries Unlimited, pg. 323. (2).

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Information Programs (Jan 13, 2010). “Director at Library

of Congress discusses World Digital Library.” CO.NX Webchat Transcript with Michelle

Rago. Retrieved from http://www.uspolicy.be/headline/director-library-congress-

discusses-world-digital-library.

Van Oudenaren, J. (2010). Connecting the World, Responding to User Needs. Information

Outlook, 14(5), 10-12. Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

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