SPC Coastal & Oceanic
Fisheries Programmes
Digital Library
Anne Gibert, SPC Librarian Assistant
(AnneG@spc.int),
Jean-Paul Gaudechoux, SPC Fisheries Information Adviser
(jeanpaulg@spc.int)
34th IAMSLIC Annual Conference
14-18 September 2008
Suva, Fiji Islands
The Pacific Islands, large distances, small scale
countries and territories, and scattered populations
Rationale for building a Digital Library
 Information and Communication Technologies are powerful tools for
development;
 Few inhabitants of the Pacific Islands countries and territories are
able to enjoy fast Internet connections;
 SPC has been involved in marine resources management since the
early 1950s;
 Thousands of papers and reports have been produced and these
documents are invaluable for retracing past records of marine
resources exploitation in the region;
 Recent e-documents were available on our web site, but scattered in
different places and not searchable through a common interface;
 The Digital Library project was initiated following a request from
Nauru in 2005, staff from the Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources
Authority having difficulties to access the SPC documents online.
Building a Digital Library - Task flow
The products
 DVD version: developed using Greenstone, open source software;
simple search interface and can be launched without any software
installation;
Online version: we developed our own interface using Lucene, a
powerful open-source indexer.
 Production of the DVD was made possible through
financial support provided by Australia, the European
Union, France and New Zealand;
 In conclusion, I would like to stress that access to
information means knowledge, and knowledge means
power. Empowering fishing communities is one of the
major challenges we are facing;
 Merci, Thank you, Vinaka vaka levu.
NOUMEA SPC LIBRARY
http://www.spc.int/Library/
THE COLLECTION
• 35 000 ITEMS
• ITEM TYPES = Books,
graphics and audio-visual
materials, and documents)
• 12 000 SPC DOCUMENTS
(from 1947 to now…)
• ENGLISH AND FRENCH
VERSION
• LIBRARY SYSTEM = KOHA
FREE OPEN SOURCE
FINDING AND TRANSFERING DATA
•
MATCH DOCUMENT IN PDF WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION IN
KOHA (BY TITLE OR BY BIBLIO
NUMBER)
•
EXTRACT DATA FROM KOHA =
(AUTHOR – PUBLICATION DATE –
TITLE –MEETING NAME OR JOURNAL
TITLE –PAGINATION)
•
INSERT METADATA IN GREENSTONE
•
BUILD REFERENCE
TASK FLOW FOR BUILDING THE
DIGITAL LIBRARY
• COLLECT EXISTING PAPER
DOCUMENTS
• CHECK/ADD CATALOGUING IN KOHA
• SCAN DOCUMENT
• OCR (PERFORM OPTICAL CHARACTER
RECOGNITION) = AUTOMATIC TASK
• RESULTS = TEXT SEARCHABLE PDFs
DIGITAL LIBRARY
DVD VERSION
ON LINE VERSION
http://www.spc.int/mrd/fishlib.php