The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library
Digital Library Development and Production Activities
The Library in the Context of the University
Established in 1867 with only 644 books from $1,000 appropriated by the State of Illinois, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library is now among the preeminent research
collections in the world. The Library is central to the University’s mission of teaching, research,
and public service. With a primary focus on supporting the learning and research needs of over
40,000 students and faculty, the organization is committed to maintaining the strongest possible
collections and services, and staff through acquisition, access, and continuous development of
professional expertise and partnerships with other leaders in the field. The Library is
decentralized and comprised of thirty-plus departmental units located campus wide, and
supported by approximately 500 FTE staff. It houses more than 22 million items, including more
than eleven million volumes and eight and one-half million microfilm items. Its outstanding
collections are valued at more than $1.5 billion.
Primary Mission: Access & Stewardship
Technology is a key component in the design and delivery of access to the Library’s collections
and staff expertise. At Illinois, the Library is renowned for its ground-breaking research,
development, and evaluation of digital library technologies, protocols, and user search behavior.
The Library subscribes to and licenses more than 52,000 e-journals resulting in over 7 million
user click-throughs per year via an e-resource registry and over 5 million full-text downloads. In
FY’2009 over 57 million virtual “visits” were logged on the Library’s Gateway web site. Faculty
and scholars in numerous academic departments and research centers contribute their research
output regularly to the IDEALS institutional repository, which recently observed its millionth
download. The IDEALS repository is a joint effort of the Library and academic computing
(CITES).
The core of digital library production, development and research depends on a foundation
jointly supported by Library IT and the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, with
combined technology staffing of approximately 15 FTE permanent library faculty and academic
professionals, and approximately 4 FTE temporary professionals. Grant funding from federal,
private, and state sources supports an increasing amount of technology research and
development—an average of $750,000 annually in the Library from numerous sources including
the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), that National Science Foundation (NSF),
the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Illinois State Library, and others.
Many research and production activities, including usability studies and user-focused
technology service development, are integrated across Library units and involve faculty and
information professionals with a variety of skills and perspectives in units such as University
Archives, Reference and Government Information Services, and the Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. Library faculty and professional staff contribute through numerous channels to the
worldwide scientific and scholarly community through research and publication, development
of innovative service programs and leadership roles in professional organizations.
At Illinois the key areas of technology development on which we are focused dovetail with areas
of active interest in the digital library community:
Search, discovery, and access:
Metadata aggregation and access to digital special collections through the use of the Open
Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH -- http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/);
A specific and well-known example of an OAI production system:
IMLS Digital Collections and Content (IMLS/DCC) registry—includes collections and model
projects supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services that help preserve library
resources, develop best practices for digitization, and digitize collections of national value. The
registry contains metadata information for 328 digitized collections in the United States, Europe,
and Asia (http://imlsdcc.grainger.uiuc.edu/).
DLF Aquifer American Social History Online (ASHO -- http://www.dlfaquifer.org/) The Andrew
Mellon Foundation supported a collaboration among several Digital Library Federation partner
libraries to provide scholars with access to distributed digital library collections pertaining to
19th and 20th century United States social history. This project provided an environment in
which the partner institutions collaborated on developing, testing, and evaluating a variety of
digital library technologies and data standards. The project allowed experimentation in a digital
library microcosm to test the viability of libraries to use MODS metadata to enable harvest of
their digital collections and the aggregation of the metadata in a portal environment that
provided powerful search and data manipulation capabilities.
Federated search system development and evaluation that has yielded the Easy Search engine.
(http://www.library.illinois.edu);
(http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/searchaid/easy_search_summary.html)
The University of Illinois Library has developed a suite of metasearch software modules that are
being used to power several access and retrieval systems. This metasearch software provides
the search functionality behind the "Easy Search", "Books", "Journals", and "Other" search tabs
on the Illinois Library Gateway at:
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/
and a custom portlet-based Engineering Library gateway at:
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/top/
There is also a "native mode" version which gives the user more flexibility in choosing multiple
subject target resources at:
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/searchaid2/searchassist.asp.
In general, the metasearch feature set is referred to as "Easy Search" (ES). The ES suite presently
provides asynchronous, broadcast search over some 75 target resources (actually more since
any Ebsco, Proquest, OCLC, Wilson, CSA, and ISI databases can be targeted). XML gateways and
html parsing (screen scraping) are used in retrieving results from the resource targets. The
target searches do not utilize Z39.50 searching. A middleware layer that connects to target
resources based on the NISO MXG (Metasearch XML Gateway) search capability has also been
implemented. This provides a REST-based SRU function that returns results information in XML
to the invoking application.
The Illinois metasearch system employs a recommender or resource discovery approach. Users
are presented with result matches from target resource searches and links from these result
matches into the native interface at the point of completed search. In this way, a user can click
through to a target system's native interface display of the completed search and they can then
modify the search argument, browse additional pages, link to full-text, etc.
The Illinois Gateway went operational in September, 2007. Since that time there have been over
2.2 million searches performed in the Easy Search suite and over 2.5 million user clickthroughs
to target resources. Under the leadership of creator Prof. William Mischo, Head of the
Engineering Library, the software is undergoing continual development, with new functionality
being added during the course of several grant investigations. These grants include an IMLS
National Leadership Grant (http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/IMLS/) on portal design and development,
an NSF NSDL (National Science Digital Library) grant (http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/nsdl/) on
metasearch XML gateway development, and a Mellon Foundation grant to the DLF Aquifer
American Social History project (http://www.dlfaquifer.org/) which funded a metasearch scenario.
The IMLS and NSDL work include a deep transaction log analysis and the identification and
implementation of assisted search and resource integration techniques. The focus is on
developing useful assisted search techniques, including suggestive prompts, to assist users with
search query formulation and refinement.
Archival management and access system:
Archon (http://archon.org) --an open-source archival collections management system that was
selected in 2008 as a recipient of a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration;
Virtual Reference:
IMCollaborator (http://code.google.com/p/imcollaborator/) an open source virtual reference
system that allows IM messages that are sent to a single IM account to be queued, answered,
and transferred by multiple operators from a web-based interface.
Scholars’ Services tools and applications:
In January 2010, the Library will launch a Scholarly Commons that intends to support scholars’
services through professional expertise and technology development in several areas. For
several years prior to this, the Library has been working on applications in a number of areas to
support these activities:
E-Science & E-Scholarship Services
BibApp – a campus research gateway and expert finder—“the ultimate mashup of article
databases, citation management software, and digital repositories.” Bibapp is a tool that both
researchers and librarians/IT professionals can use to add content to institutional repositories,
by identifying content that can be archived, generate ingest packages for IR’s like DSpace, and
ultimately manage citations and publications. Bibapp allows scholars to promote their research
and make it more accessible, reuse their publication history in other applications, and to find
collaborators on campus.
This open source application has been developed jointly with the University of Wisconsin
Madison (http://bibapp.org/). Bibapp tutorial: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/8806.
Personalized information profiles: A team of librarians and IT professionals in the Grainger
Engineering Library have been working closely with faculty in the College of Engineering to
develop custom Web portals that combine their research group information with other related
research and publications held in the Library. Examples of this work include:
Prof. Klaus Schulten’s Research group:
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/comp_sci/faculty.asp?living_cell
Institute for Condensed Matter Theory
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/comp_sci/faculty.asp?icmt
http://search.grainger.uiuc.edu/comp_sci/faculty.asp?donna_cox
These feature e-scholarship support services and tools that are centered on individual faculty
and research group personalized information interest profiles (PIPs). The PIPs
for researchers and research group are derived from publication, citation, research grant, and
award information taken from the literature, faculty web sites, and custom research
management databases. The prototype e-scholarship sites contain:

faculty publication lists with direct links to full-text articles and articles citing those
individual articles;

on-the-fly generated links to Google News articles of interest to the scholar/group;

customized pre-stored federated search links--derived from PIP information—-that
perform literature searches across relevant article, book, and report databases;
Digital Humanities : Text Data mining and manipulation/analysis:
(The UIUC campus participates in Project Bamboo, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation:
Library, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Academic Computing, and NCSA).
MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) Project: designed to help humanities scholars discover
and analyze patterns in the texts they study; supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
from 2007-2009. All code produced by the project is open source. MONK has a publicly available
instance with texts contributed by several institutions. Partners include Northwestern,
Nebraska, NCSA, Illinois (the Library and GSLIS), Alberta, McMaster, Maryland.
http://www.monkproject.org/
Using OAI-ORE Resource Maps to Support Scholarly Annotation of Digitized Books: a research
project supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, spearheaded by Timothy Cole, Head,
Mathematics Library, and Michael Norman, Head Cataloging and Metadata Unit.
Visual Resources Use, Management, and Curation in support of instruction
Illinois is a member of the ArtSTor Shared Shelf visual resource description and management
system as a partner in the development steering committee.
Digital Preservation Research and Development:
The UIUC Library recently formed a digital repository and scholarly communication services
technical team, which has recommended the implementation of a Fedora repository. The work
on the implementation of the repository will commence in early 2010.
IDEALS Digital Repository:
The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/ - is a set of collections and related services that together constitute
the campus institutional repository. IDEALS preserves and provides persistent and reliable
access to the digital scholarship of faculty, staff, and students and aims to provide the greatest
dissemination and recognition to these works as possible. IDEALS centralizes the twin goals of
access and preservation, as do other institutional repositories, to provide the maximum campus
commitment toward achieving these ends.
HathiTrust: Illinois is a founding member of the HathiTrust digital repository, a joint effort of
Michigan and Indiana. We view HathiTrust as an integral element of Illinois’ digital preservation
program strategy. Illinois content that is slated for ingest, management and access through HT
includes books digitized through the CIC Google digitization project (up to 2 million books from
UIUC collections); OCA digitized books; selected additional content as ingest conduits are
developed by HT.
The ECHO DEPository (http://www.ndiipp.illinois.edu/) is a 5-year (2004-2009) digital
preservation research and development project at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, funded by the Library of Congress under their National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
The project was funded through two phases, which included work on the following:
Phase 1 ECHO DEPository:
 Web archiving tool development
 Repository evaluation
 Interoperability tool development
 Longer term semantic preservation research
Phase 2 ECHO DEPository:
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Expansion of repository architecture towards promoting further interoperability
Semantic archiving for preservation of meaning as well as structure
Development of tools for automating metadata extraction and creation, as well as user
evaluation
Data format risk assessment and analysis based on the INFORM methodology
Partners in the project include: OCLC, NCSA, Michigan State University, the state libraries of
Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
The work on repository interoperability yielded a rich set of tools—the Hub and Spoke (HandS)-that consists of a number of components that can be used individually or in tandem to help
enable digital-repository interoperability.
(http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/echodep/hands/index.html).
4 Nov. 2009 (B. Sandore)