The Open Source Library and it Popularity among Different Communities and in Various Fields - Research Paper Example

BUILDING AN APPLICATION FOR al Affiliation) Key words: open source library, Competitors The open source library has gained popularity among universities nowadays. Building the open source library for students under economic conditions, software is needed and preferable. The paper therefore, builds the open source library where the students from university will store, upload, and download their application forms. Introduction The open source library facilitates creating, organizing, maintaining, managing, accessing, sharing, and preserving the digital document collection. The open source libraries are built today for different communities and in various fields like in education, culture, science, governance, and health (Mann, 2005).The purposes in education are to enable the students to store, download and upload their application with ease. It may also accumulate the application or develop a scholarship repository of the company. The open source libraries tend to differ from one organization to another. The open source libraries can be to disseminate information, preserve, and propagate education information. To develop and administrate the open source library, digital library software is important. There are many open source libraries that are available today. Unfortunately most of them are too expensive to afford (Leggott, 2005).They also needs high costs of installation by yearly maintenance costs software for the purposes of digitization. But the availability of various open source packages of the digital library, creating and sharing of information through the digital collections of libraries have become a feasible and attractive proposition for the students and library across the world. Therefore, building an open source library under the economic framework, open source software is needed. The paper develops the open source library where the students will store, download, and upload the application forms. Methodology After searching the internet for the available open source libraries and software packages, various subject oriented, organization oriented, and mission oriented library packages and projects were found. Almost 20 open source library packages were found. We selected only four of the digital packages for library software. The selected software was the Eprints, DSpace, Greenstone, and Fedora. Before developing the open source library, we conducted the survey among the students and librarians to understand their interest in coming up with an open source library that would store, download, and upload application for students. We prepared a questionnaire consisting of ten questions testing the interest of the open source library users. We requested the students to fill the questionnaire. Before settling on the preferred software, it was realized that the installation for the open source digital library packages; Eprints. DSpace, Greenstone, and Fedora have no big difference. The development of the software settled on the DSpace since it is popular among the solutions that are present in the domain of open source despite the vast use of Eprints. Educational institutions dominated in the used of the package. Although various educational institutions uses the digital libraries only a fraction of them are found online. The knowledge of open access will only be possible ones the repositories are found online (Koch, 2005). The open source online library will act as a machine built collection, management system, and as hybrid expert. The system will support a fundamental, expert created, and a first tier collection that will be increases by the second tier collection of crucial internet application that will be automatically described and gathered. The open source online library will build by the Infomine. Infomine is a virtual collection of library of more than 26000 librarian created and machine created application that describe and link to academic internet materials. The software will enable the students to work individually and cooperatively offer a well arranged, collection of online library of metadata descriptions of the application and other internet resources. The open source library will be flexible, powerful, and flexible to the need of students and to the university as a whole. The application is designed to assist the open source online scale (Kavanagh, 2004). The open source online library is designed to help the students store, upload, and download systems of the library as the number of resources online have continued to augment. The large, crucial mass of application forms that would represent a wider coverage and facilitate a fine granularity in the searching and downloading, which most internet users feel is not available in the internet online libraries. Similarly, commercial online libraries and finding instruments continue evolving at extents that most of the non-commercial libraries have not matched. The open source online library has addressed the challenges in various ways. First the application will join the best features that are library oriented, expert collection of online library with the best characteristics and classification systems. Additionally, it develops a foundation supporting various levels of sharing, cooperative, and multi-project building. Generally, the system proves important within the greater context to enable those in the university to find what they require on the internet. In fact, most computer specialists specializing in search engine technologies have believed that the engines may pose to be significant technological limitation that federated collection of the finding instruments, each handle a finite topic area and target the students and each depending on the crawling and various mechanisms that the open source online library applies (Katsirikou, 2011). The streamlined, focused, hybrid, and expert based approach that the library is designed represents a crucial discovery strategy for the internet material. Potentially, is assists in bringing together and amplifying the expertise found within the high quality abundance and important but uncoordinated and disparate the finding instruments of the online library. This open source online library could better place and take an important position along other search engines. The system uses the librarian web since it represents the open source system, cooperative that acts as a catalyst for weaving together and cooperation, benefits and represent approach tapestry underlying the online library and the search engines(Orr, 2011). Some of the main features of the open source online library include: The core system that is reliable, robust, fast, and scalable to many application forms and students. A creation of the content and system of editing that support important practices that have content procedures that are expert based Collection of web crawlers that is capable of automating the identification of the crucial internet materials. Classifiers that automate the creation of content in areas like the annotation, key phrases, assignment, and identification of subject. Classifiers enabling semi-automated creation of content offering machine interaction in the entire building process of the application. This is normally applicable to high valued resources that expert suggested or gauged as highly important by the crawlers (Parker, 1876). The interface developing system that will accommodate the needs of the university for a constant presence of the open source online library and front end by offering a wider selection of interface options for browsing, searching, content building for the experts. The branded or the custom views of the content of the search outcomes are supported. Browse and search interface options that offer students with a greater flexibility in coming up with the application that supports every level for the search skills of users. Application savings in the semi or fully automated content creation and maintaining task and through multi-institutional, cooperative, and sharing. Supporting the multiple and single subject open source online projects which share the application on any cooperation level. The project base The open source online library is developed by one of the largest online libraries that are librarian created like the INFOMINE (“I.C.S. reference library: a series of textbooks prepared for the students of the International Correspondence Schools and containing in permanent form the instruction papers and examination questions used in their various courses”. 2009). The work of the open source online library is supported by Libraries of Organized Online Knowledge). Other applications include the Internet Public Library, Michigan Electronic Library, Librarian’s Index to the Internet, and Virtual Reference Library. Most of the applications are operating in concerts during planning of the systems. An example of the Infomine outlook is as shown below: The open source online library includes the crucial systems components like the expert’s database, machine built records, user search, browse, displaying options for a variety of semi-automated and automated identification of applications, array of maintenance application, maintenance programs, application store, application download, and application upload, data views, key phrase identification(Quin, 2000). An overview is as shown below: Core system The core system of the open source online library is a collection of open source program that maintain and build the online library and allow students greater flexibility to access the contents in the system. The system scalable, free, stable, and emphasizes on the cooperation of multi-project and strategies that are machine assisted for describing and finding the resources and then share them. The students will find various means of searching and browsing for information. Searching for the specialties together with application forms by the help of the standard Boolean and operator’s proximity is also supported. The array builders will find a vast resource discovery selection and building of content, edit; maintain the tools at their peril. The content creation system of the application is flexible and enables a huge number of expertise contributions from various projects to build content through various coordinated needs as per the needs of the university. The track is dependent on the privileges enables to student’s content builders and the levels of review (Huebner & Zanero, 2010).This enables the project of various sizes to start his production faster using the guidelines that are the same to those with experience, Included in the software’s content building are the building interfaces metadata generators, smart classifiers, and focused crawlers. The applications that used the software can come up with array of links through manually creating the application folder, that are automatically created by the classifiers and crawlers, manually increasing and refining records developed by the focused classifies and crawlers, importing applications and resources from other internet arrays including the OAI-PMH protocol. The application is written using a C++ program, runs on the Linus, and employs MySQL, and DB management packages (Rosenfeld, & Loertscher, 2007). The sustainability and scalability for the online library is a social one not a technological issue. Important cooperation among the open source online library projects minimized the recurrent effort and takes the advantage of larger gains made by the sharing of resources and labor. Sharing the application among the student offers the resource savings in the field on content maintenance, system development cost, and content development. To enable this, the application supports more than one used and data views. The theme-ing application enables the cooperating projects in retaining the design options that were provided. Theme-ing enables creating the interface, options that are data retrieval, or outcome displays that will be desired. Myl allows selecting and retrieving the subsets of the greater library collection. The categories are regarded as descriptors that are assigned to applications so that the specialized pathfinders, sub-collections, and resources of a given topic are created. The lists are generated by the Myl category names such as storing forms, uploading forms, and downloading forms. The applications stored, downloaded, or uploaded are subsequently displayed and retrieved from the system (Griswold, 2001). Collection Development Majority of the open source online library comprises of small collection and are subjected to null searched. In the system, larger collections of semi-automated and automated created metadata, together with the full text that are extracted from the applications, are developed to offer a critical content mass required in solving a given problem. Larger resource also offers a much higher level in searching, which the students expect in an internet instrument. In the system, the crawlers will detect important information, and the classifiers will offer metadata that will represent the application is coming up with collections that are applied in Infomine to support and undergrid. This led to crucial monetary saving and labor in identifying the resources. The crawling system will crawl and identify relevant application forms through a focused crawling and approaches that distil the topics that involve mechanisms. The analysis of inter-linkage operated like the citation index through resource identification that is connected to the focused subject regions of various domains. The co-occurrence for texts is used in measuring the similarity degree between the internet resource sect and expert vetted resource, known, and high valued. The relevant and quality measures offers a general efficient means of identifying the applications automatically (Fitzgerald, 2011). The automatic focused crawler crawls the application to find the files that are inter-connected and are of the same related communities like those that are in the created arrays. The applications that are of the same topic are evaluated in their own ways as authoritative hubs. The perfect hubs and authorities are added to the application as created automatically. The highly weighted of this all are those that are flagged for the review of experts and possibly added to the already uploaded ones (Sowe, Stamelos & Samoladas, 2008). Description creation The descriptions will be created through the extraction of various types describing the resource. The texts are determined based on the web resource position and other layout of the form clues like the XML structures. Crucial phrases are also employed here. The length of the description is determined by the rich text amount discovered on the area that is gauged. The application will automatically store, upload, and even download the pages of the applications in the collection. The indexing enables the users greater granularity to search and offers a boost for augmenting the successful searches through supply of the natural language terms in supplementing both the machine and expert applied metadata and correcting the short terms in the terms of subject schema (Feller, 2005). Machine Assisted Collection Maintenance Maintaining an array of internet application forms is a challenge in reference to maintaining the URL current and detects the content changes so that the descriptions of the resource remain accurate. The content change and URL maintenance instrument assisted in both sections. The form’s URL that remained broken over the three week period were automatically flagged and detected for the review of experts. In scenarios where there is URL re-direction, the URL will be suggested after being discovered. The content change, that are measured through crucial changes in the count of words are detected automatic, and flagged for the review of experts (Rosenfeld & Loertscher, 2007). New Approaches Within the greater searching and browsing options of retrieval, the open software created a term browsing interface that is the same to browse index which makes the students to browse quickly through the applications that happen in large collection of document. Based on the Lexica, phind is considered to be topic oriented, hierarchical, and intuitive for browsing application forms in array that the normal keyword do not get. Phind is normally applied in Infomine, where it is commonly known as the Mega topic, to find the key phrases in the entire subject. The innovation in the open source online library is that the applications that works with Phind are students database record that are highly defined as is expressed in the title, description fields, and subject. The Phind also supports the thesauri application, and the future research will occur to adapt and use the application with library guidelines and other schemas of subjects. Therefore, the open source online library is high performance system that provides crucial saving of resources through semi and full automation of many maintenance processes and collection building (Eden, 2011). Conclusion The open source library will have an obvious function to play in the formal learning framework by providing the students with the provisions to store, upload, and download their application. Apart from expanding the format and access of information, the open source library will provide more information more than the students have been able to access and maintain. The open source library will be accessible in classroom, homes, and in specialized library facilities where the access, use, and display of application forms will be shared. Accessing the applications from a remote region enables the possibility for virtual learning and accessing to unique and rare applications and material in homes and also in schools. The promise of the open source library is that learning will be made broader and faster with a better communication services and better information. The physical advantage will promise various advantages to both learners and teachers through the extension of the classroom, however there are tradeoff and cost that will be attached to the advantages (Witten, Bainbridge & Nichols, 2010). The clear difference between the conventional library and the open source library is that the developed one will offer a greater chance for the students to deposit and share information. Therefore, students, librarian, and teachers will acts as both publishers and readers in the open source library. The number of scholars will surely grow since the teachers and students will bring online information to education setting and move the products from the classroom to a digital library. The open source library will bring the difference between the readers and the published very close (Dixon, 2004).Accessing the internet through a classroom setting will jeopardize the distinction between learning and teaching. The learners will bring important and interesting information to discussions in class and in various ways lead their classmate to new tools and electronic resources. The teachers will find themselves in crucial roles critic and a moderator at the same time. The teachers who will begin using the shared applications and material will adapt easily to the new technologies and ideas and will be comfortable to share their powers with the learners (Stronge, 1760). The open source library will support the students of interest and enable more specialized faculties to be used. For instance, the students might share the open source library of data from weather and students specializing on earth science may share the NASA data. Telecourses have already approved some of the schools to provide placement courses to some of the students through teacher sharing across the distances in geography. Due to the increase in network access in universities, some of the specialized faculties have been provides in basis that is distributed. From the past realities, courses that internet based have already been provided successfully (Cohen, 2007).The most crucial changes that the open source libraries will bring will the advancing the informal learning. The similar is in student learning and accruing to persons pursuing their learning. In various ways, the Freenets developments are the extensions for the public library systems. The open source libraries will act as digital schools that will provide formal packaging for the specialized skills and topic, in addition the general browsing for the self-guided, informal learning, and creative discovery (Weber, 2004). The university fraternity has considered mechanism of supporting learning in the environment of electronics in addressing problems of obsolescence and coverage. For the open source library to work well, the issues of accessing and intellectual property need to be controlled. The more challenging bit was developing the intellectual infrastructures for the open source library. This includes use of the electronic information in learning and in teaching. The teachers need to be taught on how to upload the multimedia applications and resources and sharing the information with the students (Bull, Thomas, & Willard, 1995). Designing tasks taking advantage of the resources need effort and time in examining their available resource and integrating information into the sequences and modules appropriate to curriculum and students. Additionally, modeling the processes of research for the students needed teachers and facilitators to grapple with challenges, make mistakes, react to dead ends, recover, and demonstrate to various frustrating aspects and uncomfortable aspects of solving problem. Just like the facilitators need to learn new strategies of using the open source tool, the students need to learn how to interact with the multimedia and how to be responsible for carrying out their own personal learning. After observing the students, the students expressed their concerns on note taking due to text screen, vases screen, and the verbal comments of the instructors (Breeding, 2010).The students were unaware of what to write down. Despite having a superior technological tool like a networked laptops, the concerns of attending and integration of multiple information streams required new physical skills, perceptual, and cognitive skills for learning. In conclusion, developing the intellectual infrastructures need social, emotional, and intellectual breakthrough for learning and teaching. At the link of intellectual infrastructure and physical, acts the interface to the open source library. The tools and instruments for finding, managing, publishing, and using the electronic information is powerful and user friendly. The open source library has provided software and student mixture to offer reference assistance and the services that asks and answers the questions. The users of the open source library go beyond the reference of serving as facilitators on demand. The learners will be assisted by software that shunts the questions on the pathfinders and questions that are frequently asked (Bitzer, 2006). Thus, the open source library will extend the beneficial characteristic of communication, electronic networks, to the learning and teaching setting. The application has a good interface that enables learners to use the digital resources both in classrooms, offices, and also at homes. The open source library has crucial role in learning and teaching. The existing libraries and the university will continue to exist because they serve social roles, informational roles, and cultural roles. There will a continuous need for the social setting and physical objects in learning. The guardians will always be there to demand child care, assurances of shared culture and organization beyond the human direction and guidance. 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