Technical Report Writing in Computer Science

Chapter 3
3 Resources to Conduct Research
3.1 Digital Libraries
– During the past recent years, there has been tremendous development reaming the concept of
digital libraries-a knowledge base that can be stored and retrieved through on-line networks.
– Digital libraries are the most complex form of information systems that support
 Digital document preservation,
 Distributed database management,
 Hypertext,
 Filtering,
 Information retrieval and
 Selective dissemination of information.
– This has really overcome geographical barrier offering wide range of academic, research and cultural
resources with multimedia effects which can be accessed around the world over the distributed
networks.
– With the advancement of science and technology, country has witnessed an unprecedented growth
of information resulting in information explosion and the information being generated in different
formats has further created havoc in providing cost-effective information services to the user
community.
– As a result, libraries have been constantly facing the problems of:
 Space,
 Escalation in cost of books & journals,
 Budget shrinkage,
 Inability to provide multiple copies and
 Most important is retrieval efficiency of user being endangered for want of information.
– The urge to overcome these problems has called for adoption of technology in libraries. These
technologies include:
 CD-ROMs and Digital Video Disk Read Only Memory ( DVDROMs)
 Networking of Computers
 Image/Text compression
 Multimedia technology
 Powerful processors

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– The powerful technology has enabled Library/Information Centers to create multimedia information
databases which provides easy retrieval & access with personal computer connected to the
network. This has led to the concept of “Digital Library”.
– In digital libraries, the question of loss of documents is overruled while the searching of information
is effective and efficient due to global indexing & search engines.

Some basic questions:

- What are digital libraries?

- What are the goals of digital libraries?
- Do terms like “electronic library”, “virtual library”, “digital library” or “cybrary” represent the
same entity?
- What communities are involved in digital library research and practice?

History: Early Visions

- H.G. Wells (1938) (social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian – “World Brain”): The
notion of a world encyclopedia
- Vannevar Bush (1945): “Memex” – a machine that could implement what we now call hypertext.
(collective memory)
- Douglas Engelbart (1963): electronic technology, the first mouse and hypertext technology
- Licklider’s (1965) vision: “Library of the future” - to refer to his vision of a fully computer-based
library.
- Tim Berners-Lee (1989): “hypertext”
(http://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web)
The link is about the birth of the WWW.
– According to the Digital Library Federation definition (1998), digital libraries are organizations that
provide the resources, including the specialized staff to select, structure, offer intellectual access to,
interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of and ensure the persistence over time of collections of
digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or
set of communities.
– Marchionini and Fox (1999) state that: Digital libraries have four dimensions:
1. The community dimension
2. Technology as the engine moving the DL

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3. Services constitute the central focus of DLs, digital reference services, real time question
answering, information literacy
4. Content

Building blocks of digital libraries

Digital content types and examples (Fox 2003)

– Digital library is a collection of textual, numeric data, scanned images, graphics, audio & video
recordings that provides access to digital collection for ease of retrieval of information to the users.
– Digital library is characterized by:
 Library is at the disposal of users that facilitate access of information by just push of a button.
 Information sources is digitized, compressed and stored in textual/numeric, audio, video, graphic

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form.
 Time saving device for user community
 Computer assisted search
 Geographically distributed creating the concept of world as a global village
 Alerts users based on their subject interests.

Types

– There are many different types of digital libraries that all fall under three large categories:
1. Stand-alone digital libraries (SDL),
2. Federated digital libraries (FDL), and
3. Harvested digital libraries (HDL).
– Stand-alone digital libraries are the physical library holdings implemented in a fully digital
manner. So, materials are digital and have either been scanned or digitized into the SDL.
– The SDL is self-contained meaning the material is localized and centralized.
– An example of an SDL is the Library of Congress digital collections (http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-
digital.html).
– Federated digital libraries are a federation of several stand-alone digital libraries in a network
organized around a common theme.
– Although the entire FDL is comprised of different, autonomous libraries, the user would have a
seamless experience moving from one database to the next.
– One of the major issues facing FDLs is interoperability—meaning each library may use a different
metadata standard or different format.
– An example of an FDL is the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
(http://www.ndltd.org/). This FDL allows users to search through published theses and dissertations
across many different platforms.
– Harvested digital libraries provide summarized access to related material scattered over a network.
– HDLs don’t actually contain the different objects; rather, they contain summaries and metadata about
the objects.
– So, unlike SDL’s where items are digitized or scanned into the network, HDLs gather items from
around the internet.
– An example of a HDL is the Internet Public Library 2 (ipl2) (http://www.ipl.org/). This HDL allows
users to search through different databases and digital libraries all from the same website.
3.2 Documentation Tools
– LaTeX is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for
medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of
publishing.
– LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the

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appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content. For example, consider
this document:
Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs
Jane Doe
September 1994
Hello world!
– To produce this in most typesetting or word-processing systems, the author would have to decide
what layout to use, so would select (say) 18pt Times Roman for the title, 12pt Times Italic for the
name, and so on. This has two results: authors wasting their time with designs; and a lot of badly
designed documents!
– LaTeX is based on the idea that it is better to leave document design to document designers, and to
let authors get on with writing documents. So, in LaTeX you would input this document as:

– Or, in English:
 This document is an article.
 Its title is Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs.
 Its author is Jane Doe.

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 It was written in September 1994.

 The document consists of a title followed by the text Hello world!
– LaTeX contains features for:
 Typesetting journal articles, technical reports, books, and slide presentations.
 Control over large documents containing sectioning, cross-references, tables and figures.
 Typesetting of complex mathematical formulas.
 Advanced typesetting of mathematics with AMS-LaTeX.
 Automatic generation of bibliographies and indexes.
 Multi-lingual typesetting.
 Inclusion of artwork, and process or spot colour.
 Using PostScript or Metafont fonts.
– LaTeX is based on Donald E. Knuth's TeX typesetting language or certain extensions.
– LaTeX was first developed in 1985 by Leslie Lamport, and is now being maintained and developed by
the LaTeX3 Project.
– LaTeX is available for free.
– http://www.latextemplates.com/template/ieee (IEEE templates for different journals/confs/traxs)
– Or https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/authors/author_templates.html

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