Research Agenda

To date, my research focuses on conducting general and technological requirements to establish the IOPDL.

My research agenda consists of two closely related projects:

1) Common Terminology (CT) Project to improve metadata interoperability (Technological Requirement)

The proposal of IOPDL was started from the questions:

  • Why cannot America create a national digital library, although many quality national digital libraries exist in various subject areas?
  • Why cannot national digital libraries in the U.S. cooperate and work together to create a national digital library for America?

Through researches about existing problems in digital libraries, I found the main problem, Interoperability problem, in sharing collections. This is due to the use of diverse metadata formats according to each community’s needs. That is, there is no standard way to handle all needs to date (Jin, 2014).

In response to this problem:

  • I create a new metadata schema, 'Unified Standard Metadata Format (USMF)' in 2009.
  • The uniformity concept is developed into the concept of 'Common Terminology (CT)' since 2012.
    • The research is instructed and supported by Professor Dubin and Dean Smith of GSLIS.
    • It is to conduct technological requirement for IOPDL, achieving and improving metadata interoperability (MI) at multi metadata levels (Jin, 2014).

This is my main research agenda these days. More details are in Common Terminology (CT).

2) Evaluating Existing Digital Libraries Project (Ggeneral Requirement)

To conduct general requirement for IOPDL,

  • I had evaluated existing digital libraries with respect to their content quality, usability, and performance in 2010.
  • With the suggested criteria, 'Content, Usability and Performance Evaluation (CUPE) criteria,' existing sixty two digital libraries in fifteen subject areas are evaluated.
  • The CUPE criteria include mainly three evaluations with seven sub-criteria:
    • Content quality evaluation (with content quality criteria),
    • Usability evaluation (with Accessibility, Convenience, Consistency and Visual design criteria), and
    • Performance evaluation (with Response time and Relevance criteria).
  • All seven evaluations with CUPE criteria are done with carefully considered check lists.
  • The evaluation is limited regionally almost in the USA and timely on 2010.
  • The evaluations reflect many discussions and instructions of Professor McDonough, Professor Dubin, Dean Smith, and Dean Renear.
  • As a result, thirty four out of sixty two candidate digital libraries turn out as well-designed digital libraries in fifteen subject areas.

They may cooperate and consist of IOPDL. We can expand the scope of IOPDL involving many national well-designed digital libraries all over the world, to realize the dream that anyone can access and find any information of the world with their privilege rights (Jin, Evaluation, 2014).

Last modified: August 11, 2014