Abstract:
University Libraries manage increasingly large collections of full text digital resources.
These might be repositories of born digital research outputs, e-reserves collections or
online libraries of material digitised to provide open access to significant texts. Whatever
the content of the material, the structured data of full text resources can be exploited to
enhance research discovery. The implicit connections and cross-references between
books and papers, which occur in all print collections, can be made explicit in a collection
of electronic texts. Correctly encoded and exposed they create a framework to support
resource discovery and navigation both within and between texts by following links
between topics. Using this approach the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) at
Victoria University of Wellington has developed a delivery system for its growing online
digital library using the ISO Topic Map technology. Like a simple back-of-book index or a
library classification system, a topic map aggregates information to provide binding points
from which everything that is known about a given subject can be reached. Topics in the
NZETC digital library represent authors and publishers, texts, and images, as well as
people and places mentioned or depicted in those texts and images. Importantly, the
Topic Map extends beyond the NZETC collection to incorporate relevant external
resources which expose structured metadata about their collection. Innovative entity
authority records management enables, for example, the topic page for William Colenso
to automatically provide access not only to the full text of his works in the NZETC
collection but out to another book-length
work in the Auckland University’s “Early NZ
Books Collection” and to several essays in the National Library’s archive of the Royal
Society Journals. It also enables links to externally provided services providing information on Library holdings of print copies of the text. The NZETC system is based on international standards for the representation and interchange of knowledge including TEI XML, XTM, XSL and the CIDOC CRM. The NZETC collection currently includes over 2500 texts covering 110,000 topics.
