Digital Libraries: From Digital Resources to Challenges in Scientific Data Sharing and Re-Use

Digital libraries and digital archives are the information management systems for storing, indexing, searching, accessing, curating and preserving digital resources which manage our cultural and scientific knowledge heritage (KH). They act as the main conduits for widespread access and exploitation of KH related digital resources by engaging many different types of users, ranging from generic and leisure to students and professionals. In this chapter, we describe the evolution of digital libraries and archives over the years, starting from Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), passing through monolithic and domain specific systems, up to service-oriented and component- based architectures. In particular, we present some specific achievements in the field: the DELOS Reference Model and the DelosDLMS, which provide a con- ceptual reference and a reference implementation for digital libraries; the FAST annotation service, which defines a formal model for representing and search- ing annotations over digital resources as well as a RESTful Web service imple- mentation of it; the NESTOR model for digital archives, which introduces an alternative model for representing and managing archival resources in order to enhance interoperability among archives and make access to them faster; and, the CULTURA environment, which favours user engagement over multimedia digital resources. Finally, we discuss how digital libraries and archives are a key technology for facing upcoming challenges in data sharing and re-use. Indeed, due to the rapid evolution of the nature of research and scientific publishing which are increasingly data-driven, digital libraries and archives are also progressively ad- dressing the issues of managing scientific data. In this respect, we focus on some key building blocks of this new vision: data citation to foster accessibility to scientific data as well as transparency and verifiability of scientific claims, re- producibility in science as an exemplar showcase of how all these methods are indispensable for addressing fundamental challenges, and keyword-based search over relation/structured data to empower natural language access to scientific data.