This is the second book based on the 5S (Societies Scenarios Spaces Structures Streams)
approach to digital libraries (DLs). Leveraging the first volume on Theoretical Foundations
we focus on the key issues of evaluation and integration. These cross-cutting issues serve as a
bridge for those interested in DLs connecting the introduction and formal discussion in the
first book with the coverage of key technologies in the third book and of illustrative
applications in the fourth book. These two topics have central importance in the DL field
allowing it to be treated scientifically as well as practically. In the scholarly world we
only really understand something if we know how to measure and evaluate it. In the Internet era
of distributed information systems we only can be practical at scale if we integrate across
both systems and their associated content. Evaluation of DLs must take place atmultiple levels
so we can address the different entities and their associated measures. Thus for digital
objects we assess accessibility pertinence preservability relevance significance
similarity and timeliness. Other measures are specific to higher-level constructs like
metadata collections catalogs repositories and services.We tie these together through a
case study of the 5SQual tool which we designed and implemented to perform an automatic
quantitative evaluation of DLs. Thus across the Information Life Cycle we describe metrics
and software useful to assess the quality of DLs and demonstrate utility with regard to
representative application areas: archaeology and education. Though integration has been a
challenge since the earliest work on DLs we provide the first comprehensive 5S-based formal
description of the DL integration problem cast in the context of related work. Since
archaeology is a fundamentally distributed enterprise we describe ETANADL for integrating
Near Eastern Archeology sites and information. Thus we show how 5S-based modeling can lead to
integrated services and content. While the first book adopts a minimalist and formal approach
to DLs and provides a systematic and functional method to design and implement DL exploring
services here we broaden to practical DLs with richer metamodels demonstrating the power of
5S for integration and evaluation.
