English summaries

International journal publications

1. Ford, J., Zhao, Y., Ye, S., Zhang, S., Makedon, F., Le, Z., Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (n.d.) "Visualizing Negotiation Communications in Setting Library Sharing Policies", International Journal of Applied Systemic Studies (IJASS) (to appear). [περίληψη] [full text]

Today's libraries have evolved to contain a very broad and diverse range of resources, each needing different types of conditions for sharing, depending on their modality (from books to videos and databases), source (from an author, repository, or museum), copyright conditions, and mode of usage (e.g. whether it is for scientific research or commercial use, and sensitive or rare). In this paper, we introduce and discuss a flexible, semi-automated mechanism to assist in setting policies and tracking their implementation based on SCENS, the Secure Content Access Negotiation System, a web-based negotiation system. We consider how SCENS can be extended and applied to libraries, including as a tool for reconciling multi-institutional or multi-national policies. We also show how monitoring of SCENS negotiations can help set library sharing policies and resolve future conflicts by keeping track of the evolution of the sharing agreements.

2. Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S. (n.d.) "Greek Libraries: A Proposal for Effective Dealing with Virtual Reference", New Library World Periodical (to appear). [περίληψη] [full text]
3. Gavrilis, D., Georgiou, P., Papadatou, F., Tsakonas, G. (2005) "Kosmopolis Digital Collection", DigiCULT.info, [10], Oct. 2005, pp. 20-21. [περίληψη] [full text]

Kosmopolis is a digital collection including the full text content of twenty Greek periodicals from the mid-19th century up to the beginning of the 20th. The project is being carried out by the Library & Information Service of the University of Patras within the framework of the TELEPHAESSA project in a partnership with the Department of Greek Literature of the University of Patras and The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (E.L.I.A.). The project is funded jointly by the European Social Fund and the Greek Ministry of Education within the 3rd Community Support Framework.

4. Nomikos, C., Rondogiannis, P., Gergatsoulis, M. (2005) "Temporal Stratification Tests for Linear and Branching-time Deductive Databases", Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 342, iss. 2-3, pp. 382-415, September 2005. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
5. Koulouris, A, Kapidakis, S (2005) "Access and Reproduction Policies of University Digital Collections", Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JOLIS), vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 25-33, March 2005. [περίληψη] [full text - "This paper has been accepted for publication in Journal of Librarianship and Information Science and the final (edited, revised and typeset) version of this paper has published in Journal of Librarianship and Information Science Vol 37/Issue 1, March/2005 by Sage Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © Sage Publications Ltd, 2005."]

   The access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of ten leading university digital libraries worldwide are classified according to factors such as the creation type of the material, acquisition method, copyright ownership etc. The relationship of these factors is analyzed, showing how acquisition methods and copyright ownership affect the access and reproduction policies of digital collections. The article concludes with rules about which factors lead to specific policies. For example, when the library has the copyright of the material, reproduction for private use is provided usually free with a credit to the source or otherwise mostly under fair use provisions, but commercial reproduction needs written permission and fees are charged. Finally, common practice on access and reproduction policies are extracted and conventional policies are mapped onto digital policies.

6. Prokopiadou, G., Papatheodorou, C., Moschopoulos, D. (2004) "Integrating Knowledge Management Tools for Government Information", Government Information Quarterly, iss. 21, 2004, pp. 170-198. [περίληψη] [full text]
7. Stavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M., Doulkeridis, C., Zafeiris, V. (2004) "Representing and Querying Histories of Semistructured Databases Using Multidimensional OEM", Information Systems, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 461-482, September 2004. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
8. Gergatsoulis M., Nomikos C. (2004) "A proof procedure for temporal logic programming", International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 417-443, April 2004. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
9. Afrati, F., Gergatsoulis, M., Toni, F. (2003) "Linearizability on Datalog Programs", Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 308, iss. 1-3, pp. 199-226, November 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]
10. Pierrakos, D., Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Spyropoulos, C.D. (2003) "Web Usage Mining as a Tool for Personalization: A Survey", User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, vol. 13(4), pp. 311-372, November 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]
11. Kapidakis, S. (2002) "Document Delivery System for Greek Libraries", The Electronic Library (Emerald ISSN 0264-0473) vol. 20, no. 6, 2002, pp. 496-503. [περίληψη] [full text]

We explain the capabilities of the current Union Catalogue application, which assists the cooperation in 232 libraries throughout the country. Using this application, the librarians search for the desired scientific journals, locate the possible provider libraries and select some of them. Afterwards they can monitor the status of the order until it is completed. The librarians that serve articles, examine their pending orders in their screen and handle them by locating the printed journal and sending the article in the designated way and update the order status.
Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the successor application, that we have already start preparing: easier - and independent of other libraries - update of journal data, capability of using external sources of journal collections and also information about article details, for detecting articles in journals, and exploration of electronic sources of full text archives, for serving articles without human intervention.

12. Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Spyropoulos, C.D. (2002) "Discovering User Communities on the Internet using Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques", Interacting with Computers, vol. 14(6), pp. 761-791, 2002. [περίληψη] [full text]
13. Mitakos, T., Gergatsoulis, M., Stavrakas, Y., Ioannidis, E. (2001) "Representing Time-Dependent Information in Multidimensional XML", Journal of Computing and Information Technology, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 233-238, 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]
14. Papatheodorou, C. (2001) "Machine Learning in User Modeling", In G. Paliouras, V. Karkaletsis, C. Spyropoulos eds., "Machine Learning and Applications", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), No 2049: Springer-Verlag, 2001, pp. 286-294. [περίληψη] [full text]
15. Rondogiannis, P., Gergatsoulis, M. (2001) "The Branching-time Transformation Technique for Chain Datalog Programs", Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 71-94, 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]
16. Karvounarakis, G., Kapidakis, S. (2000) "Submission and repository management of digital libraries using WWW", Computer Networks: The international Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (Elsevier Science), vol. 34, no. 6, December 2000, pp. 861-872. [περίληψη] [full text]

Digital library objects can be quite complex, with a lot of metadata and data in different digital forms, and currently, most installations of digital library systems need computer expert personnel to administer and maintain them. We designed and implemented tools to simplify addition, modification and numerous other maintenance actions in a digital library, for use by content contributors (where appropriate) and librarians without special computer training.
Our tools provide an easy way to input or modify the metadata describing a submission and also to upload the digital documents, as well as inspect, commit or modify new submissions (and old objects) to a set of collections, even with different metadata fields. They are easy to install, while - at the same time - they are powerful and configurable.
The tools are modular and generic, and cover even rare requirements. The configuration choices allow the customization of the tools for use with different digital library systems using different metadata formats, fields, languages and many optional features, depending on the desired sophistication of the environment.

17. Kapidakis, S., Sairamesh, J., Terzis, S. (2000) "A Framework for Performance Monitoring, Load Balancing, Adaptive Timeouts and Quality of Service in Digital Libraries", Special Issue In the Tradition of Alexandrian Scholars, International Journal of Digital Library, Springer-Verlag, vol. 3, no. 1, July 2000, pp. 19-35. [περίληψη] [full text]

    In this paper, we investigate the issues of performance management in large scale, autonomous and federated Digital Library systems, performing the tasks of indexing, searching and retrieval of information objects. We defined a management architecture and performance framework for measuring and monitoring the behavior of digital libraries as they operate. Our architecture and mechanisms are easily applicable to other digital library systems of similar flavor and architecture.
    We implemented this architecture over a testbed of Dienst servers using real data and workload from the operational NCSTRL system. We defined the relevant parameters for investigating the performance of the servers and we developed visualization tools to monitor the parameters. In addition, our performance framework provides mechanisms for load-balancing of search requests in a network of digital library servers. We demonstrated this by building a testbed for investigating a few novel load balancing policies. Given that network delays and outages are unpredictable over the Internet, we have developed new adaptive mechanisms to detect timeouts and provide quality of service.

18. Houstis, C., Nikolaou, C., Lalis, S., Kapidakis, S., Chrisophides, V. (1998) "Open Scientific Data Repositories Architecture", invited position paper, Invitational Workshop on Distributed Information, Computation and Process Management for Scientific and Engineering Environments proceedings, NSF sponsord, Washington DC, May 15-16, 1998. [περίληψη] [full text]

The transparent combination of independent scientific repositories proves to be a difficult task. These systems have a widely heterogeneous user community, ranging from authorities and scientists with varying technical and environmental expertise as well as the public. To address these problems we envision an open environment with a middleware architecture that combines digital library technology, information integration mechanisms and workflow-based systems to address scalability both at the data repositories level and the user level. A hybrid approach is adopted where the middleware infrastructure contains a dynamic scientific collaborative work environment and mediation to provide both the scientists and simple users the means to access globally distributed heterogeneous scientific information. The proposed architecture consists of three main object types: data collections, mediators, and programs. Every object in the system has metadata associated with it. Access to the system, is given through a single web-based interface, which allows users to browse through the object collections in order to discover data sets, mediators, applications, and programs of interest.

19. Tsiknakis, M., Chronaki, C., Kapidakis, S., Nikolaou, C., Orphanoudakis, S. (1997) "An Integrated Architecture for the Provision of Health Telematic Services through Application of Digital Library Technologies", Special Issue for Digital Library technologies in Healthcare, International Journal of Digital Library, Springer-Verlag, vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 257-277. [περίληψη] [full text]

This paper presents the results of an ongoing effort for the design and implementation of an architecture, based on digital library technologies, for the provision of user-oriented telematic services in a regional healthcare network. Specifically, it addresses issues related to the provision of user-oriented services, transparent to the needs of different user groups and the requirements of specific tasks, based on: a)meta-information for the creation of an information infrastructure for the regional
healthcare network which is, effectively, a multimedia distributed digital library, b) intelligent information retrieval strategies to selectively retrieve information from multimedia data, c) agent-based technologies for effective service delivery adapted to the current user needs and the task at hand, and d) middleware services that explicitly reveal not only the characteristics of the information sources, but also address the context of specific telematic services, through appropriate mediation mechanisms.

International conference publications

1. Stasinopoulou, T., Bountouri, L., Kakali, C., Lourdi, I., Papatheodorou, C., Doerr, M. and Gergatsoulis, M. (2007) "Ontology-based Metadata Integration in the Cultural Heritage Domain". In D.H.-L. Goh, I. Solvberg, E. Rasmussen, T.H. Cao (eds.), Asian Digital Libraries - Looking Back 10 Years and Forging New Frontiers. 10th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, ICADL 2007, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 10-13, 2007, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4822, pages 165-175, Springer-Verlag, 2007. [περίληψη] [full text]

In this paper, we propose an ontology-based metadata integration methodology for the cultural heritage domain. The proposed real - world approach considers an integration architecture in which CIDOC/CRM ontology acts as a mediating scheme. In this context, we present a mapping methodology from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Dublin Core (DC) metadata to CIDOC/CRM, and discuss the faced difficulties.

2. Bountouri, L. and Gergatsoulis, M. (2007) "Interoperability between archival and bibliographic metadata", (Poster), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web (in conjunction with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference), Busan, Korea, 12 November, 2007. [περίληψη] [full text]

In this paper, we propose a crosswalk between Encoded Archival Description schema (EAD) and Metadata Object Description schema (MODS). Our target is to deal with interoperability issues between archival and bibliographic metadata, by defining the archival documentation philosophy and its basic characteristics, while trying to map them to standards used in bibliographic catalogs. Finally, we present an analysis of our crosswalk method, a conversion mechanism and a real world example

3. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2007) "Policy Decision Tree for Academic Digital Collections" (poster), Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2007), Budapest, Hungary, September 16-21, 2007, and Lectures Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 4675, pp.481-484. [περίληψη] [full text]

We present the results of a questionnaire survey for the access and reproduction policies of 67 digital collections in 34 libraries (national, academic, public, special, etc.) from 13 countries. We examine and analyze the above policies in relation to specific factors, such as, the acquisition method, copyright ownership, library type (national, academic, etc.), content creation (digitized, born-digital) and content type (audio, video, etc.); how these factors affect the policies of the examined digital collections. Responses were received from a range of library sectors but by far the best responses came from academic libraries, in which we focus. We extract policy (access, reproduction) rules and alternatives according to these factors that lead to a policy decision tree on digital information management for academic libraries. The resulting decision tree is based on a policy model; the model and tree are divided into two parts: for digitized and born-digital content.

4. Kakali, C., Lourdi, I., Stasinopoulou, T., Bountouri, L., Papatheodorou, C., Doerr, M. and Gergatsoulis, M. (2007). "Integrating Dublin Core metadata for cultural heritage collections using ontologies". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2007, August 27-31, Singapore, 2007. [περίληψη] [full text]

Cultural heritage collections are related to historical events and depict the customs of human societies. Their main characteristic is that they consist of heterogeneous objects, which usually are described by a variety of metadata schemas. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative plays a significant role in the interoperability of such collections. This paper proposes the exploitation of the CIDOC/CRM ontology as a mediating schema to which metadata sources can be mapped and integrated. In this context a methodology for mapping DC Types Vocabulary terms to CIDOC/CRM is presented, demonstrating a real-world effort for ontology-based metadata integration.

5. Koulouris, A., Kokkinos, D., Anagnostopoulos, A., Tanti, M. (2007) "The institutional repository of NTUA: challenges, concerns, pilot implementation and perspectives" (poster), Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2007), Uppsala, Sweden, June 13-16, 2007. [περίληψη] [full text (html-source), (pdf), (pdf-poster), (e-lis)]

   This poster describes the challenge, development and pilot implementation of the Institutional Repository (IR) at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Our primary goal is to establish new routines to academic community for ETDs, e-submission and self-archiving. Current progress constitutes the preparation and implementation of a web-based e-submission form for ETDs and its relevant online help (in Greek and English); the necessary modification and addition of Dublin Core (DC) metadata fields for ETDs DC registry; and the policies for, metadata storage and accessibility, copyright ownership and access of ETDs. Additionally, modifications have been made to the DSpace web interface for satisfying our user-centered needs. Current steps include the formal promotion of ETDs and e-submission procedure, and the evaluation of the pilot testing period (approximately six months) of IR. Future plans: personalization, integration of DL collections and services, submission of modifications to the DSpace development community; participation in NDLTD Union Catalogue and movement.

6. Arahova, A. and Kapidakis, S. (2006) "Marketing e-partnerships in Greece between libraries, archives and museums. A new age has just started", IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations), 72nd World Conference, August 20-24, 2006, Seoul, Korea. [περίληψη] [full text]
7. Arahova, A. and Kapidakis, S. (2006) "Globalization and Library' Management: Practical Ideas for Effective Strategic Methods", IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations), 72nd World Conference, Pre-Conference, M&M Section, August 16-18, 2006, Shanghai, China. [περίληψη] [full text]
8. Lourdi, I. and Papatheodorou, C. (2006) "Metadata policies for the description of digital folklore collections", Proceedings of 3rd International Conference of Museology & Annual Conference of AVICOM, Mytilene, June 5-9, 2006. [περίληψη] [full text]

The implementation of various technologies and computational applications in digitization projects of folklore collections have as a goal to preserve and to show through the web the cultural heritage of a country to a wide audience. The current requirements for "rich" information discovery and retrieval from heterogeneous resources make necessary to have a common policy for collection administration and description without concerning about the nature of the holding institution (museums, libraries, archives). In all cases, the expected benefits from digitization projects are almost the same, but the main difference is in the material description policy, such as: from a library perspective, the documentation focuses most on the bibliographic item and not on the collection as an entity but from a museum perspective, items are described in the context of the collection they belong to according to thematic or spatial criteria. In a digitization project besides the selection and implementation of the adequate system, it is also important to have the right metadata schema in order to satisfy all information needs. For this purpose they have been developed many metadata standards either by international committees or by local projects that preserve and describe cultural heritage collections, providing simultaneously to users rich in semantics information. From the administrative point of view, this means that between separate digital collections there must be interoperability or even combination of various metadata standards. This paper will try to approach in a theoretical and practical way the policies for design a metadata model in order to document a digitized folklore collection. We will focus mostly on how to describe a collection of folklore items that is exposed, as a museum collection, but in an academic library. Our main goal is to discuss and to show how a folklore collection can be documented both from a museum and library perspective, without losing its nature and unique characteristics. More specifically, we will define the requirements that a metadata model needs to cover for describing compound digital folklore collections and how this model is able to facilitate efficient navigation through the collection material. We will refer to specific metadata standards about cultural heritage collections and we will investigate various ways for achieving metadata interoperability. In the end we will analyze the differences between describing a collection from a museum and from a library perspective and we will propose a way to combine them by keeping also their creation context and their purpose.

9. Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S. (2006) "Collaboration, interactivity. Using virtual technology at a policy guide in knowledge sharing among libraries", BOBCATSSS 2006, EUCLIB (European Association for Library and Information Education and Research), Tallinn, Esthonia, January 30-February 2, 2006. [περίληψη] [full text]
10. Gergatsoulis M., Lilis P. (2005) "Multidimensional RDF", 4th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), Aghia Napa, Cyprus, Oct. 31-Nov. 4, 2005. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
11. Tsakonas, G. (2005) "Open Access Through the User's Looking Glass", 1st Workshop on E-Prints for Library and Information Science, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, October 22, 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]

Open access archives, repositories, directories and digital libraries spread widely as a result of technologic interventions and a reaction to demanding and competitive economical conditions. Although these innovative systems, that challenge traditional structures of the publishing economy, have rapidly developed, little significance has been given to the user interaction within their frames. All system developments and collection growth policies have been based on stakeholders' view of the information management; users' participation in evaluation, feedback and design is quite limited. Open access systems and their acceptance is not solely based on the integrated technologies, the innovative marketing policies and the economical convenient schemes, but requires the complete support and acceptance by the end users themselves. This presentation aims at providing a user-centred looking glass to view, to assess and improve the effectiveness of E-LIS' usage. Based on an Interaction Evaluation triptych framework this presentation introduces particular user-centered evaluation axes for E-LIS and correlates the effective user interaction with its acceptance and promotion.

12. Arahova, A. (2005) "Empowering our Libraries, Empowering our Education System: Using the Research Results for Implementing not the Best, but the Most Effective Policy for School Libraries", Round Table is: Experiences in collaboration between public libraries and school libraries. Feria de Madrid, International Book Exposition, LIBER, October 14, 2005, Madrid. [περίληψη] [full text]
13. Arahova, A., Christodoulakis, S., Arapi, P., Moumoutzis, N., Patel, M., Kapidakis, S., Bountouri, L. (2005) "Interoperability of eLearning Applications with Audiovisual Digital Libraries", Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2005), Vienna, Austria, September 18-23, 2005, and Lectures Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 3652, pp.436-447. [περίληψη] [full text]
14. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2005) "Policy Model for University Digital Collections", Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2005), Vienna, Austria, September 18-23, 2005, and Lectures Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 3652, pp. 356-367. [περίληψη] [full text]

The access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of ten leading university digital libraries worldwide are classified according to factors such as the creation type of the material, acquisition method, copyright ownership etc. The relationship of these factors is analyzed, showing how acquisition methods and copyright ownership affect the access and reproduction policies of digital collections. We conclude with rules about which factors lead to specific policies. For example, when the library has the copyright of the material, the reproduction for private use is usually provided free with a credit to the source or otherwise mostly under fair use provisions, but the commercial reproduction needs written permission and fees are charged. The extracted rules, which show the common practice on access and reproduction policies, constitute the policy model. Finally, conventional policies are mapped onto digital policies.

15. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2005) "Policy Model for National and Academic Digital Collections" (poster), Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2005), Vienna, Austria, September 18-23, 2005, and Lectures Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 3652, pp. 525-526. [περίληψη] [full text]

The access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of fifteen leading academic and national digital libraries worldwide are classified according to factors such as the creation type of the material, acquisition method and copyright ownership. The relationship of these factors and policies is analyzed and quantitative remarks are extracted. We propose a policy model for the digital content of the national and academic libraries. The model consists of rules, supplemented by their exceptions, about which factors lead to specific policies. We derive new policy rules on access and reproduction when different copyright terms are applied. We conclude with findings on policies. Finally, we compare national and academic library policies, showing interesting results that arise on their similarities and differences.

16. Arahova, A. (2005) "New Model for Using the Research Results for Implementing not the Best, but the Most Effective Policy for School Libraries", 71st IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations) Conference, Main Conference, Oslo, Norway, August 14-18, 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]
17. Arahova, A. (2005) "Promoting Library Services, Designing Marketing Strategies, Evaluating our Past and our Present, Feeling more Optimistic about our Libraries Future", 71st IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations) Conference, Management & Marketing Section, Bergen, Norway, August 9-11, 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]
18. Afrati F., Chirkova R., Gergatsoulis M., Pavlaki V. (2005) "Designing Views to Efficiently Answer Real SQL Queries", In Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation, 6th International Symposium, SARA 2005, Airth Castle, Scotland, UK, July 2005, Proceedings, Jean-Daniel Zucker, Lorenza Saitta (editors), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) vol. 3607, pp. 332-346, Springer-Verlag, 2005. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
19. Lourdi, I., Nikolaidou, M. and Papatheodorou, C. (2004) "Implementing digital folklore collections", Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, e-Business and Applications (CSITeA-04), Cairo, December 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

In this paper, we present a metadata model to describe the digitized digital folklore collection of the Department of Greek Studies in the University of Athens. Folklore collection consists of different kinds of digitized material. The volume and the variety of material results to collection representation as a hierarchical structure, according to the type of objects, the corresponding chronological period and geographic region. Our goal was to preserve and popularize to every user all the precious information regarding collection material. For this purpose we develop a metadata model that enables efficient navigation to the notebooks sub-collection structures, as well as meaningful information retrieval to the collection objects.

20. Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S. (2004) "National Libraries and Academic Libraries: Partners in E-educational National and Global Action", International Conference on Libraries, Globalization and Cooperation (IFLA/FAIFE), Sofia, Bulgaria, November 3-5, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

The paper underlines the new role the National Libraries worldwide can play as electronic guides inside an organizational schedule where the meanings of collaboration and interactivity dominate. In the new electronic epoque, where the need of an effective national and international policy in the field of librarianship, as express of a general cultural policy, is more than imperative, National Libraries with the Academic Libraries can lay out a match of innovative guidelines. The point is how to provide not only information but also real knowledge to the patrons and the librarians themselves and how the whole thing can be done under the prearrangements of accuracy, promptness and validity. In the electronic epoque we live and work, we need the best results in the quicker time. We search for collaborative solutions worldwide; let's see how the National Libraries and Academic Libraries can be real e-educators.

21. Tsakonas, G., Kapidakis, S., Papatheodorou, C. (2004) "Evaluation of user interaction in digital libraries" (position paper), DELOS Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries, Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy, October 4-5, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]
22. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2004) "Considerations on Policies of University Digital Collections", Proceedings of the 6th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries (RCDL 2004), Pushchino, Russia, September 29-October 1, 2004, pp. 159-168. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

We examine the factors (creation type of the material, acquisition method, copyright ownership etc.) and the access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of ten leading university digital libraries. We classify the policies according to the factors and analyze their relation, showing how the acquisition method and the copyright ownership define the access and reproduction policies for the digital collections. We conclude with rules about which factors lead to specific policies. For example, when the library has the copyright of the material, the reproduction for private use is provided usually free with a credit to the source or otherwise mostly under fair use provisions and the commercial reproduction needs written permission from and fees paid to the library. Finally, we extract the common practice on access and reproduction policies and we map the conventional to digital policies.

23. Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S. (2004) "Greek Libraries: A Vision for a National Entrance to the Virtual Reference", 70th IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations) Conference, Management & Marketing Section, Sao Paolo, Brazil, September 18-20, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

    The paper attempts to identify strategic issues for Greek libraries wishing to pursue a more active policy with regard to the changes affecting librarian system due to the increased use of information and communication technologies. The article starts out by sketching the changes currently occurring in the organizational schedule of libraries in Greece. We can identify two major areas in which libraries can develop strategies to enhance services for their patrons. Following domains are discussed: collaborative design and the relation between physical and virtual learning environments. Next, possible implications for library staff regarding the changes are discussed. The article also includes thoughts on alignment between library strategy and the strategy of the Open University. Greece is standing in front of a new challenge; the extent and strength of the library support that can be offered to this new generation of distant learners! The point is to help the Greek patron in formulating his own information needs within a national collaborative virtual-based reference question forum. Greeks, as we think all people incoming in libraries, love the quick, accurate and friendly interaction between the patron and the librarian in intermediary face-to-face way.

24. Gavrilis, D., Georgiou, P., Papadatou, F., Tsakonas, G. (2004) "Kosmopolis: digital content in Greek language", Digital Resources for Humanities Conference 2004, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, September 5-8, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]
25. Lourdi, I. and Papatheodorou, C. (2004) "A metadata application profile for collection-level description of digital folklore resources", Proceedings of the 3rd International workshop on Presenting and Exploring Heritage on the Web (PEH'04), 15th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications DEXA 2004, August 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

    The preservation and representation of folklore collections is a basic priority for every country because they are valuable for studying the customs and the tradition of specific groups of people and places. However, for the heterogeneity and diversity of folklore resources (text, images, photographs, 3D objects, sound recordings, maps or even digital material), it is difficult to create a unified and semantically rich description concerning both the collections and their objects. In this paper we introduce an integrated metadata model by mixing elements of different metadata standards in order to make the navigation to the digital collection efficient and to provide the users with rich meaningful information retrieval to collection objects. The model fits with the requirements and the unique characteristics of the folklore collections and is focused on facilitating the retrieval of information to all the structural levels.

26. Prokopiadou, G., Papatheodorou, C., Moschopoulos, D. (2004) "Encoding of Public Records and Procedures in Electronic Registries", 3rd International Conference on Electronic Government - EGOV '04, Zaragoza, Spain, August 30-September 3, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]
27. Prokopiadou, G., Moschopoulos, D., Papatheodorou, C. (2004) "Information Management Systems for Ensuring the European Administrative Harmonization", 4th European Conference on E-Covernment, Dublin Castle, Ireland, June 17-18, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]
28. Potikas P., Gergatsoulis M., Rondogiannis P. (2004) "Using Branching-time Logic to Optimize an Extended Class of Datalog Programs", In G. Vouros and Th. Panayiotopoulos (editors), Proceedings (Companion Volume) of 3rd Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN'04), Samos, Greece, May 5-8, 2004, pp. 197-206. [περίληψη] [full text]
29. Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S. (2004) "National Libraries: A Perspective for a Leading Role in the E-Services Epoque", Proceedings of the International Conference on National Library Services (ΙCONLIS 2004), Calcutta, India, March 15-16, 2004, pp. 10-21. [περίληψη] [full text]

A principal aim of this work is to stimulate further discussion within and among national libraries and to underline their leading role in the field of e-services, especially e-learning and e-reference. Initially we quote a brief introduction to the history and the mission of the National Library of Greece and continually, we cite ideas about convenient access to the e-services within a patron-centered framework where the patron is the librarian himself. Finally we underline the role of the National Libraries in the social interaction and we give directions for a new more active role that the librarians of the National Libraries are able to play for the community's good.

30. Prokopiadou, G. (2004) "Access Tools to Government Information", Workshop "Public Sector Information: management and opportunities of re-use", Ionian University, Ionian Academy, Corfu, December 10, 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]
31. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2003) "Access and Reproduction Policies of the Digital Material of Seven National Libraries", Proceedings of the 5th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries (RCDL 2003), Saint-Petersburg, Russia, October 29-31, 2003, pp. 35-44. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

    We examine the access and reproduction policies of the digital material of seven national libraries that selected for the variation of their digital material and the diversification of their access policies. Our goal is to discover the differences among the implemented access policies of these national libraries. We analyze the access and reproduction policies that these libraries have implemented for their digital material showing the different levels of access, of the copyrights, and of the privacy and publicity rights. We emphasize the relation among acquisition method, copyright ownership, and access and reproduction policies, because, often, they define the policies. The implemented access policies differ in various aspects. We generalize them into one unified policy, which can implement the specific policies by varying some of its parameters. We study these parameters and explain their most useful alternative values and their semantics. We also foresee new policy parameters that will be appropriate to more complex policies that will be needed soon.

32. Gergatsoulis, M., Stavrakas, Y. (2003) "Representing Changes in XML Documents Using Dimensions in Database and XML Technologies", Proceedings of the 1st International XML Database Symposium, XSym 2003, Berlin Germany, September 2003 , Z. Bellahsene, A. B. Chaudhri, E. Rahm, M. Rys, R. Unland (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2824, pp. 208-222, Springer-Verlag, 2003. [περίληψη] [abstract] [full text]
33. Pierrakos, D., Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Dikaiakos, M. (2003) "Construction of Web Community Directories using Document Clustering and Web Usage Mining", Proceedings of the 1st European Web Mining Forum, Workshop at ECML/PKDD-2003, Cavtat-Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 22, 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]
34. Pierrakos, D., Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Dikaiakos, M. (2003) "Construction of Web Community Directories by Mining Usage Data", 2nd Hellenic Data Management Symposium , Athens, Greece, September 4-5, 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]
35. Sfakakis, M., and Kapidakis, S. (2003) "An Architecture for Online Information Integration on Concurrent Resources Access on a Z39.50 Environment", 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries, Trondheim, August 17-22, 2003 and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 2769, pp. 288-299. [περίληψη] [full text]

The lack of information integration, by the existing online systems, for resource sharing in a distributed environment, impacts directly to the development and the usage of dynamically defined Virtual Union Catalogues. In this work we propose a design approach for the construction of an online system, able to improve the information integration when a Dynamic Resource Collection is used, by taking into account the restrictions imposed by the network environment and the Z39.50 protocol. The main strength of this architecture is the presentation of de-duplicated results to the user, by the gradual application of the duplicate detection process in small received packets (sets of results), as the data packets flow from the participating servers. While it presents results to the user, it also processes a limited amount of data ahead of time, to be ready before the user requests them.

36. Prokopiadou, G., Papatheodorou, C., Moschopoulos, D. (2003) "Government Information Centres: digital library architecture for depicting Public Sector's hierarchy", Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on E-Government, Dublin, Ireland, July 3-4, 2003, pp. 39-58. [περίληψη] [full text]
37. Zygogiannis, K., Papatheodorou, C., Chandrinos, K., Makropoulos, K. (2003) "Automatic Web Resource Discovery for Subject Gateways", Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human - Computer Interaction, (HCI International 2003), Crete, Greece, June 22-27, 2003, vol. I, pp. 883-887. [περίληψη] [full text]
38. Prokopiadou, G. (2003) "Information Centers in Public Libraries", International Conference "Library Services for the Community", Goethe-Institut, Athens, June 2-4, 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]
39. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S., Zhao, Y. (2003) "Collections and Access Policies of the Digital Material of Ten National Libraries" (poster), Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2003), Houston, Texas, USA, May 27-31, 2003, p. 409. [περίληψη] [full text (pdf), (pdf-poster), (e-lis)]

    We examine and analyze the access policies of the digital collections of ten national libraries. We classify the implemented access policies, according to their characteristics, and we show their differences. We generalize the diversified access policies, by combining the varying parameters and other relevant emerging ones. Most national libraries prefer digitizing or make digitally available, part of their material, the one that is simpler in accessing restrictions, which was simpler to implement and more appropriate to do first. As this process evolves and matures, the libraries want to make more material available, and this will force them to handle material that is more complex in terms of copyright and access. Thus, we should predict and standardize new access policy variations. We propose a generalized access policy, on which, we classify the users up to four groups that have non-increasing access abilities, as will be defined by the implemented policy. We also propose new charging and delivery parameters for use or reproduction of the non-free and copyrighted digital material.

40. Ye, S., Makedon, F., Steinberg, T., Shen, L., Ford, J., Wang, Y., Zhao. Y. and Kapidakis. S. (2003) "SCENS: A system for the mediated sharing of sensitive data", Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2003), Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, May 27-31, 2003. [περίληψη] [full text]

This paper introduces SCENS, a Secure Content Exchange Negotiation System suitable for the exchange of private digital data that reside in distributed digital repositories. SCENS is an open negotiation system with flexibility, security and scalability. SCENS is currently being designed to support data sharing in scientific research, by providing incentives and goals specific to a research community. However, it can easily be extended to apply to other communities, such as government, commercial and other types of exchanges. It is a trusted third party software infrastructure enabling independent entities to interact and conduct multiple forms of negotiation.

41. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2003) "Three Disposition Policies of Electronic Theses and Dissertations", Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2003), Berlin, Germany, May 21-24, 2003, pp. 84-90. [περίληψη] [full text (html), (pdf), (e-lis)]

We examine the disposition policies of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) among three institutions: National Documentation Centre of Greece (NDC), Virginia Tech (VT) and West Virginia University (WVU) of USA. In addition, we compare the implemented disposition policies by the three institutions, and we analyze their similarities and differences. We select the three institutions because they comprise a representative sample of different national ETD initiatives. While the content of the dissertations and the technologies to provide them exist, the availability is limited by the absence of decisions concerning the applicability of policies. We suggest alternative access policies in order the ETDs to be more open and accessible to all. We analyze these questions and make suggestions about the solution approaches of these problems, especially solutions about the disposition policies of the digital material. Finally, we compare the implemented and the proposed policies.

42. Makedon, F., Ford, J., Shen, L., Steinberg, T., Saykin, A., Wishart, H. and Kapidakis, S. (2002) "MetaDL: A digital library of metadata for sensitive or complex research data", Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries, Rome, September 16-18, 2002 and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 2458, pp. 375-389. [περίληψη] [full text]

    Traditional digital library systems have difficulties when managing heterogeneous datasets that have limitations on their distribution. Collections of digital libraries have to be accessed individually and through non-uniform interfaces. By introducing a level of abstraction, a Meta-Digital Library or MetaDL, users gain a central access portal that allows for prioritized queries, evaluation and rating of the results, and secure transactions to obtain primary data. This paper demonstrates the MetaDL architecture with an application from human brain neuroimaging research, BrassDL, the Brain Support Access System Digital Library. This is the first such system that covers all aspects of a digital library for sensitive and complex human brain data, from secure acquisition and access, user to user system-supported transactions, to legal, ethical and sustainability issues.

43. Sfakakis, M. and Kapidakis, S. (2002) "User Behavior Tendencies on Data Collections in a Digital Library", Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Digital Libraries, Rome, September 16-18, 2002 and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 2458, pp. 550-559. [περίληψη] [full text]

We compare the usage of a Digital Library with many different categories of collections, by examining its log files for a period of twenty months, and we conclude that the access points that the users mostly refer to, depend heavily on the type of content of the collection, the detail of the existing metadata and the target user group.
We also found that most users tend to use simple query structures (e.g. only one search term) and very few and primitive operations to accomplish their request. Furthermore, as they get more experienced, they reduce the number of operations in their sessions.

44. Stavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M., Doulkeridis, C., Zafeiris, V. (2002) "Accomodating Changes in Semistructured Databases Using Multidimensional OEM", in Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'2002), Proceedings of the 6th East-European Conference, Bratislava, Slovakia, September 8-11, 2002, Y. Manolopoulos and P. Navat (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2435, pp. 360-373, Springer-Verlag, 2002. [περίληψη] [full text]
45. Zafeiris, V., Doulkeridis, C., Stavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M. (2002) "An Infrastructure for Manipulating Multidimensional Semistructured Data", Proceedings of the 1st Hellenic Data Management Symposium, HDMS'2002, Athens, Greece, July 22-23, 2002. [περίληψη] [full text]
46. Papatheodorou, C., Vassiliou, A., Simon, B. (2002) "Discovery of Ontologies for Learning Resources Using Word-based Clustering", Proceedings of the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA 2002), Denver, Colorado, USA, June 24-29, 2002, pp. 1523-1528. [περίληψη] [full text]
47. Sfakakis, M. and Kapidakis, S. (2002) "Evaluating User Behavior Tendencies on Data Collections in a Digital Library", DELOS Workshop on Evaluation of Digital Libraries: Testbeds, Measurements, and Metrics, Budapest, June 6-7, 2002. [περίληψη] [full text]

We evaluate the usage of a Digital Library with many different collections, by examining its log files, and we concluded that the access points that the users mostly refer to, depend heavily on the type of content of the collection. We also found that most users not only tend to use simple query structures (e.g. one search term) and very few operations per session but they also reduce the complexity of their sessions, as they get more experienced.

48. Stavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M. (2002) "Multidimensional Semistructured Data: Representing Context-Dependent Information on the Web", in Advanced Information Systems Engineering, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference (CAISE' 2002), Toronto Ontario, Canada, May 27-31, 2002, A. B. Pidduck, J. Mylopoulos, C. Woo, T. Ozsu (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2348, pp. 183-199, Springer-Verlag, 2002. [περίληψη] [full text]
49. Pierrakos, D., Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Spyropoulos, C.D. (2001) "KOINOTITES: A Web Usage Mining Tool for Personalization", Proceedings of the Panhellenic Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Patras, December 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]
50. Potikas, P., Rondogiannis, P., Gergatsoulis, M. (2001) "A Transformation Technique for Datalog Programs Based on Non-Deterministic Constructs", in 11th International Workshop on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR'2001), Paphos, Cyprus, November 28-30, 2001. Selected papers. A. Pettorossi (editor), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2372, pp. 25-45, Springer-Verlag 2002. A preliminary version also appears in the Pre-Proceedings of LOPSTR' 01, pp. 1-8. [περίληψη] [full text]
51. Gergatsoulis, M., Stavrakas, Y., Karteris, D. (2001) "Incorporating Dimensions in XML and DTD", in Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA'2001), International Conference, Munich, Germany, September 2001, Proceedings, H. C. Mayr, J. Lazansky, G. Quirchmayr and P. Vogel (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2113, pp. 646-656, Springer-Verlag, 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]
52. Gergatsoulis, M., Stavrakas, Y., Karteris, D., Mouzaki, A., Sterpis, D. (2001) "A web-based system for handling multidimensional information through MXML", in Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'2001), 5th East European Conference, Vilnius, Lithuania, September 2001, Proceedings, A. Caplinskas and J. Eder (editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2151, pp. 352-365, Springer-Verlag, 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]
53. Kapidakis, S., Loverdos, C. (2001) "Flexible, service-based content presentation: The Hellenic Dissertations Presentation System" (demonstration), 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, September 4-8, 2001, Darmstadt, Germany. [περίληψη] [full text]

We describe an architecture for the presentation of the digital content of the Hellenic Dissertations database, consisting of about twelve thousand records and two million pages. Our architecture is based on a flexible service registration and discovery mechanism, which can be used to reconfigure the Presentation System even at runtime. Services are responsible not only for presentation but also for various document conversions, format transformations, authorization policies enforcement and watermarking. The architecture encourages modular programming, by allowing services to cooperate.

54. Mitakos, T., Gergatsoulis, M., Stavrakas, Y., Ioannidis, E. (2001) "Representing Time-Dependent Information in Multidimensional XML", in Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Information Technology Interfaces, Pula, Croatia, June 19-22, 2001, pp. 111-116. [περίληψη] [full text]
55. Kapidakis, S. (2001) "Interlibrary loan system for Greek libraries" (poster), NIT2001, The 12th International Conference on New Information Technology - Global Digital Library Development in the New Millenium, Beijing, China, May 29-31, 2001, pp. 511-512. [περίληψη] [[full text]

    The Union Journal Catalogue application of NDC holds the scientific journals that are available in all Greek libraries. In the new Union Catalogue, currently in development from NDC, the journal data are not in principle inside the ordering system. Theoretically, every information repository can maintain its own list of journal holdings, and every retrieval operation will query all such distributed sources. We still store all user and order data inside the Union Catalogue of NDC, along with the location of the journal data sources and information about their format and retrieval procedures. The order data contains (by copying) all needed information from the journal data.
    Any data source can contain holding data for many libraries. Currently, the data sources can provide their data in Z39.50 and http. There are many Z39.50 servers and clients, and the Union Catalog can work with any of them - normally the one provided by the source will be used, that can explore the full functionality of the source. The user interacts with the client, until he locates the journal he is looking for. The Union Catalog is aware of the user choice by using proxy technology, and intercepting, decoding and recording the relevant answers to the user requests (Z39.50 answers in our case).
    The new Union Catalogue also supports multiple levels of retrieval: searching for articles from article information (e.g. author, title) using appropriate databases with article information describing the journal and the pages that contain it, and offers searching for the journal on the data sources to find the libraries that can provide it.

56. Kapidakis, S., Saltogiannis, C. (2001) "A Submission and Approval System for the collection of Electronic Theses and Dissertations", ETD 2001 (the 4th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations), California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, March 22-24, 2001, pp. 18-19. [περίληψη] [full text]

Digital library objects may be quite complex, with a lot of metadata and data in different digital forms. We designed and implemented a tool to simplify addition, modification and other maintenance actions in a digital library for use by content contributors and librarians, without special computer training.
So as to be user-friendly the tool is used through web-interface. It generates dynamically all the required digital forms, that are used to submit the metadata through the use of configuration files. The metadata conform to existing theses standards and we provide help to explain the exact interpretation of each field. The configuration files, that can be produced easily, contain information about all the different fields of the generated form. Information to control the appearance of a specific field, to control if it is obligatory, if it is repeated, and other specific information such as its type (date, number) e.t.c.
The operations that the tool handles can be divided into three functions: submission of a new digital library object, modification of an older submission and the process of approving and committing submitted metadata and digital formats. The tool is being used right now with success, for the submission of electronic theses (PhDs) in the National Documentation Center of Greece.

57. Kapidakis, S., Zorbadelos, K. (2000) "An Open Digital Library Ordering System" (short paper and demonstration), 3rd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lisbon, September 18-20, 2000, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1923, p. 498-501. [περίληψη] [full text]

    In this paper we briefly describe an open ordering manipulation system with a WWW interface. The orders concern articles of scientific journals. Customer users can search in data sources from a variety of suppliers for articles of journals and order specific pages of the articles. Their search can also include electronic journals in which case their orders can be fulfilled, charged and delivered electronically as an e-mail attachment without needing an operator. The various suppliers can view orders made to them and service them. A customer can direct his order to several suppliers declaring an order of preference. We also introduce the issues involved and present our open system solution that separates the search from the order procedures. Searching can use any external interface provided by the various data sources and intercepts. 

58. SStavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M., Mitakos, T. (2000) "Representing Context-Dependent Information using Multidimensional XML", in Proceedings of the 4th European Conference, ECDL 2000 and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1923, pp. 368-371, Springer-Verlag, 2000. [περίληψη] [full text]
59. Stavrakas, Y., Gergatsoulis, M., Rondogiannis, P. (2000) "Multidimensional XML", in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop "Distribited Communities on the Web (DCW'2000), Quebec City, Canada, June 2000 and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1830, pp. 100-109, Springer-Verlag, 2000. [περίληψη] [full text]
60. Karvounarakis, G., Kapidakis, S. (2000) "Submission and repository management of digital libraries using WWW", TERENA Networking Conference 2000, Lisbon, May 22-25, 2000. [περίληψη] [full text]

We designed and implemented tools to simplify addition, modification and numerous other maintenance actions in a digital library, for use by content contributors (where appropriate) and librarians without special computer training. Our tools provide an easy way to input or modify the metadata describing a submission and also to upload the digital documents, as well as inspect, commit or modify new submissions (and old objects) to a set of collections, even with different metadata fields.
They are easy to install, while - at the same time - they are powerful and configurable. The configuration choices allow the customization of the tools for use with different digital library systems using different metadata formats, fields, languages and many optional features, depending on the desired sophistication of the environment.

61. Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Spyropoulos, C.D., Tzitziras, P. (2000) "Large-Scale Mining of Usage Data on Web Sites", AAAI 2000 Spring Symposium on Adaptive User Interfaces, Stanford, CA, 2000, pp. 92-97. [περίληψη] [full text]
62. Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Spyropoulos, C.D. (2000) "Clustering the Users of Large Web Sites into Communities", Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2000), P. Langley ed., Morgan Kaufmann, 2000, pp. 719-726. [περίληψη] [full text]
63. Kapidakis, S. (1999) "Issues in the development and operation of a Digital Library", Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Paris, September 22-24, 1999, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1696, pp. 363-382. [περίληψη] [full text]

This paper briefly describes both organizational and technical issues and approaches involved in creating an operational digital library at the University of Crete, found at http://dlib.libh.uoc.gr/. We investigate and describe our approaches and experiences, the last few years, on setting in operation a Digital Library with many collections.
We had to analyze the library goals and user needs, to select appropriate software, to make flexible design for the additional functionality needed, to adapt and extend the selected software to make it applicable to the current demands, to install and configure the software, to improve it using feedback, and to interact with document authors and librarians to make the digital library friendly, usable and easily maintainable, and even to collect and digitize the library material. The final system is operated by current library personnel.
The main technical issues are related to the design, implementation and application of features of digital libraries, such as multilingual storage and interface, generalization of the software to permit searching on heterogeneous collections, adding support for the Z39.50 protocol and tools that simplify the configuration, administration and data insertion to the digital library, as well as tools to input or modify the metadata and to upload data, when submitting new documents in the digital library.

64. Kapidakis, S., Karvounarakis, G. (1999) "Submission and repository management tools for digital libraries, with WWW interface: a Demo proposal" (demonstration), 3rd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Paris, September 22-24, 1999, p. 495. [περίληψη] [full text]

    Our tools provide an easy way to input or modify the metadata describing a submission and also to upload the digital documents, as well as inspect, commit or modify new submissions or old objects. They also comply with multilingual and heterogeneous collection extensions, where the metadata fields describing each collections may be different. Finally, to be able to be widely used and to suit most needs, these tools are fully configurable (including paths, languages, fields per collection or even messages, colors etc) while at the same time their minimal configuration is very simple, especially when used with DIENST, by reading directly the DIENST configuration information.

65. Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Spyropoulos, C.D., Tzitziras, P. (1999) "From Web Usage Statistics to Web Usage Analysis", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Systems Man and Cybernetics, 1999, pp. II-159-164. [περίληψη] [full text]
66. Paliouras, G., Karkaletsis, V., Papatheodorou, C., Spyropoulos, C.D. (1999) "Exploiting Learning Techniques for the Acquisition of User Stereotypes and Communities", Proceedings of the International Conference on User Modelling (UM 99), CISM Courses and Lectures, no. 407: Springer-Verlag, 1999, pp. 169-178. [περίληψη] [full text]
67. Houstis, C., Nikolaou, C., Lalis, S., Kapidakis, S., Christophides, V., Tomasic, A., Simon, E. (1999) "Towards a next generation of open scientific data repositories and services", Special issue on Digital Libraries, CWI Quarterly (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica), vol. 12, no. 2, June 1999, Amsterdam Netherlands. [περίληψη] [full text]

Scientific repositories found in institutions and organizations consist of data and programs. Data consists principally of numeric data, images, and text documents. Programs consist principally of software methods for visualizing and processing data and simulators of natural processes. Data represents both measured physical behavior and the results of simulations. The integration and visualization of scientific repositories into an easily accessed interoperable networked environment is needed in many disciplines for both scientific and management purposes. To satisfy these needs we present an open hybrid architecture, which combines digital library technology, information integration mechanisms and workflow-based systems. Our experience is based on the THETIS project, a distributed collection of scientific repositories focused on supporting Coastal Zone Management of the Mediterranean Region in Europe. It will demonstrate its ability to respond to users such as scientists and public administration authorities that use scientific information for decision making.

68. Afrati, F., Gergatsoulis, M., Kavalieros, T. (1999) "Answering Queries using Materialized Views with Disjunctions", in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT'99), Jerusalem, Israel, January 10-12, 1999, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1540, pp. 435-452, Springer-Verlag. [περίληψη] [full text]
69. Kapidakis, S., Sairamesh, J., Terzis, S. (1998) "A Management Architecture for Measuring and Monitoring the Behavior of Digital Libraries", Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Crete, September 21-23, 1998, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1513, pp. 95-114. [περίληψη] [full text]

    In this paper, we investigate issues of performance management in Digital Libraries. We defined a management architecture for measuring and monitoring the behavior of digital libraries as they operate, so that we can make performance conclusions using real life digital library load. Our architecture can be easily applied on any digital library system, introducing minimal overhead to digital library performance, and requiring minimal changes to the digital library code. We implemented this architecture over a testbed of Dienst servers using real data and workload. We defined the relevant parameters for investigating the performance of the servers and we made visualization tools to study the performance results. We also demonstrated how the performance results can be used by the digital library itself, to produce advanced unattended operations, like load balancing and dynamic timeout adaptation.

70. Toraki, K., Kapidakis, S. (1998) "The Technical Chamber of Greece Digital Library: the vision of a special organisation to save and disseminate its information work through the network" (poster), 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Crete, September 21-23, 1998, pp. 691-692. [περίληψη] [full text]

We discuss the creation of a digital library which contains scientific work produced by the Technical Chamber of Greece and disseminated to its members through post or library services. The Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE) is the technical consultant to the Government as well as the professional organisation of greek engineers. A pilot TEE digital library has already been created in a computer of TEE with the cooperation of the ICS-FORTH, using the Dienst software. The electronic address of the digital library is: http://www.central.tee.gr/dlib. It contains in digital form scientific work produced by TEE, aiming to serve primarily its members all over the country but also any other interested in technical aspects. The documents that TEE hold include material mainly in greek, but in english as well.
During the pilot phase, separate contacts with people working at TEE have taken place in order to get the digital material. It has been noticed that the greatest difficulty is to organise and manage the collection of the various scientific works in digital form. The need for coordination and integration is stressed in order to achieve the best results. Some other issues to be taken into consideration are the cooperation with the computer department, the familiarity of library staff with the new type of application, the management and maintenance of the service. A very important issue is to make the digital library an element of the integrated information system of TEE.

71. Biagioni, S., Borbinha, J. L., Ferber, R., Hansen, P., Kapidakis, S., Kovacs, L., Roos, F., Vercoustre, A-M. (1998) "The ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library" (demonstration), 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Crete, September 21-23, 1998, pp. 905-906. [περίληψη] [full text]

    We implement and test a prototype infrastructure for networked access to a distributed multi-format collection of technical documents produced by ERCIM members. The collection is managed by a set of interoperating servers, based on the Dienst system. The aim is to assist ERCIM scientists to make their research results immediately available world-wide and provide them with appropriate on-line facilities to access the technical documentation of others working in the same field. Public access to this reference service is provided through Internet. The features of ETRDL include a Common User Interface, an Extended Metadata Set, a Common Classification Scheme, a Multilingual Interface, Multilingual Access and Browsing, Cross-language Querying and a Gateway to Z39.50.

72. Kapidakis, S., Mavroidis, I. (1998) "Unicode-based Digital Library Interface" (demonstration), 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Crete, September 21-23, 1998. [περίληψη] [full text]

A major problem many multilingual interfaces already developed face, is that HTML pages could, until recently, only support one character set from ISO 8859. All these character sets contain only a limited number of languages each, usually English and one or two other. As a result HTML pages could not display languages that did not coexist in the same character set.
A recent solution to this problem is the development of unicode which comes to unify all the different ISOs in one, containing all the languages. Java interfaces can solve multilingual problem posed by the limitations of ISO 8859 by using unicode, but they will introduce unecessary complexity on the majority of simple interfaces. The HTML pages supporting unicode (e.g. Netscape's recent version 4) are able to display text consisting of any different languages.
Thus, we developed a unicode-based digital library interface, which we applied on the dienst digital library software. Using this interface, results with text from many languages can coexist on the same page. We use this interface for accessing a digital library with documents in many languages, and we can handle all unicode-described languages.
Our technique indicates how such interfaces can be build, avoiding extensive changes to the digital library server code and with no changes to the multilingual - but no unicode-based - stored data. Our development is using the multilingual version of dienst, that we had previously developed.

73. Paliouras, G., Papatheodorou, C., Karkaletsis, V., Spyropoulos, C.D., Malaveta, V. (1998) "Learning User Communities for Improving the Services of Information Providers", Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL '98), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), no. 1513: Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 367-384. [περίληψη] [full text]
74. Rondogiannis, P., Gergatsoulis, M. (1998) "The Intensional implemantation technique for Chain Datalog programs", Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Languages for Intensional Programming (ISLIP'98), Palo Alto, California, May 7-9, 1998, pp. 55-64. [περίληψη] [full text]
75. Kapidakis, S., Nikolaou, C., Sairamesh, J., Terzis, S. (1997) "Demonstration on Measuring and Monitoring the Performance of DIENST" (demonstration), 1st European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Pisa, September 1-3, 1997. [περίληψη] [full text]

We analyzed the performance of the current DIENST system and studied various performance parameters (setup delays, response time, lock-waiting time, network delays) occurring in the DIENST software running in a computer and because of the communication that is carried out over the network. We used both instrumentation and log file analysis for investigating the user response time of the running system.
We use a simple client-server architecture model for performance management of the DIENST system. This model is based on ideas from SNMP based performance management in networks and distributed systems. We have broken down the performance monitoring framework into three main design components

76. Kapidakis, S., Nikolaou, C., Sairamesh, J. (1997) "Measuring and Monitoring the Performance of DIENST", 3rd Cabernet Plenary Workshop, Rennes, April 16-18, 1997. [περίληψη] [full text]

    A Dienst-based collection is managed by a set of interoperating Dienst servers distributed over the network. Each of these servers manages three basic library services: repositories of multi-format technical reports; indexes of technical reports collections and search engines for these indexes; user interfaces to provide front-end services for browsing, searching, and accessing the collections. A network of centralized Collection Servers provide directories of locations for all other services. These multiple Dienst servers interoperate to provide a logically integrated collection, even though the collection may physically be distributed over multiple sites. Each individual Dienst server ``knows'' about other sites, and visa-versa, by periodically polling the Collection Servers.
    Our implementation shows the performance of the three servers while in operation. We demonstrate performance variables that capture the behavior of the servers.

77. Sairamesh, J., Nikolaou, C., Kapidakis, S. (1996) "Architectures for QoS based Retrieval in Digital Libraries", Information Retrieval Workshop in the 19th International ACM SIGIR conference, August 18-22, 1996, Zurich. [περίληψη] [full text]

We are working on various issues concerning the design and development of large decentralized and autonomous Digital Library systems. We also view such l;arge systems in an economic sense, so as to understand the issues of storage, server and network costs, and over-all costs of retrieval and presentation of multimedia objects. This also promotes accounting and billing for the usage of resources.
In creating and maintaining a large distributed Digital Library system with many nodes on the Internet, many problems arise: limited bandwidth and reliability, server load, cost and quality of service based searching and distributed searching alternatives. We provide a testbed of DIENST servers to experiment on resource allocation mechanisms and distributed searching and retrieval, based on quality of service. We are conducting experiments and testing our ideas over the testbed.

78. Afrati, F., Gergatsoulis, M., Katzouraki, M. (1996) "On Transformations into Linear Database Logic Programs", in D. Bjorner, M. Broy and I. V. Pottosin (Eds.) Perspectives of System Informatics, 2nd International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Russia, June 1996, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 1181, pp. 433-444, Springer-Verlag. [περίληψη] [full text]
79. Sairamesh, J., Kapidakis, S., Nikolaou, C., Yemini, Y. (1996) "A Framework for Pricing and Charging in Digital Libraries", Proceedings of the Digital Library Workshop, 5th International Conference on the World Wide Web, May 6, 1996. [περίληψη] [full text]

We consider commercial Digital Libraries as information economies consisting of several players: authors and publishers who create and sell their collections, suppliers (e.g. computer systems) who provide information storage, indexing and access services, information-agents who provide searching and presentation services, and users who request for services.
In such an economic framework, one can envision suppliers and information-agents competing to provide services for information storage, searching, access and presentation. In providing such services, several issues arise, among them are pricing and Quality of Service (QoS) to access and view information objects. These issues play an important role in allocating resources--such as processing time, network bandwidth and buffers, memory, cache and network I/O. Using this framework, we present the interactions among the players, service models, pricing and charging/billing mechanisms (QoS based), and corresponding implementation issues in large digital libraries.

Greek journal publications

1. Αράχωβα, T. (2006) "Εικονικές Βιβλιοθήκες: Μέσα Ανοιχτής Πρόσβασης στην Εξ Αποστάσεως Εκπαίδευση", Ανοιχτή και εξ Αποστάσεως Εκπαίδευση, τ. 3, 2006. [περίληψη] [full text]
2. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2005) "Πληροφόρηση και εκπαίδευση μέσα από ένα σύστημα σήμανσης: μια μελέτη περίπτωσης ακαδημαϊκής βιβλιοθήκης", Ηυφέν, 5, 2005, σσ. 21-26. [περίληψη] [full text]
3. Φραντζή, Μ., Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2005) "E-LIS: ένα ηλεκτρονικό αρχείο για την Βιβλιοθηκονομία και την Επιστήμη της Πληροφόρησης", Βιβλιοθήκες και Πληροφόρηση, [18], 2005, σσ. 8-12. [περίληψη] [full text]

   The present article presents e-print archive E-LIS, an archive of open access on documents on Library, Information Science and related disciplines. The fundamental aim of e-print archives is to place full text documents at the disposal of various communities (in the case of E-LIS for LIS), making them visible, harvestable, accessible, retrievable and usable from any potential user who requires them for non-profit reasons. The article presents the context, in which efforts of e-print archives, like E-LIS, are developed, the functionalities that the archive provides to its users and the way of handling subtle subjects as the intellectual property rights. Simultaneously, it underlines the lacks that are observed in the Greek environment of scientific publication and the ability to be covered by E-LIS.

4. Κουλούρης, Α., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2003) "Η μετεξέλιξη της βιβλιογραφικής βάσης δεδομένων του Εθνικού Αρχείου Διδακτορικών Διατριβών του Εθνικού Κέντρου Τεκμηρίωσης, σε ψηφιακή βιβλιοθήκη: ιστορία -προβλήματα -προοπτικές", ["The evolution of the bibliographic database of the Hellenic National Archive of Dissertations of the National Documentation Centre of Greece to digital library: history -problems-prospects"] Σύγχρονη Βιβλιοθήκη & Υπηρεσίες Πληροφόρησης, [19], Μάρτιος-Απρίλιος 2003, σσ. 35-41. [περίληψη] [full text]

   We examine the evolution of the bibliographic database of the Hellenic National Archive of Dissertations of the National Documentation Centre of Greece (NDC) to digital library. We make a throwback and evaluation of the project and the evolution of the digital library with respect to the new technologies. During this process, we highlight the problems, questions that emerge to the new digital reality, and the prospects of the evolution and development of the project. While the content of the dissertations and the technologies to provide them exist, the availability is limited by the absence of decisions concerning the use of policies. We suggest alternatives access policies having in mind, to be acceptable for the students, universities, NDC etc, to conform to the current legislation and to be compatible with the common practice. Finally, we try to suggest solutions, concerning mostly, the availability problem of the dissertations.

5. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2003) "Λογότυπα βιβλιοθηκών", Ηυφέν, 4, [2], 2003, σσ. 37-43. [περίληψη] [full text]

   The present article discusses the application and use of logotypes as means of library promotion, especially for the academic ones. What is a logotype, what is its usefulness and what are the benefits for an academic library? Is it necessary such a promotional action or the establishment of a logotype in the commercial domain contrasts to the aims of a library?

6. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2003) "Fanzines: ο θαυμαστός κόσμος της ερασιτεχνικής εκδοτικής", Ηυφέν, 4, [1], 2003, σσ. 13-17. [περίληψη] [full text]
7. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2003) "Αναγνωσιμότητα ηλεκτρονικών κειμένων: μια αρχική προσέγγιση", Ηυφέν, 4, [1], 2003, σσ. 43-49. [περίληψη] [full text]
8. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2003) "Λογότυπα βιβλιοθηκών", Σύγχρονη Βιβλιοθήκη & Υπηρεσίες Πληροφόρησης, [18], Ιανουάριος-Φεβρουάριος 2003, σσ. 24-29. [περίληψη] [full text]
9. Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2001) "Σύστημα Διαδανεισμού Ελληνικών Βιβλιοθηκών", Σύγχρονη Βιβλιοθήκη & Υπηρεσίες Πληροφόρησης, [6], Ιανουάριος 2001, σσ. 17-23. [περίληψη] [full text]
10. Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2000) "Αναγνωσιμότητα και τυπογραφικά στοιχεία", Ηυφέν, 2, [3], 2000, σσ. 9-18. [περίληψη] [full text]
11. Καπιδάκης, Σ. (1997) "Η Ψηφιακή Βιβλιοθήκη του Πανεπιστημίου Κρήτης", ΑΒΑΞ, [7], 1997. [περίληψη] [full text]

Greek conference publications

1. Κουλούρης, Α., Κόκκινος, Δ., Αναγνωστόπουλος, Α., (2007) "Ανάπτυξη ψηφιακής βιβλιοθήκης και ιδρυματικού αποθετηρίου στην Κεντρική Βιβλιοθήκη ΕΜΠ", ["Digital library and institutional repository development at NTUA Central Library"], 16^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Πανεπιστήμιο Πειραιώς, Πειραιάς, 1-3 Οκτωβρίου 2007, σσ. 378-392. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

This paper describes the digital library (DL) and institutional repository (IR) (initially with ETDs) development at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). We have already implemented the ETD e-submission system, a separate web application, acting as a proxy between DSpace and the end user and started our pilot testing period, from June 2007. Additionally, code and GUI modifications have been made to DSpace for satisfying our specific user needs. Current steps include the IR pilot testing period's evaluation, focusing on the scientific community's reaction in self-archiving and e-submission. Future plans: personalization, integration of DL collections and services, full-text searching capability, federated searching feature to all digital heterogeneous resources, batch metadata importing to the DSpace system, submission of code and GUI modifications to the DSpace development community; participation in the NDLTD.

2. Αράχωβα, A., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2005) "Μοντέλο λειτουργίας των ακαδημαϊκών βιβλιοθηκών ως φορέων εξ αποστάσεως εκπαίδευσης: εικονικά περιβάλλοντα στην υπηρεσία των χρηστών-εκπαιδευομένων", ["Model for the academic libraries' function as e-learning providers: virtual environments at users' service"], 14^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Αθήνας, Νέο Φάληρο, Πειραιάς, 1-3 Δεκεμβρίου 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]
3. Κουλούρης, Α., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2005) "Αντιστοίχιση και σύγκριση μεταξύ συμβατικών και ψηφιακών πολιτικών σε συλλογές ακαδημαϊκών βιβλιοθηκών", ["Mapping and comparison between conventional and digital policies on collections of academic libraries"], 14^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Αθήνας, Νέο Φάληρο, Πειραιάς, 1-3 Δεκεμβρίου 2005, σσ. 227-238. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

Conventional policies do not map directly, but indirectly, onto digital ones with differences primarily due to the easy duplication properties of the digital content. We examine the functional linkage on conventional and digital policies of access, reproduction, library loan and inter-library loan. We map and compare the conventional to digital policies on the collections (conventional and digital) of ten leading academic libraries worldwide, showing their similarities, differences, advantages and disadvantages. We answer questions, such as, if the digital policies are transformation of conventional ones or they are new cases, if they are more liberal than conventional or restricted etc. Finally, we propose a policy model of access, reproduction and use for the digital content of academic libraries, according to factors, such as, the content creation type, acquisition method, intellectual property etc. The model, integrates already implemented practices, but also new policies that have not been implemented so far, and can offer solutions to the management of digital information and knowledge.

4. Τρούτπεγλη, Ν., Σφακάκης, Μ., Πεπονάκης, Μ. (2005) "Αναζήτηση εγγραφών καθιερωμένων τύπων με το πρωτόκολλο Z39.50", ["Searching authority records using Z39.50 protocol"], 14^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Αθήνας, Νέο Φάληρο, Πειραιάς, 1-3 Δεκεμβρίου 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]
5. Φραντζή, Μ., Τσάκωνας, Γ. (2005) "E-LIS - Ανοικτή πρόσβαση στη βιβλιοθηκονομία και την επιστήμη της πληροφόρησης", [E-LIS - Open access in library and information science], 14^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Αθήνας, Νέο Φάληρο, Πειραιάς, 1-3 Δεκεμβρίου 2005. [περίληψη] [full text]

The paper presents an endeavor to the diffusion of the Open Access Movement through the creation of an international, open access electronic archive. E-LIS is the first international e-prints server on Library, Information Science and the related disciplines. The fundamental aim of E-LIS is to place full text documents at the disposal of Library and Information Science (LIS) community and to make them visible, harvestable, accessible, retrievable and usable from any potential user who requires them for non-profit reasons. This poster presents the context, in which efforts of e-print archives, like E-LIS, are developed, the functionalities that the archive provides, the workflow and the way of handling subtle subjects, as the intellectual property rights. Finally this poster summarizes the work of the E-LIS Greek work team within the first six months of its operation.

6. Ford, J., Zhao, Y., Ye, S., Zhang, S., Makedon, F., Le, Z., Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2005) "Visualizing Negotiation Communications in Setting Library Sharing Policies", Proceedings of the 1^st National Conference 2005 of the Hellenic Society for Systemic Studies (HSSS 2005), in co-ordination with the University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece, May 12-14, 2005, pp. 192-208. [περίληψη] [full text]

Today's libraries have evolved to contain a very broad and diverse range of resources, each needing different types of conditions for sharing, depending on their modality (from books to videos and databases), source (from an author, repository, or museum), copyright conditions, and mode of usage (e.g. whether it is for scientific research or commercial use, and sensitive or rare). In this paper, we introduce and discuss a flexible, semi-automated mechanism to assist in setting policies and tracking their implementation based on SCENS, the Secure Content Access Negotiation System, a web-based negotiation system. We consider how SCENS can be extended and applied to libraries, including as a tool for reconciling multi-institutional or multi-national policies. We also show how monitoring of SCENS negotiations can help set library sharing policies and resolve future conflicts by keeping track of the evolution of the sharing agreements.

7. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S. (2005) "Knowledge Management Policies on Digital Content of Libraries", Proceedings of the 1^st National Conference 2005 of the Hellenic Society for Systemic Studies (HSSS 2005), in co-ordination with the University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece, May 12-14, 2005, pp. 394-407. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

We analyze the use of the digital content of non-profit libraries, such as, national and academic, worldwide, as expressed through the restrictions of intellectual property and the knowledge management policies. We classify the policies according to factors, such as, the content creation type, its acquisition method and intellectual property, analyze their relationship and extract quantitative remarks. We propose a policy model of access, reproduction and use for the digital content of national and academic libraries. The model contains not only library implemented practices, but also, new, and not implemented so far, policies, which can offer solutions to management of digital information and knowledge; in addition, rules on policies supplemented by their exceptions. Two separate policy models, for the digitized and the born-digital, arise and presented respectively, and relevant conclusions that valid on each case are extracted. Finally, findings on policies, common, for national and academic libraries, and unique, are presented.

8. Koulouris, A., Kapidakis, S., Makedon F. (2005) "Applying Library Policies for Digital Content Access to the Commercial Sector", Proceedings of the 1^st National Conference 2005 of the Hellenic Society for Systemic Studies (HSSS 2005), in co-ordination with the University of Peloponnese, Tripolis, Greece, May 12-14, 2005, pp. 719-727. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

The digital content of libraries is different from commercial digital products, such as, computer applications, software tools, and computer code or data streams, but they have the same sharing, reproduction and distribution digital properties and similar knowledge management problems. We examine the policies applied to commercial and library digital content. We classify the commercial digital products, according to their use and distribution properties, and we analyze their policy components. Mapping on library and commercial sector policies is illustrated, and their similarities and differences are extracted. Within this mapping, we conclude by showing, how a subset of the library policies can be transferred and implemented by companies. We show how this implementation could be beneficial for commercial companies, because libraries have great experience in providing digital content and in implementing policies. In this sense, libraries are leading the way, by showing to commercial companies how to handle and provide digital content.

9. Αράχωβα, A. (2004) "Εθνικές Βιβλιοθήκες και εξ´ αποστάσεως εκπαίδευση: Νέοι Ορίζοντες στην Hλεκτρονική Eποχή", ["National Libraries and Distance Learning: New Horizontals in the Electronic Epoque"], 1η Πανελλήνια Διημερίδα με Διεθνή Συμμετοχή Δια βίου και εξ' Αποστάσεως Εκπαίδευση στην Κοινωνία της Πληροφορίας, Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης, Ρέθυμνο, 23-24 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

Electronic resources have been multiplied, users need guidance in their navigation for accuracy, effective and on-time adequacy, immediacy in the relevance between queries and references. The paper attempts to acknowledge strategic issues upon which national libraries wish to follow a more active policy respecting the changes that affect the increasing use of the new communication and information technology. As an example are reported the most important National Libraries that are leading worldwide in the invention of collaborative solutions characterized by functional coherence and studied connection, realizing in their national librarian status programs of endorsement for the distance learners.

10. Αράχωβα, A., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2004) "Πολιτικές συνεργασίας των ακαδημαϊκών βιβλιοθηκών με άλλες κατηγορίες βιβλιοθηκών και το Ανοιχτό Πανεπιστήμιο για την παροχή εξ´ αποστάσεως υπηρεσιών", ["Collaboration' strategies between the academic libraries and other categories of libraries and the Open University for the provision of e-services"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνεδρίο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

The paper starts out by sketching the changes currently occurring in the strategical organizational schedule of Academic libraries. Worldwide Academic libraries make up about one-third of the current membership in the provision of electronic services. We can identify two major areas in which libraries can develop collaborative strategies to enhance services for their patrons. Following domains are discussed: collaborative design and the relation between physical and virtual learning environments. Next, possible implications for library staff regarding the changes are also discussed. The paper also includes thoughts on alignment between library strategy and the strategy of the Open University. Greece is standing in front of a new challenge; the extent and strength of the library support that can be offered to this new generation of distant learners! The point is to help the patron in formulating his own information needs within a national collaborative virtual-based reference question forum. Many Academic libraries use a combination of these definitions depending upon their institution's definition of distance education and on the service, or the level of service, being provided.
The paper describes the envision of a more hopeful future, in which librarians and the academics of The Open University collaborate to expand the pedagogical boundaries of distance learning, ensuring that electronic developments are integrated with traditional concerns for wide teaching, fully informed and with all the available in the nation sources following a philosophical precept suitable to the idiosyncrasy of the Greek reality. Convenience and coherence are two incentives for providing library resources and services, with main protagonists the Academic Libraries. Online services can be designed to logically connect to the other educational materials and programs the students need for their coursework. Different kinds of libraries, special, academic, public, gallery's, museum's libraries, having ties with each other as branches of a most-promising schema can lay out a match of innovative guidelines respecting on the parallel the differentiation between one nation's libraries.

11. Γαβρίλης Δ., Γεωργίου Π., Παπαδάτου Φ., Τσάκωνας Ι. (2004) "Κοσμόπολις: δημιουργώντας ψηφιακό περιεχόμενο στην ελληνική γλώσσα", ["Kosmopolis: creating digital content in Greek language"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

Kosmopolis is a digital collection including the full text content of twenty Greek periodicals from the mid-19th century up to the beginning of the 20th. The implementation was carried out by the Library & Information Service of the University of Patras within the framework of the project TELEPHAESSA in a partnership with the Department of Greek Literature of the University of Patras and The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (E.L.I.A.). The project is funded jointly by the European Social Fund and the Greek Ministry of Education within the 3rd Community Support Framework.
The workprogram of the project includes digitization, bibliographical and scientific processing of the documents and access to the users through a web interface. The basic objectives of the project were:

• to extend public and scientific community access to rare and valuable content
• the enrichment of digital content in Greek language
• to contribute to the preservation efforts of historical and valuable material
• to create and promote new research challenges in Greek literature and history through the scientific processing of the digital content

As a multi-purpose project, Kosmopolis work flow and procedures were designed following a step-by-step approach. Basic issues we had to be deal with were:

• definition of the objectives and demands of the system, workflow design and the various resources management among the partners
• definition of the basic and advance standards and requirements for issues such as digitization, technology and infrastructure, access and storage of the digital content
• development of the appropriate technical and organizational strategies for long term digital preservation of the content
• structure and functions of the appropriate web interface
• metadata schema
• service evaluation models

12. Ηλιοπούλου Ε., Αγοργιανίτης Σ., Τσάκωνας Ι. (2004) "Συστήματα σήμανσης ακαδημαϊκών βιβλιοθηκών: το παράδειγμα της Βιβλιοθήκης και Υπηρεσίας Πληροφόρησης του Πανεπιστημίου Πατρών", ["Academic libraries' signage systems: the Library and Information Service of University of Patras case study"] (αναρτημένη εισήγηση), 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

Signage systems are used in areas, where a great number of people is moving, like roads, stations, areas of specific use (e.g. the signage system during Olympic Games), public buildings and various transportation means (e.g. ships, trains, airplanes). All these require the application of a rational signage system, which must be consistent, informatory concise and aesthetically pleasant. Academic libraries are places that host a great number of users, with particular tasks and conditions of realization (e.g. available time). For this reason the interior signage of these spaces is of critical importance, not only because they contribute in the formation of a reliable image of the library organization, but because they must support the effective movement of the users.
Library and Information Service, parallel to the upgrading of its services, organized and implemented the transfer to new building facilities, which guarantees improved storage of the information material, evolvement of actions multiplicity and friendlier reception and serving of the user community. The new building, which is extending to four levels of total area 8.000 m2, created the need for the rational confrontation of the direction and orientation problems of the users, as well as the minimization of the reference requests, regarding these issues. The signage system had to be harmonized with the architectural conditions and the predefined distribution of areas and functions' flow.
In the present poster we exhibit the work of LIS personnel and the freelance partners for the development of an effective interior signage system. The aims of the workteam were set as follow:

1. To confront with success the issues of user navigation and orientation.
2. To develop, via a signage system, the conditions for users' familiarization with the spaces and the distribution of functions per level, in order to minimize reference requests.
3. To develop a conjectural interference through a "hi-tech" reaction to the modernistic architectural design of the building.

In this present poster a generalized framework of consideration about the signage of interior spaces, which guided consistently the workflow, is also developed and exhibited.

13. Κουλούρης, Α., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2004) "Πολιτικές ακαδημαϊκών ψηφιακών συλλογών", ["Policies for academic digital collections"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

We examine and classify the access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of ten leading academic digital libraries according to factors such as the creation type of the material (digitized, born-digital), the acquisition method, the copyright ownership etc. We analyze the relationship of the factors and the policies, showing how the acquisition method and the copyright ownership affect the access and reproduction policies for the digital collections. We derive some quantitative remarks and we conclude with rules about which factors lead to specific policies. For example, when the library has the copyright of the material, the reproduction for private use is provided usually free with a credit to the source or otherwise mostly under fair use provisions and the commercial reproduction needs written permission from and fees given to the library. We extract the common practice on access and reproduction policies. For example, the on-campus onsite access is always free independently of the copyright ownership and the creation type of the material. Finally, we map the conventional access and reproduction policies to digital and we compare them, showing mostly their differences.

14. Μπουντούρη, Λ., Τσόκας, Ν., Σφακάκης, Μ. (2004) "eXaMpLe: αξιοποιώντας την τεχνολογία XML στη διαχείριση της πληροφορίας", ["eXaMpLe: exploiting XML technology in information management"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

The developments of information technology have always affected organizations that create and manage information, particularly in terms of the standards used and the tools for managing them. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a language for representing and encoding data and metadata, came to be established as a new flexible tool for describing and managing these standards. As a result of the above came the gradual redefinition of standards from their traditional form into XML syntax and technology, still without affecting their content or scope. The set of rules that have to be applied, in order for data to be encoded in a valid and accurate manner, are defined in XML Schemas. Thus, a diversity of XML Schemas has been produced so as to correctly describe data from different scientific disciplines and domains. eXaMpLe, which is being developed by the National Documentation Centre (NDC), aims at fulfilling the needs of informational organizations concerning emerging technologies. The application is giving users the opportunity to set the XML Schema they want to implement so as to describe data consistently. Comprehensively, through the use of XML Schemas, eXaMpLe functions as a tool for processing documents that conform to explicit standards, like the ones developed for use from the informational organizations (EAD, MARCXML, MODS etc). The description of data in a digital form with eXaMpLe is complemented by a mechanism for preview and publishing that takes advantage of the orientation of XML towards Internet technologies. The application attempts to fill the apparent gap between the new technologies that are increasingly being employed in information management, the authoritative international standards and the traditional working methods.

15. Μπουντούρη, Λ. (2004) "Text Encoding Initiative επισκόπηση, προβλήματα και εφαρμογές", ["Text Encoding Initiative: review, problems and real world implementations"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

The last decades, there have been many efforts in the scientific field of Humanities Computing in order to create standards and useful tools to edit, manage and deliver the humanities textual material in the web. Editing and delivering electronically the textual material was the basic implementation of Computing in the Humanities field. Those procedures were of major importance in promoting, managing and editing texts. The humanists, in order to manage and represent electronically the humanities texts, have used the markup languages (HTML, SGML, and XML). The particular article examines the Text Encoding Initiative standard (TEI), which was established in 1987. TEI was initially based on SGML but, nowadays, there is also a TEI - XML compatible version. Its main target was to function as a community - based standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching. By giving a general description of the TEI Document Type Definition (TEI DTD) and its components, we will prove TEI's usefulness for humanities textual material. At the same time, we will emphasize on the use and importance of TEI Header, which is mandatory part of the TEI DTD. The TEI Header offers valuable information to the users that search and retrieve the electronic documents and, at the same time, to the librarians or the creators of the documents. The TEI is used in a world wide basis, especially from libraries and archival institutions. In parallel, the adoption of TEI in real world implementations makes obvious its advantages and, at the same time, its open research problems that have to be reconsidered in order to improve the standard. Those problematic areas will be analysed in the particular article.

16. Προκοπιάδου, Γ., Μοσχόπουλος, Δ., Παπαθεοδώρου, Χ. (2004) "Εννοιολογική Ομοιογένεια: Αξιοποίηση Ταξινομικών Συστημάτων", ["Semantic Homogeneity: Exploitation of the Classification Systems' Conceptualization"], 13^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Ιόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο, Ιόνιος Ακαδημία, Κέρκυρα, 13-15 Οκτωβρίου 2004. [περίληψη] [full text]

Interoperability is considered to be the main focal point and determinant of every national policy on information management, due to the fact that it enables systems communication and the exchange of machine readable data. However, international bibliography has addressed the lack of semantic homogeneity and compatibility owing to the lack of structured and interlinked indexes on global knowledge. The thesauri and taxonomies developed by several information agencies remain local or national initiatives. This results in international semantic heterogeneity although the library community has established a uniformity regarding bibliographic metadata. Another essential parameter that contributes to semantic incompatibility is the advancement of sciences and technology, since this progress influences the diction of the established terms and introduces new terminology. Language development and new conceptualization regarding t he scientific fields of human activity contribute to semantic confusion and incompatibility, since the used terms are not clearly defined and interlinked.
Our proposal is mainly oriented towards a public policy for the the exploitation of classification system capabilities, so as to develop efficient information and knowledge management systems, as well as mutual methodology regarding semantic data and metadata management. In particular, this presentation (a) examines the problem of semantic management and term allocation, ( b) introduces the usage of classification systems, not only as a classification tool but also as a source for the semantic metadata, and (c) aims at defining a common framework for the development of a mutual methodology for semantic management.
The several semantic tools (subject headings and/or thesauri) used by the majority of l ibraries are not compatible. The usage of subject headings mainly requires the translation of the terms used. As such, the same principal may be applied using a different diction and/or conceptualization. Moreover, the thesauri used reveal the locally developed indexes and terminology and thus remain incompatible with other semantic tools with a different conceptualization on the same topics. A solution to this problem may be the establishment of a methodology based on the conceptualization derived from the classification systems themselves. This methodology shall (a) evaluate the appropriateness of the several classification systems, (b) examine their update / extension capabilities and (c) allow the replacement of subject headings with the terminology used be the classification systems. The description of the semantics with tools that base their structure on hierarchical classes is considered as a starting point for the further procession of information using open knowledge management standards (RDF, Topic Maps). An example is provided regarding the usage of the classification systems' conceptualization, as well as their structure in open standards. Specifically, this example provides for the terminology derived from the DDC and UDC and how this may be converted into Topic Maps.

17. Αράχωβα, Τ., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2003) "Εθνικές πολιτικές για εξ´ αποστάσεως βιβλιογραφική αναζήτηση και εκπαίδευση", ["National policies for e-reference and e-learning"] (αναρτημένη εισήγηση), 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 421-436. [περίληψη] [full text]

The definition of a national policy, of an integrated creation and coordination strategy of an organizational center - schedule, in a national level, conduces determinatively to the evolution of the provided services and to the reinforcement of a nation's libraries. It includes the effectiveness of many partners who are involved in the knowledge area, playing its own role and contributing in a timely, valid and immediate help to the distance users, into a friendly interactive environment.
The paper will focus on the cases of The National Library of Canada, The National Library of Australia, The Library of Congress and The Boston Public Library which are the pioneers worldwide in the coordinate and realistic carry out of two of the most important e-services, characterized by functional connectiveness and meditative joining, in their national librarianship framework. These two are:
1. e-learning
2. e-reference (supporting distance service provided by a net of libraries and skilled librarians) As it concerns the first two, the information gathering brought into effect, with the forwarding of the whole program from the project managers, and as for the two other libraries, by visiting them by myself, collecting the relevant material and after thorough exposition by the responsible staff.
The electronic resources have been multiplied, the users need education in their navigation for accuracy, effectiveness and immediate necessities' s cover, immediacy and pertinence between the searches and the references. Especially, librarians should have the opportunity to act as tutors, as virtual tour leaders via email or videoconference.
The National Library into an interactive and collaborative framework, with all other libraries, in a national level, especially the academic, as carriers of scientific knowledge, can boost the user' s convenience outlining their social national mission.
Incorporating digital technology into a service of interdependence and interactivity, the librarian of a national, public, academic library, a museum' s library, a gallery' s library, a library of every foundation that provides information, experience the encounter with the colleague and the user, doing with responsibility his job, facilitating access to knowledge.
The challenge for the Greek librarian reality, with the proper adjustment to its particularities, is definitely obvious. We must not stay behind. Studying the structure and the needs of the Greek reality and taking under serious consideration the foreign examples, we can go ahead with proposals, actions and pilot applications.

18. Βαλής, Χ., Ορφανού-Ραυτοπούλου, Ε., Παπούλιας, Β.,  Τσάκωνας, Γ., Χαρμπίλα, Β. (2003) "Πνευματικά δικαιώματα στην διαδικτυακή εξ' αποστάσεως εκπαίδευση", ["Copyright issues in web-based education"], 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 219-229. [περίληψη] [full text]

Web based education is a new and evolving field, whose ambition is to cover the gaps and difficulties of traditional teaching. By taking advantage of the capabilities of technology, it promotes the teaching procedure, making it more efficient, more enriched and more adapted to individual learning needs. Within this environment, copyright issues seem like difficult-to-manage factors that can create several problems into the organizations that handle them.
In a non-defined usage framework, academic libraries in our country are asked to materialize or support web-based education. The ability of forming and providing electronic collections of informative material turns them into important participants in the provision of educational services within this environment.
Academic libraries are called to make the best use of their experience on such matters and confront the positive or negative particularities that the Greek legislation establishes.
The sensibility in the field of copyright handling requires continuous attention, in order to safeguard the integrity of copyright possession and to defend the reliability and validity of the educational environment.
The presentation aims to:
· Show the basic principles in the administration of copyright issues,
· show the conditions in copyright usage that govern the central parts of the procedure, such as educational platforms (open source, commercial products),
· show the most important and reliable initiatives, nationally and abroad, for safeguarding copyright issues,
· show the role of libraries and information organizations in the administration of copyright,
· show the practices of Library & Information Service concerning this matter.

19. Βίγλας, Κ., Λουρδή, Ε., Μπουρογιάννη, Π., Νικολαΐδη, Μ.,  Πυρουνάκης, Γ., Σαΐδης, Κ. (2003) "Δομές κεντρικής διαχείρισης και αυτοματοποιημένες διαδικασίες για τις βιβλιοθήκες του Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών", ["Structures of centralized management and workflow procedures for the libraries of the University of Athens"], 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 63-82. [περίληψη] [full text]

In this paper we will describe the structures established by the Libraries Computer Center (LCC) of the University of Athens in order to facilitate centralized management, and also ensure the more effective, flexible and safe communication between all the participating parties (namely the LCC personnel, the libraries’ staff, and the Academic community that utilizes the libraries and their material). After a reference to the University Libraries as a whole and their individual peculiarities, the plans for an originally virtual and later on physical unification towards Central Libraries will be presented alongside the methods that were introduced in order to achieve this goal. In this respect, a more detailed view will be given not only on the various information deployment procedures targeting the libraries staff, but also on the application environment offered as a service to the libraries by the LCC personnel. In the light of the aforementioned, the library-oriented office automation environment that is being used will be described offering the use of secure, accessible and feature-rich electronic mail facilities (including server-wise and local address books, groups and user classification per library), as well as the support for auxiliary workflow applications that can be securely updated and accessed by the libraries staff (at an editor’s access level). They can be either of internal use (such as the on-line help for cataloguing, the help-desk application where hardware and software problems, addressed to the LCC personnel, are recorded, and the automated procedure for ordering journal articles) or even become published on the web via the libraries’ web pages that are hosted on the LCC’s web site (such applications include information and access to electronic journal subscriptions, update of information and announcements per library). Moreover, a series of personalized-per-library location statistic reports will be presented, that are made of dynamically created web pages, accessible by each library that wants to receive administrative information on such issues as library catalog (number of records per collection, record titles, authors, etc.), circulation (items out, items overdue, circulation receipts), subjects, inventory and retrospective cataloguing, that are not likely to be produced by the library automation software that is being used. Finally, and after stressing the interactive process of deriving specifications and developing the aforementioned applications, conclusions will be mentioned based upon the managerial experiences of the LCC, and future plans will be given for further improvement and enrichment of the applications and procedures offered.

20. Κουλούρης, Α., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2003) "Προδιαγραφές συγγραφής και υποβολής ηλεκτρονικών μεταπτυχιακών και διδακτορικών διατριβών", ["Writing and submission specifications of electronic theses and dissertations"], 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 321-334. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

The electronic submission and provision of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) benefits from the use of appropriate specifications for writing and deposition. A very important initiative on this matter is the UNESCO Guide for Creating Electronic Theses and Dissertations that contains unified writing and deposition specifications of ETDs. The eventual goal of this guide is to make all students at all universities to be able to create ETDs, with similar layout and structure of their content, in order to be easier retrievable and accessible, independently of their creating environment. We analyze the main points of the UNESCO Guide, showing how it can help universities to develop their local infrastructure regarding electronic publishing and digital libraries; and how, this guide, can be an important tool for the bibliographic control of the electronic content.

21. Λουρδή, Ε., Παπαθεοδώρου, Χ. (2003) "Ανάπτυξη ψηφιακών συλλογών λαογραφίας", ["Development of digital ethnographic collections"], 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 203-216. [περίληψη] [full text]

Ethnography refers to various sectors of living such as: the customs, folk tales, music, songs, architecture, clothing, handicraft and the oral tradition of a community. The ethnographic collections are a valuable source for study and research about the cultural features of a country. An ethnographic collection consists of either text written on different kinds of materials, or still images, photographs, 3D objects, sound recordings, maps or even digital material. For such a variety and complexity that characterizes folklore, it is reasonable to have collections and sub-collections with complex structure and rich semantics. The digitization projects should preserve the semantics and the structure of these collections, by describing their structure per se, as well as the their elements. In this paper we present a methodology for the development of a metadata model for the description of ethnographic collections. The model will work as a tool, supporting the description of digitized cultural material, the access to it from multiple users and the communication with other systems. Furthermore, it will contribute to the connection between complex collections and their objects either semantically, or temporarily, or any other way that suits for the nature of collection and the user’s needs. The paper focuses on the most important factors of the creation of a model, which are the following: a) the description of the collections and the objects that contain, b) the metadata schemes, which are based on international standards and c) the requirements for the semantic interoperability of metadata.

22. Τσάκωνας, Γ., Παπαθεοδώρου, Χ. (2003) "Χρηστικότητα Δικτυακών Τόπων Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών", ["Usability of Academic Libraries' web sites"], 12^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Σερρών, 12-14 Νοεμβρίου 2003, σσ. 111-123. [περίληψη] [full text]

The wide acceptance of Internet technologies, the activation of electronic publishing mechanisms and the users' needs differentiation are some of the main motivations for the libraries to offer, partially or totally, their services on the Internet. Academic libraries are called to serve a multidimensional audience with leveled and diverse needs. For these reasons they hold in their collections informative material in various and different formats.
Most libraries design and publish websites, which constitute a communication forum with their permanent' audience, as well as with remote users. We could also consider libraries' websites as communication channels between the information users and producers/providers.
The publication of such websites coincides with a period at which the libraries try to develop user-centered services, i.e. they aim to adapt their services to the user needs, studying the interaction with their users and modeling the users behavior.
However many library websites cannot be used in an effective, efficient and satisfactory way, because of many methodological errors during their design and implementation. The detection, the analysis and recovering of these errors are of fundamental importance for the acceptance of libraries' websites.
In this paper we consider the libraries as web based information service providers, mainly of access in information material. The main objective of our study is the examination of the interaction quality between the libraries and their users.
Thus, the particular aims of this paper is to present:
· The main usability problems, that are observed in the libraries' environment through relative case studies,
· the basic principles for the creation of usable library websites and web-based services and to focus on crucial design parameters in which libraries should pay close attention,
· the benefits from the monitoring and examination the usability of the library websites,
· the main methods for usability evaluation.

23. Καπιδάκης, Σ., Σφακάκης, Μ. (2002) "Σχεδιασμός αποτελεσματικών portal στο Διαδίκτυο", ["The design of effective Internet portals"], 11^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Λάρισας, 6-8 Νοεμβρίου 2002, σσ. 189-200. [περίληψη] [full text]
24. Κουλούρης, Α., Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2002) "Η μετεξέλιξη της βιβλιογραφικής βάσης δεδομένων του Εθνικού Αρχείου Διδακτορικών Διατριβών του Εθνικού Κέντρου Τεκμηρίωσης, σε ψηφιακή βιβλιοθήκη: ιστορία-προβλήματα -προοπτικές", ["The evolution of the bibliographic database of the Hellenic National Archive of Dissertations of the National Documentation Centre of Greece to digital library: history -problems-prospects"], 11^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Λάρισας, 6-8 Νοεμβρίου 2002, σσ. 121-133. [περίληψη] [full text, full text at e-lis]

We examine the evolution of the bibliographic database of the Hellenic National Archive of Dissertations of the National Documentation Centre of Greece (NDC) to digital library. We make a throwback and evaluation of the project and the evolution of the digital library with respect to the new technologies. During this process, we highlight the problems, questions that emerge to the new digital reality, and the prospects of the evolution and development of the project. While the content of the dissertations and the technologies to provide them exist, the availability is limited by the absence of decisions concerning the use of policies. We suggest alternatives access policies having in mind, to be acceptable for the students, universities, NDC etc, to conform to the current legislation and to be compatible with the common practice. Finally, we try to suggest solutions, concerning mostly, the availability problem of the dissertations.

25. Προκοπιάδου, Γ., Μοσχόπουλος, Δ., Παπαθεοδώρου, Χ. (2002) "Κέντρα Κυβερνητικής Πληροφόρησης: συνεργασία Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Δημόσιων Βιβλιοθηκών και Διοικητικών Περιφερειών", ["Government Information Centers: Academic Libraries, Public Libraries and Local Authorities Cooperation"], 11^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, ΤΕΙ Λάρισας, 6-8 Νοεμβρίου 2002, σσ. 291-310. [περίληψη] [full text]
26. Μάνεση-Κυριάκη, Δ., Μοσχόπουλος, Δ., Προκοπιάδου, Γ. (2001) "Διαχείριση πληροφοριών κυβερνητικών δημοσιευμάτων: εφαρμογές στα Φύλλα της Εφημερίδας της Κυβέρνησης", ["Information Management of Government Publications: the case of the Greek Government Newspaper"], 10^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας, 15-17 Οκτωβρίου 2001, σσ. 42-54. [περίληψη] [full text]

The Ionian University in cooperation with the National Documentation Centre has undertaken the task of indexing the Official Gazette using international coding and standards. The indexing process is prop up by a structured thesaurus. The indexing and thesaurus work secondary products are planned to be the following:
1. a lexicon of administrative terms
2. an administrative encyclopaedia correlated to the lexicon
3. an administrative atlas with statistical information connected to both the lexicon and the encyclopaedia
The project today covers the early years of the Greek state (ruling of King Otto A'1833-1862).
It is already a multifaceted information tool that serves research in the field of administrative science. At the same time, it is a product of information science's basic principles. The interdisciplinary character of information science lends itself to cooperation with other fields of science, hence the particular project can serve as a point of reference for similar works and further applications. The planning and the first stage of the project's implementation were a result of research in the following domains:
a. information science
b. administrative history
c. administrative science
Furthermore, the project is geared towards research in the area of information management of government publications.

27. Παπαθεοδώρου, Χ., Τσιμπόγλου, Φ. (2001) "Έκδοση και Διαχείριση Ηλεκτρονικών Περιοδικών από Βιβλιοθήκες", ["Publishing and managing e-journals: the libraries role"], 10^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας, 15-17 Οκτωβρίου 2001. [περίληψη] [full text]

One of the main characteristics of electronic journals is the minimization of the required cost and time for their publishing. However the tight co-relation between the print and electronic subscriptions' prices is a major problem for libraries, which their budget decreases year by year. In this paper we present the main e-journals characteristics and we study a set of problems concerning their production and management. We also present the efforts and initiatives taken by the libraries in order to deal with the managerial and financial problems revealed by the transition from print to electronic journal collections. Finally we present a model concerning the activities and skills that the libraries and librarians should to develop in order to face the challenges of e-publishing evolution.

28. Καπιδάκης, Σ. (2000) "Σύστημα Διαδανεισμού Ελληνικών Βιβλιοθηκών", ["Inter-Library Loan System for Greek Libraries"], 9^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Εθνικό Μετσόβειο Πολυτεχνείο, 18-20 Δεκεμβρίου 2000. [περίληψη] [full text]

Today, with the existing technology and the globally available information, the art of information retrieval and dissemination is more complex than ever. The libraries, the traditional carrier of valid information, cannot restrict themselves to the material they physically contain in their own premises, but should be able to locate and provide more material, like the one residing in other libraries. The Union Catalogue application of NDC serves this goal for the scientific journals that are available in all Greek libraries.
Using the Union Catalogue application, any user can search for the available journals in 232 libraries throughout the country, in a uniform way in a single search. But this is only the beginning of what one can do. The librarians can, additionally, order articles from the journals owned by other libraries and get the content of the articles back without walking out of their offices. After searching for the desired journals and locating the possible provider libraries, the librarians can select some of the providers, and prioritise them for each article, to handle cases where a provider cannot in fact serve the article. Afterwards they can monitor the status of the order, until it is completed. The librarians that serve articles see their pending orders in their screen, serve them by locating the printed journal and sending the article in the designated way and update the order status.
If the librarians are not able to serve an order, they reject it and update its status, so that it is forwarded to the next selected provider. The application records all transactions, and charges or credits the libraries for their actions, so that the users of new services will cover their own expenses. The libraries that serve many articles will have a significant income coming from the users that order articles and are been served, to cover the expenses of the transaction.
We will explain the capabilities of the application, how it promotes the cooperation and we will discuss the capabilities of the successor application, that we have already start preparing: easier - and independent of other libraries - update of journal data, capability of using external sources of journal collections and also information about articles details, for detecting articles in journals, and exploration of electronic sources of full text archives, for serving articles without human intervention.
Our current version of the Union Catalogue application, with a WWW interface, has made the library cooperation closer, has increased the orders and is also used by closed groups of libraries (like the libraries of the archaeological schools, that have created their own network), that try, reluctantly, to investigate the new, cooperative, way of working. And the new application will make available a much larger variety of sources.

29. Σφακάκης, Μ. (2000) "Προβλήματα διαλειτουργικότητας βιβλιογραφικών δεδομένων και βιβλιοθηκών και το ολοκληρωμένο σύστημα Αυτοματισμού Βιβλιοθηκών Εθνικού Κέντρου Τεκμηρίωσης (ΑΒΕΚΤ)", 9^ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών, Εθνικό Μετσόβειο Πολυτεχνείο, 18-20 Δεκεμβρίου 2000. [περίληψη] [full text]