Communications - February 2011

together all the selected articles and annotations with a cover image. In essence, the new binder function enables the DL to become an authoring and a publishing platform for certain kinds of e-books.”

new interactive capabilities

Although ACM already provided one of the most comprehensive global resources for the computing field, a combination of forces prompted this major overhaul of the DL. “User feedback streams in on a daily basis,” says Rous. For example, critical feedback from SIGs led to the creation of a Conference Profile page and a SIG Profile page. Analysis of such feedback, augmented by surveys, user workshops, focus groups, and advisory bodies, revealed strong demand for more interactive capabilities and for richer data views.

“Comments relating to change re-
quests are collected, analyzed, and fi-
nally placed on a prioritized to-do list,”
explains Rous. “ACM’s Librarian Ad-
visory Group, Digital Library Advisory
Board, and Publications Board have all
reviewed and critiqued early versions
of new functionality. Tests are run with
focus groups and, finally, beta produc-
tion versions are released for further
feedback and refinement. The new
DL reflects the collective wisdom of a
broad community participating in the
development process.”
The new DL also reflects the real-
ity that many users have dropped their
print subscriptions, yet they occasion-
ally want to order a printed copy of an
issue. New e-commerce functions pro-
vide ways for online-only subscribers to
order a print copy and for nonsubscrib-
ers to gain access to online content.
“A print-on-demand function is sorely
needed and will shortly appear along-
side the other options,” Rous says.

The trend from print to online is also a challenge to external libraries, Rous says, and they have responded by installing complex local infrastructures and by tapping into external systems to manage their digital resources. “ACM is committed to supporting libraries in these transformative efforts,” he says.

One way ACM is doing that is by providing access to its increasingly rich metadata, with or without extracted full-texts, for local or third-party index-

the new Acm Digital
Library is more
interactive, and puts
a lot of emphasis
on the capture and
use of metadata.

ing to facilitate cross-platform discovery by the library’s patrons.

Rous says ACM aims to make the DL the most reliable source for citation and usage statistics in the field, and to make that kind of information useful for the assessment of research and the contributions and influence of individuals and institutions.

Part of the DL’s new look is a result of rebranding in response to user confusion over the differences among the terms ACM Digital Library, ACM Guide to Computing Literature, and ACM Portal, with most users simply lumping everything under the “Digital Library” moniker. The full-text library of ACM publications remains, as does the ACM Guide, the larger bibliographic database of computing literature. But these are now more tightly integrated and function as a single resource branded as the ACM Digital Library.

Jill Powell, a librarian at Cornell University’s engineering library, says computer science faculty and students have for years used the library in traditional ways—“to discover articles by keyword and author”—but that usage of it will become more extensive now. She calls the new bibliometrics “very interesting” and says the features for automatic subject and table of contents alerts via email and RSS are attractive. “It’s a rich site, it has a lot of features, and it’s easy to use,” Powell says.

A number of enhancements have
been made “under the hood,” says
Graves, who wrote most of the new
code. The pages of the DL are dynami-
cally generated and the data is re-
trieved from precomputed data sets
supported by a new, flatter data mod-
el, resulting in a much faster front-end
interface. And a new caching scheme
fetches only the data needed, rather
than the templates and logic required
to generate the pages. The library
served up about 10 pages per second,
on average, under the old architecture
but now runs at about 15 pages per
second, Graves says. The library con-
tains 1. 6 million items, and has users
in 190 countries, who download 13
million full-text files and conduct 12
million searches annually.