Digital library (DL) support for different information seeking strategies (ISS) has not evolved as fast as their amount of offered stock or presentation quality. However, several studies argue for the support of explorative ISS in conjunction to the directed query-response paradigm. Hence, this paper presents a primarily explorative research system prototype for metadata harvesting allowing multimodal access to DL stock for researchers during the research idea development phase, i.e., while the information need (IN) is vague. To address evolving INs, the prototype also allows ISS transitions, e.g., to OPACs, if accuracy is needed.
As its second contribution, the paper presents a curated data set for digital humanities researchers that is automatically enriched with metadata derived by different algorithms including content-based image features. The automatic enrichment of originally bibliographic metadata is needed to support the exploration of large metadata stock as traditional metadata does not always address vague INs.
The presented proof of concept clearly shows that use case-specific metadata facilitates the interaction with large metadata corpora.
As of November 2025 the HDF5 dependency has been removed. The following information has only been preserved for historic reasons.
The only known issues during the installation occur under macOS' ARM plattform are related to the build of the needed Python packages, i.e. tables and HDF5. The issues are described here and here and basically boil down to running these commands before the pip-based installation using the provided requirements.txt:
pip install cython
brew install hdf5
brew install c-blosc
export HDF5_DIR=/opt/homebrew/opt/hdf5
export BLOSC_DIR=/opt/homebrew/opt/c-blosc
You might also have to add LZO_DIR and install LZO as seen aboved.
To minimize your personal quest for finding tables-related errors, an installation of the latest PyTables package directly from GitHub (typically) resolves all errors:
pip3 install git+https://github.com/PyTables/PyTables
Alternative installation paths are also available.