Learning Toolkit

The following resources are useful for students learning about tools and practical applications.

Cataloging & Metadata
  • RDA (Resource Description and Access): RDA is the current international standard for cataloging. It provides a set of guidelines for describing library resources in a digital environment, focusing on user tasks such as "find, identify, select, and obtain." It's designed to be more flexible and adaptable than AACR.
  • MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging): MARC is a standard digital format for the exchange of bibliographic data between libraries. It's a structured framework that allows computers to read and interpret the information on catalog cards, enabling the creation and sharing of digital library catalogs.
Classification & Ontology
  • DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification): DDC is a widely used system for organizing library materials by subject. It assigns a numerical code to each subject, allowing books to be arranged on shelves in a logical order, making it easier for users to browse and find related materials.
  • WebDewey: WebDewey is the online version of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. It provides a real-time, searchable database of the DDC schedule and tables, allowing catalogers to access the latest updates and additions to the classification scheme.
  • Protege: Protege is a free, open-source ontology editor and knowledge management system. It's used by researchers and developers to build and manage ontologies, which are formal representations of knowledge in a specific domain. It's a key tool for creating the Semantic Web.
  • OWL (Web Ontology Language): OWL is a W3C-recommended language for creating and sharing ontologies on the web. It's a key component of the Semantic Web, enabling machines to process and reason about information.
  • SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System): SKOS is a W3C specification for representing and sharing knowledge organization systems, such as thesauri and classification schemes, on the web. It provides a simple, yet powerful, way to manage and link controlled vocabularies.
  • Semantic Web: The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web that enables machines to understand the meaning of information. It aims to make web data readable by computers so that they can automatically find, share, and integrate information.
Digital Library & Archiving
  • DSpace: DSpace is an open-source repository software used by institutions worldwide to manage and preserve digital content. It's a popular choice for building institutional repositories, providing a platform to store, organize, and provide access to a wide range of digital assets, from research papers to images.
  • E-Prints: E-Prints is another open-source software for building institutional repositories. It's specifically designed to manage and make research papers, preprints, and other scholarly output openly available, supporting the open-access movement in academic publishing.
E-Publishing & E-Resource Management
  • OJS PKP (Open Journal Systems Public Knowledge Project): OJS is an open-source journal management and publishing system. It's widely used by universities and research institutions to manage the entire workflow of academic journals, from submission and peer review to publishing and archiving.
  • CORAL: CORAL is an open-source electronic resource management (ERM) system for libraries. It helps librarians manage the entire lifecycle of their e-resources, including licensing, access, and usage data.
Content Management System
  • Joomla: Joomla! is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). It's used to create websites and powerful online applications, offering a wide range of extensions and templates.
  • Drupal: Drupal is a flexible and scalable open-source CMS used for building robust websites and digital experiences. It's known for its powerful features and is often used for large, complex websites and applications.
  • WordPress: WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, powering a significant portion of all websites. It's a free, open-source platform that is user-friendly and highly customizable, making it suitable for everything from simple blogs to e-commerce sites.
Library Automation & OS
  • KOHA: KOHA is a full-featured, open-source integrated library system (ILS). It's used by libraries of all sizes to manage their daily operations, including cataloging, circulation, acquisitions, and patron management.
  • e-Granthalaya: e-Granthalaya is a digital platform developed by the National Informatics Centre in India for library automation. It provides a complete solution for managing library activities, including a digital library module and cloud hosting for online access.
  • Ubuntu: Ubuntu is a free, open-source Linux operating system. It's popular for its security and ease of use, and it's often a preferred choice for running library servers and other software.
Data Analysis & Visualization
  • Tableau: Tableau is a powerful data visualization and business intelligence tool. It allows users to connect to various data sources and create interactive dashboards and reports, helping to analyze and present complex data in a clear and understandable way.
  • Canva: Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to create visual content easily. It provides a wide range of templates and tools for designing everything from presentations and infographics to social media graphics and documents.
  • SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences): SPSS is a widely used software for statistical analysis. It's a powerful tool for data mining, data management, and data analysis. It's commonly used in social sciences research, marketing, and health sciences.
Reference Management Tools
  • Mendeley: Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network. It helps researchers organize their research papers, generate bibliographies, and collaborate with other researchers online.
  • Zotero: Zotero is a free, open-source reference management tool. It's a powerful and user-friendly tool for collecting, organizing, citing, and sharing research sources. It integrates seamlessly with web browsers and word processors.
Programming Languages & Data Structures
  • HTML (HyperText Markup Language): HTML is the standard markup language used to create web pages. It provides the structure of a webpage, using a series of elements to define headings, paragraphs, links, and other content.
  • Python: Python is a high-level, interpreted programming language known for its readability and simplicity. It is widely used in data analysis, artificial intelligence, web development, and scientific computing.
Scientometrics & Infometrics
  • VOSviewer: VOSviewer is a free software tool for creating and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks can show relationships between authors, journals, or keywords, making it a powerful tool for analyzing research trends and scholarly communities.
  • Altmetric: Altmetric is a data science company that tracks and analyzes the online attention of scholarly research. It provides tools to measure the impact of research outside of traditional citations, using data from social media, news outlets, and blogs.
Data Mining
  • Voyant Tools: Voyant Tools is a web-based text analysis tool. It allows users to upload texts and instantly get visualizations and summaries, such as word clouds, trend charts, and keyword lists, making it ideal for literary and digital humanities research.
  • RStudio: RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the R programming language. It provides a user-friendly interface for writing and executing R code, making it a popular choice for statistical computing and data analysis.
  • OpenRefine: OpenRefine is a powerful desktop application for cleaning and transforming data. It helps users quickly and easily spot inconsistencies, fix errors, and convert data into a more usable format for analysis.
Web Technologies
  • OpenURL: OpenURL is a standardized format for creating links to online resources. It allows users to easily access library resources and scholarly articles by providing a standard way to exchange citation data between different systems.
  • RDF (Resource Description Framework): RDF is a standard model for data interchange on the web. It's a foundational component of the Semantic Web, providing a framework for describing web resources.
Database Management System
  • MySQL: MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). It's a popular choice for web applications and is known for its performance, reliability, and ease of use.
  • PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system. It's known for its advanced features, high performance, and strong adherence to SQL standards.
  • Structured Query Language (SQL): SQL is a programming language used for managing data in relational database management systems. It's a standard language for performing tasks such as creating, updating, and querying data in a database.
    • Website: No single website; SQL is a language, not a product.
Artificial Intelligence
  • Gemini: Gemini is a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google. It is designed to understand and operate across different types of information, including text, images, audio, and code.
  • OpenAI: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It is known for developing large language models like GPT-4 and generative models like DALL-E.
  • Scite_: Scite is a research tool that uses AI to analyze and evaluate the reliability of scientific claims in research papers. It shows how a publication has been cited by providing "Smart Citations" that indicate whether the citing paper supports or disputes the original claim.
  • Perplexity AI: Perplexity AI is an AI-powered conversational search engine. Unlike traditional search engines, it provides direct, concise answers to user queries by synthesizing information from multiple sources and citing those sources directly in the response.
  • OpenAlex: OpenAlex is an open, comprehensive index of scholarly works, authors, and institutions. It uses AI to link scholarly data and make it available for free, providing an alternative to commercial databases like Web of Science and Scopus.
  • Copilot: Copilot is an AI-powered code completion tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI. It assists developers by suggesting code snippets and entire functions in real-time as they type, improving programming efficiency.
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Toolkit