ScienceTreks: an autonomous digital library system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide support for automation of the annotation process of large corpora of digital content. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents and discusses an information extraction pipeline from digital document acquisition to information extraction, processing and management. An overall architecture that supports such an extraction pipeline is detailed and discussed. Findings – The proposed pipeline is implemented in a working prototype of an autonomous digital library (A‐DL) system called ScienceTreks that: supports a broad range of methods for document acquisition; does not rely on any external information sources and is solely based on the existing information in the document itself and in the overall set in a given digital archive; and provides application programming interfaces (API) to support easy integration of external systems and tools in the existing pipeline. Practical implications – The proposed A‐DL system can be used in automating end‐to‐end information retrieval and processing, supporting the control and elimination of error‐prone human intervention in the process. Originality/value – High quality automatic metadata extraction is a crucial step in the move from linguistic entities to logical entities, relation information and logical relations, and therefore to the semantic level of digital library usability. This in turn creates the opportunity for value‐added services within existing and future semantic‐enabled digital library systems.