© Copyright 2006 Texas Digital Library. All Rights Reserved.
Vol 5, No 3 (2004)
Editorials
Articles
Experiences of Educators Using a Portal of Aggregated Metadata
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project sought to test the viability of a search portal containing aggregated metadata for cultural heritage resources harvested using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Metadata was collected from 39 providers, including museums, archives, libraries, historical societies, consortiums, and digital libraries. Some resources existed in digital formats, such as .JPG images. Other resources were analog objects and were represented digitally through the metadata. The paper documents a pilot user test with a small group of K-12 teachers-in-training. The users were asked to use the portal to locate primary source materials for use in the classroom. The results highlight the challenges posed by aggregations of heterogeneous metadata for both users and service providers. Areas for further investigation and approaches for more in-depth studies are suggested.
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MERLOT: A Model for User Involvement in Digital Library Design and Implementation
MERLOT is an international consortium comprised of over 20 institutions and systems of higher education and industry partners who collaborate to produce a premier online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share online learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT's mission is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by expanding the quantity and quality of peer-reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty-designed courses. Created in 1997 by the California State University, in 1999 MERLOT expanded by inviting other partners to participate in creating and implementing MERLOT as a free, Web-based resource for higher education. MERLOT emphasizes both the quality and review of materials as well as services for the broad community it serves. MERLOT's partners are integral to the functioning of MERLOT and its services, from initial design and testing to deployment and management.
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The Use of Visual Artifacts in the User-Informed Development of an Educational Digital Library Collection
Digital libraries are complex sociotechnical artifacts. As such they will be understood and treated in different ways by the different groups that interact with them. The different understandings of these groups will be rooted in the differing tacit, underlying 'technological frames' that they will have of digital libraries as technologies. In cases where developers and users are both involved in the development of digital library collections, and where the frames of developers and users differ significantly, this can result in difficulties in the collection development process. It is important, therefore, to acknowledge that such differences can exist between developers and users, and to find ways to identify, describe, and mediate them. The paper describes the case of the Digital Water Education Library (DWEL). DWEL was an example of community-led collections development, in which users - in this case educators - were involved in the design and development of its collection. An ethnographic and communications-based analysis of DWEL's organizational communication revealed the existence of different technological frames among the developers and the users of DWEL, differences which impeded the progress of the project. These differences were exacerbated by the project's distributed organizational structure and reliance on network communication technologies for the bulk of its organizational communication. The paper describes how these differences were mediated, in part through the sharing of 'boundary objects' - graphic representations of the project's structures and processes - among the developers and users, and how these representations subsequently informed the development of an online tool that represented some of the developers' knowledge to the users.
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The Power of Partnering: The Cooperative Creation of Digital Collections
The use of consortia and partnerships has increased significantly over the past decade as a result of the increasing complexity of developing projects in a digital world. Funding agencies have acknowledged this by directing support to multi-institutional projects. Some agencies have gone so far as to establish categories that require multi-institutional applicants. Partnerships of disparate institutions provide opportunities for learning and growth. The paper describes one such partnership, Connecticut History Online, and investigates the value and significance that partnering plays in creating a successful digital product.
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Supporting Community Inquiry with Digital Resources
Today there are a number of fields that address the need to develop better means of employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help communities achieve their goals. Digital infrastructure and repositories are widely created to support the activities of educational, workplace, and scientific communities, as well as virtual communities of interest that may center on topics as diverse as entertainment, crisis management, and health. However, the research and development of ICTs faces numerous challenges. Community inquiry theory can help address some of these challenges. The Inquiry Page project supports a set of ICTs that have been developed by a community of inquiry in order to support communities of inquiry. The paper presents the theory of community inquiry and illustrates how inquiry theory can influence the research and development of ICTs and their adoption and use within real communities.
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MatDL: Integrating Digital Libraries into Scientific Practice
Digital repositories can be catalysts for new knowledge by providing information space and tools to facilitate the work of students, educators, or scientists. The NSF NSDL Materials Digital Library (MatDL) is adapting existing open source "tools", such as an image gallery and a version control system, to meet the needs of users within the materials science community. The tools are being modified to make submission to MatDL an easy step within a user's existing workflow and to avoid redundant effort. These satellite services provided by MatDL are intended to become an integral part of the user's "laboratory or workspace". The paper investigates whether digital repositories can expand their communities and collections by building tools that integrate a digital repository into researchers' workspaces. In the long term, it is anticipated that making submissions to MatDL an easy part of users' regular workflow will increase the likelihood that users will submit resources to the repository. Ultimately, the goal of integrating a repository into users' workspaces is to enhance the impact between research and education. Initial experience of providing these tools and responding to user feedback through MatDL is discussed.
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