Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 172 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-164).

Not available / text

Edited and abridged version of a paper presented at International Conference on Digital Library, New Delhi, 24-27 February, 2004, entitled â Architecture and building of Medical Digital Library at National Informatics Centre: What exists and what is required for MeDLib@NIC?â / ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information has developed various products that are available over Internet. These includes: i. UNcat (http://uncat.nic.in) - union catalogue of journal holdings of medical libraries of India; ii. IndMED (http://indmed.nic.in) - A bibliographic database of Indian biomedical journals and iii. medIND (http://medind.nic.in) - full texts of Indian biomedical journals being indexed in IndMED. Now, having these services, tools, databases and content in operation, the focus of future activities would be to integrate these â ingredientsâ both internally and externally to provide â single window digital access persistentlyâ . Here we propose an architecture under which each service, tool, database and content collection is an independent layer. These layers are the building blocks of Digital Library (DL) and can interoperate with each other due to either build-in or plug-in(ed) interoperability. They are accessible by their own interfaces as well as through Digital Library interface. In context of the proposed architecture, this article also takes stoke of what is available and what is required to build the digital library.

Digital Library for Earth Science Education, DLESE / Digital libraries offer a unique and unprecedented resource through which teachers can facilitate student inquiry. In the recent National Research Council publication quoted above, National Science Education Standards, emphasis on inquiry is pervasive. Yet, when it comes to textbooks and curricula as they exist today, the clear emphasis is on learning science content disconnected from experience. Although digital libraries can't change pedagogy or textbooks, they can make it possible for students to have access to scientific information and data which interests them, a fundamental requirement for authentic inquiry. Digital libraries can provide teachers with a feasible way to let students pursue their own interests within the bounds of the curriculum and without creating an enormous amount of extra work in providing students with materials to support their investigations. This article will explore the ways in which digital libraries can support inquiry learning. We are looking at the benefits of digital libraries in high schools and middle schools through our experiences with implementation of University of Michigan's Digital Library (UMDL). In particular, we will focus here on students asking their own questions, and learning through sustained inquiry. This article will address the following questions: Why is it important for students to ask their own questions and how does it contribute to inquiry based learning? How do digital libraries help make inquiry learning possible? How is UMDL supporting sustained inquiry? What is our research telling us about tools and techniques needed to make it happen?

null / Use of citations and web links embedded in online teaching materials was studied for an undergraduate course. The undergraduate students enrolled in Geographic Information Science for Geography and Regional Development used web links more often than citations, but clearly did not see them as key to enhancing learning. Current conventions for citing and linking tend to make citations and links invisible. There is some evidence that citations and web links categorized and highlighted in terms of their importance and function to be served may help student learning in interdisciplinary domains. This is a preprint of the article published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56 (4) February: 382-392.

Nanoscience and technology is characterized by nano researchers as an increasingly interdisciplinary domain, drawing upon such disciplines as chemistry, physics, materials science, and computer, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. A key challenge faced by information professionals involved in organizing and providing the related information services is to efficiently identify information resources and to carry out inclusive and effective searches in a diverse and heterogeneous range of digital libraries, web-based databases and search engines. This demand emphasizes the importance of thinking about and developing methodological models for investigating interdisciplinary knowledge organization practices. This 2008 study examined the extent of interdisciplinarity in user queries submitted to the NANOnetBASE digital library. Transaction logs of the digital library were analyzed to explore usersâ search behaviour patterns and to examine the extent to which user queries were interdisciplinary. The Inspect thesaurus and Classification codes were utilized the disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus of the queries. The results indicate that 62% of the unique top terms resulting from mapping usersâ query terms to the INSPEC Classification codes represented two or more disciplines, specifically terms associated with the Classification code â Aâ representing â physics.â The results contribute to the development of more critical information organization and classification practices in such an increasingly interdisciplinary domain as nanoscience and technology.

Archeologists have used material artifacts found in a physical space to gain an understanding about the people who occupied that space. Likewise, as users wander through a digital library, they leave behind data-based artifacts of their activity in the virtual space. Digital library archeologists can gather these artifacts and employ inductive techniques, such as bibliomining, to create generalizations. These generalizations are the basis for hypotheses, which are tested to gain understanding about library services and users. In this article, the development of traditional archeological methods is presented and used to create a conceptual framework for the artifact-based evaluation in digital libraries.

Digital Library for Earth Science Education, DLESE / The focus of our project was to build functional prototype of the discovery system user interface (UI) for the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE). The prototype had two goals: first to show a proof of concept for the DLESE project and second to provide an initial search and discovery implementation that can be extended to include multiple heterogeneous data collections in future iterations. Our design goal was to ensure that userâ s desired information be easy and convenient to discover via the UI. We focused on three components with this goal in mind: first a keyword search designed so that the most relevant information was returned at the top of the results list. Second a â browseâ search that provided a summary of the resource topology in one simple view. Third a clear and concise presentation of search results that allow users to evaluate desired information quickly. Once the prototype was up and running we conducted user tests. The results of these tests and our recommendations for future iterations of the DLESE search engine are outlined at the end of this report.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Illinois DLI Project, one of six projects funded by the NSF/DARPA/NASA DLI, consists of two major components: (1) a production testbed based in a real library (SGML publisher stream deployed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UIUC) and (2) fundamental technology research for semantic interoperability (semantic indexes across subjects and media developed at the University of Arizona). The Illinois DLI production testbed was developed in the Grainger Engineering library at UIUC. It supports full SGML federated structure search on an experimental Web-based interface. The initial rollout was available at the UIUC campus in October 1997 and has been integrated with the library information services. The testbed consist of materials from 5 publishers, 55 engineering journals, and 40,000 full-text articles. The testbed was implemented using SoftQuad (SGML rendering) and OpenText (full-text search), both commercial software.

This paper begins by discussing the various meanings of metadata both on and off the Web, and the various uses to which metadata has been put. The body of the paper focuses on the Web and the roles that metadata has in that environment. More specifically, the primary concern here is for metadata used in resource discovery, broadly considered. Metadata for resource discovery is on an evolutionary path with bibliographic description as an immediate predecessor. Its chief exemplar is the Dublin Core and its origins, nature and current status will be briefly discussed. From this starting point, the paper then considers the uses of such metadata in the Web context, both currently and those that are planned for. The critical issues that need addressing are its weaknesses for achieving its purposes and alternatives. Finally, the role of libraries in creating systems for resource discovery is considered, from the perspective of the gains made to date with the Dublin Core, the difficulties of merging this effort with traditional bibliographic description (aka MARC and AACRII), and what can be done about the gap between the two. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------