This is a presentation (15) slides at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Charlotte, N.C. on October 31, session on Collaboration in Digital Libraries: Luminous Ideas from Health Informatics, Academic Libraries, and Historical Archives (Organizer and Moderator: Deborah Swain).

A study of the properties of virtual laboratories to design interactivity metrics for an engineering digital library are described. An Interactive Checklist to help select the best resources for educational context and describe them objectively is demonstrated. Virtual laboratories are one important genre of interactive multimedia objects. Interactivities are complex objects and new digital genres or forms, with no print equivalent. A prototypical example of an interactive is the 3-d simulation virtual laboratory in GROW (Budhu & Coleman, 2002). This type of virtual laboratory provides links to prerequisite material, supplementary readings, uses multimedia formats, and different types of user interaction to motivate, engage, challenge, facilitate, and test learning. It has conceptual and physical components that can be objectively identified on which metrics for interactivity can be developed. Interactivity type and interactivity level are elements for resource description in educational metadata frameworks such as the IEEE LOM (2004). However, interactivity is hard to describe in a way that is useful as an access point or for making relevancy choices about resources in educational tasks such as teaching and learning and hence the need for objective measures. The currently available vocabularies for interactivity type are inadequate and include: active, expositive, mixed, and undefined. Similarly the values for interactivity level are equally limited and ambiguous: very low, low, medium, high, very high. The Interactive Checklist, tested with GROW, allows the metadata creator and the collection developer to easily and quantitatively measure interactivity and assign the corresponding level to learning resources of all types.

From the Executive Summary of the 67 page Report: The National Science Board (NSB, the Board) recognizes the growing importance of these digital data collections for research and education, their potential for broadening participation in research at all levels, the ever increasing National Science Foundation (NSF, the Foundation) investment in creating and maintaining the collections, and the rapid multiplication of collections with a potential for decades of curation. In response the Board formed the Long-lived Data Collections Task Force. The Board and the task force undertook an analysis of the policy issues relevant to long-lived digital data collections. This report provides the findings and recommendations arising from that analysis. The primary purpose of this report is to frame the issues and to begin a broad discourse. Specifically, the NSB and NSF working together â with each fulfilling its respective responsibilities â need to take stock of the current NSF policies that lead to Foundation funding of a large number of data collections with an indeterminate lifetime and to ask what deliberate strategies will best serve the multiple research and education communities. The analysis of policy issues in Chapter IV and the specific recommendations in Chapter V of this report provide a framework within which that shared goal can be pursued over the coming months. The broader discourse would be better served by interaction, cooperation, and coordination among the relevant agencies and communities at the national and international levels. Chapters II and III of this report, describing the fundamental elements of data collections and curation, provide a useful reference upon which interagency and international discussions can be undertaken. The Board recommends that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) take the lead in initiating and coordinating these interagency and international discussions.

Digital libraries need to provide and extend traditional library services in the digital environment. This paper presents a project that will provide and extend library services through the development of a sharium-a workspace with rich content and powerful tools where people can collaborate with others or work independently to explore information resources, learn, and solve their information problems. A sharium is a learning environment that combines the features of a collaboratory, where people collectively engage in research by sharing rich information resources, and a local library, where people come to meet, find information resources, and discuss common interests. To achieve this, collaboration services that build on synchronous and asynchronous communication technology should be integrated with other digital library services, including searching, browsing, and information management and authoring services. This paper presents our motivation for providing collaboration services and describes the types of collaboration services that will be included in the digital library.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In the recent literature, we have seen the expansion of information retrieval techniques to include a variety of different collections of information. Collections can have certain characteristics that can lead to different results for the various classification techniques. In addition, the ways and reasons that users explore each collection can affect the success of the information retrieval technique. The focus of this research was to extend the application of our statistical and neural network techniques to the domain of geological science information retrieval. For this study, a test bed of 22,636 geoscience abstracts was obtained through the NSF/DARPA/NASA funded Alexandria Digital Library Initiative project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This collection was analyzed using algorithms previously developed by our research group: concept space algorithm for searching and a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm for browsing. Included in this paper are discussions of our techniques, user evaluations and lessons learned.

The paper overviews theoretical background and real-world implementations for High Availability (HA) and Storage Area Network (SAN). A systems analysis process is described and a platform was built to integrate the HA and the SAN for an academic library's critical web server and its Content Management System. Recommendations for selection and implementation are suggested for people adapting this approach.

The attributes of education in a digital neighborhood have warranted a community of teachers on one end with shared curriculum and teaching materials and another community of students with distance and distributed learning on the other end. There is a different kind of ecology emerging and the library professionals have the opportunity to create a world without borders, making everything available to everyone anytime, anywhere. Roles of libraries have changed from being traditional to exist as hybrid or electronic libraries. In turn, the Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals have become intelligent filters of information and contribute to the libraries to emerge as â Knowledge Resource Centersâ . Creating successful e-information services for its demanding clientele has become their major challenge. One such case study of e-information services provided by the Science Campus (Guindy Campus) Li-brary of University of Madras is focused in this paper. The Campus Library caters to the re-search community of Schools of Life, Physical, Chemical, Earth Sciences and an array of re-searchers (members) from industries. Periodic discussions with experts, faculty and research scholars have necessitated the Library to enhance research with Information Gateways on spe-cific themes. Subject Gateways on Biomedical Sciences, Life, Chemical, Physical and Inter-disciplinary Sciences are compiled periodically and made available on the intranet in turn making its clientele access the sources on the internet from their desktop. They not only sup-plement research but also new popular courses introduced, thrust of the University programs and so on. The Gateway focused here is â Nutraceuticalsâ which is a component of the Gate-ways on â Biomedical Sciencesâ . The methodology of information aggregation from the Inter-net, evaluating their validity and organizing them for access, the strategies used to market the e-service, such as organizing user education and information literacy programs are discussed. Methods of evaluation of the service provided are analysed to improve the same. The chal-lenges of the career to develop essential skills to combat technology have compelled the pro-fessionals at the Library to get trained and update their technical expertise. Thus the Library tries to support the evolutionary convergence of Library Services, Technology and the Clien-tele.

This is a presentation (18 slides) at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting session on Collaboration in Digital Libraries: Luminous Ideas from Health Informatics, Academic Libraries, and Historical Archives.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / A University of Illinios project is developing an infrastructure for indexing scientific literature so that mutliple Internet sources can be searched as a single federated digital library.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Digital libraries serving multimedia information that may be accessed in terms of geographic content and relationships are creating special challenges and opportunities for networked information systems. An especially challenging research issue concerning collections of geo-referenced information relates to the development of techniques supporting geographic information retrieval (GIR) that is both fuzzy and concept-based. Viewing the meta-information environment of a digital library as a heterogeneous set of services that support users in terms of GIR, we define a geographic knowledge representation system (GKRS) in terms of a core set of services of the meta-information environment that is required in supporting concept-based access to collections of geospatial information. In this paper, we describe an architecture for a GKRS and its implementation in terms of a prototype system. Our GKRS architecture loosely couples a variety of multimedia knowledge sources that are in part represented in terms of the semantic network and neural network representations developed in artificial intelligence research. Both textual analysis and image processing techniques are employed in creating these textual and iconic geographcal knowledge structures. The GKRS also employs spreading activation algorithms in support of concept-based knowledge retrieval. The- paper describes implementational details of several of the components of the GKRS as well as discussing both the lessons learned from, and future directions of, our research.