Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the long-time topic of digital libraries has suddenly become white hot. As the Internet expands, particularly the WWW, more people are recognizing the need to search indexed collections. Digital library research projects thus have a common theme of bringing search to the Net. This is why the US government made digital libraries the flagship research effort for the National Information Infrastructure (NII), which seeks to bring the highways of knowledge to every American. As a result, the four-year, multiagency DLI was funded with roughly $1 million per year for each project (see the "Agency perspectives" sidebar). Six projects (chosen from 73 proposals) are involved in the DLI, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This issue of Computer includes project reports from these six university sites: Carnegie Mellon University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and Stanford University.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1994-1998, had the goal of developing widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The DLI testbed focused on using the document structure to provide federated searches across publisher collections. Our sociology research included the evaluation of its effectiveness under use by over 1,000 UIUC faculty and students, a user community an order of magnitude bigger than the last generation of research projects centered on searching scientific literature. Our technology research developed indexing of the contents of text documents to enable a federated search across multiple sources, testing this on millions of documents for semantic federation. This article will discuss the achievements and difficulties we experienced over the past four years.

There is a serious lack of conceptual clarity in the definitions and uses of learning objects, resulting in design and usability problems in current e-learning systems. The paper proposes ReLOMS, prototype reusable learning objects management system, being implemented to address the problem of usability and reusability of learning objects in e-learning systems.

This conceptual piece presents a framework to aid libraries in gaining a more thorough and holistic understanding of their users and services. Through a presentation of the history of library evaluation, a measurement matrix is developed that demonstrates the relationship between the topics and perspectives of measurement. These measurements are then combined through evaluation criteria, and then different participants in the library system view those criteria for decision-making. By implementing this framework for holistic measurement and cumulative evaluation, library evaluators can gain a more holistic knowledge of the library system and library administrators can be better informed for their decision-making processes.

From the early information retrieval systems to recent web search engines, most systems ask user to express their information need in a query. While the online information systems, such as search engines and digital libraries, bring the great opportunity of accessing huge amount of information directly, they also present challenges on users’ competence of formulating good queries. In library, thesauri and classification schemes are not only indexing tools, but also concept consultation tools. Thesauri and classification schemes haven’t fully adapted in to digital library and IR system, because there are not universal concept hierarchies. This essay introduces the ideal of using query-based concept structures to improve subject access to digital libraries. It reports some early work of an ongoing project that explores the usability and effectiveness of query-based concept structures, which naturally connects static knowledge in the information collection and user dynamic information need, as intermediary. Methodologies and experimental designs are laid out. The preliminary results are presented and further research is discussed.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The basic problem in information retrieval is that large scale searches can only match terms specified by the user to terms appearing in documents in the digital library collection. Intermediate sources that support term suggestion can thus enhance retrieval by providing altentative search terms for the user. Term suggestion increases the recall, while interaction enables the user to attempt to not decrease the precision. We are building a prototype user interface that will become the Web interface for the University of Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) testbed. It supports the principle of multiple views, wherc different kinds of term suggestors can be used to complement search and each other. This paper discusses its operation with two complementary term suggestors, subject thesauri and co-occurrence lists, and compares their utility. Thesauri are generatad by human indexers and place selected terms in a subject hierarchy. Co-occurrence lists are generated by computer and place all terms in frequency order of occurrence together. This paper concludes with a discussion of how multiple views can help provide good quality Search for the Net. This is a paper about the design of a retrieval system prototype that allows users to simultaneously combine terms offered by different suggestion techniques, not about comparing the merits of each in a systematic and controlled way. It offers no experimental results.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), launched in December 2002, is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education. As a part of this extensive project, the GetSmart system was created to apply knowledge management techniques in a learning environment. The design of the system is based on an analysis of learning theory and the information search process. Its key notion is the integration of search tools and curriculum support with concept mapping. More than 100 students at the University of Arizona and Virginia Tech used the system in the fall of 2002. A database of more than one thousand student-prepared concept maps has been collected with more than forty thousand relationships expressed in semantic, graphical, node-link representations. Preliminary analysis of the collected data is revealing interesting knowledge representation patterns.

This is a presentation of 30 slides at the Brown Bag Series, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana on 31 March 2006. Abstract: Commons-based digital libraries are an emerging phenomenon. They are based on a new vision of digital information organization and use. A definition of commons-based digital libraries, some examples, fundamental characteristics, emerging information behaviors, and preliminary results from a scholarly communication survey of LIS faculty will be presented.

This report describes the results of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded study to investigate the use of technological or policy tools to control patron access to or use of digital collections of cultural materials created by U.S. archives, libraries and museums. The technological and policy tools serve primarily to control copying or other reuses of digital materials. The study had the following goals: 1. Assess what technical and policy tools cultural institutions are employing to control access to and use of online digital collections. 2. Investigate motivations for controlling access to or use of collections (e.g., copyright, privacy, protecting traditional restrictions, income generation etc.). 3. Investigate discouragers to the implementation of access and use control systems (e.g., preference for open collections, lack of resources, institutional mission, etc.). 4. Gauge interest in implementing technical systems to control access to and use of collections. 5. Determine what types of assistance IMLS could provide. 6. Identify institutions with innovative controlled online collections for follow up case studies on policy, technical and managerial details.

This is a report prepared by the author in the Human-Computer Interaction Group, Information Science Program, Department of Communication at Cornell University. It firstly gives an introduction to NSDL; then the complexity of capturing userâ s behavior on the Internet is discussed. The report then discussed the details of this project, including the web log analysis tools used, data cleaning process, the results of data analysis and its interpretation. Finally a general conclusion was given and its implication for digital library design is provided.