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Abstract

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 56(2005) no.6, S.636-657

Theme

Information Gateway

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Abstract

The Internet would not be very useful if communication were limited to textual exchanges between speakers of English located in the United States. Rather, its value lies in its ability to enable people from multiple nations, speaking multiple languages, to employ multiple media in interacting with each other. While computer networks broke through national boundaries long ago, they remain much more effective for textual communication than for exchanges of sound, images, or mixed media -- and more effective for communication in English than for exchanges in most other languages, much less interactions involving multiple languages. Supporting searching and display in multiple languages is an increasingly important issue for all digital libraries accessible on the Internet. Even if a digital library contains materials in only one language, the content needs to be searchable and displayable on computers in countries speaking other languages. We need to exchange data between digital libraries, whether in a single language or in multiple languages. Data exchanges may be large batch updates or interactive hyperlinks. In any of these cases, character sets must be represented in a consistent manner if exchanges are to succeed. Issues of interoperability, portability, and data exchange related to multi-lingual character sets have received surprisingly little attention in the digital library community or in discussions of standards for information infrastructure, except in Europe. The landmark collection of papers on Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure, for example, contains no discussion of multi-lingual issues except for a passing reference to the Unicode standard. The goal of this short essay is to draw attention to the multi-lingual issues involved in designing digital libraries accessible on the Internet. Many of the multi-lingual design issues parallel those of multi-media digital libraries, a topic more familiar to most readers of D-Lib Magazine. This essay draws examples from multi-media DLs to illustrate some of the urgent design challenges in creating a globally distributed network serving people who speak many languages other than English. First we introduce some general issues of medium, culture, and language, then discuss the design challenges in the transition from local to global systems, lastly addressing technical matters. The technical issues involve the choice of character sets to represent languages, similar to the choices made in representing images or sound. However, the scale of the language problem is far greater. Standards for multi-media representation are being adopted fairly rapidly, in parallel with the availability of multi-media content in electronic form. By contrast, we have hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years worth of textual materials in hundreds of languages, created long before data encoding standards existed. Textual content from past and present is being encoded in language and application-specific representations that are difficult to exchange without losing data -- if they exchange at all. We illustrate the multi-language DL challenge with examples drawn from the research library community, which typically handles collections of materials in 400 or so languages. These are problems faced not only by developers of digital libraries, but by those who develop and manage any communication technology that crosses national or linguistic boundaries.

Theme

Information Gateway