Case studies of digital libraries supporting education: NDLTD and CITIDEL VII Conference for Information Technologies Universidad de los Andes Mérida, Venezuela 5-9th July Edward A. Fox Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA USA Slides:

Acknowledgements (Selected) Sponsors: US Embassy, Conference/University; plus: ACM, Adobe, AOL, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, NLM, NSF, OCLC, SUN, US Dept. of Ed. (FIPSE) VT Faculty/Staff: Debra Dudley, Weiguo Fan, Gail McMillan, Manuel Perez, Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne Watson, … VT Students: Yuxin Chen, Shahrooz Feizabadi, Marcos Goncalves, Nithiwat Kampanya, S.H. Kim, Aaron Krowne, Bing Liu, Ming Luo, Paul Mather, Fernando Das Neves, Unni. Ravindranathan, Ryan Richardson, Rao Shen, Ohm Sornil, Hussein Suleman, Ricardo Torres, Wensi Xi, Baoping Zhang, …

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (NDLTD) NDLTD Board of Directors, previous Steering Committee + other NDLTD committees; those running Electronic Thesis & Dissertation (ETD) initiatives in universities, regions, countries Helpful sponsorship by many organizations, especially Adobe (new initiative!), CONACyT, DFG, FIPSE (US Dept. Education), IBM, Microsoft, NSF (IIS , , , ; DUE , , , ), OCLC, SOLINET, SUN, SURA, UNESCO, VTLS, many governments (Australia, Germany, India, …), … Colleagues at Virginia Tech (faculty, staff, students), and collaborators at many universities Slides included from: Vinod Chachra, Thom Hickey, Joan Lippincott, Gail McMillan, Axel Plathe, Hussein Suleman, …

Part 1 Introduction

Virginia Tech Background Largest university in Virginia, land-grant, football, town population 35K plus 26K students 3 rd fastest supercomputer (1100 Apple G5 dual-proc) Blacksburg Electronic Village, since 1992, with > 80% of community on Internet Net.Work.Virginia, with sites for education, research, government; LMDS, gigabit wireless networking Math Emporium, 500 workstations Faculty Development Initiative, round 3 Torgersen Hall, $30M Advanced Communications and Information Technology Center, with DLRL

Fox at VT Professor, Dept. of Computer Science 1/3 time report to Erv Blythe, VP for Info. Tech. Director of University Center: Internet Technology Innovation Center at VT Director, Digital Library Research Laboratory Location: 2030 Torgersen Hall Students: typically about 20 Visitors: India: 2, S. Korea: 1, Brazil: 1, … Grants: 9 active

Digital Libraries --- Objectives World Lit.: 24hr / 7day / from desktop Integrated “super” information systems: 5S: streams, structures, spaces, scenarios, societies Ubiquitous, Higher Quality, Lower Cost Education, Knowledge Sharing, Discovery Disintermediation -> Collaboration Universities Reclaim Property Interactive Courseware, Student Works Scalable, Sustainable, Usable, Useful

DLs: Why of Global Interest? National projects can preserve antiquities and heritage: cultural, historical, linguistic, scholarly Knowledge and information are essential to economic and technological growth, education DL - a domain for international collaboration wherein all can contribute and benefit which leverages investment in networking which provides useful content on Internet & WWW which will tie nations and peoples together more strongly and through deeper understanding

Libraries of the Future JCR Licklider, 1965, MIT Press World Nation State City Community

Synchronous Scholarly Communication Same time, Same or different place

Asynchronous, Digital Library Mediated Scholarly Communication Different time and/or place

Information Life Cycle Authoring Modifying Organizing Indexing Storing Retrieving Distributing Networking Retention / Mining Accessing Filtering Using Creating

Definitions Library ++ (library+archive+museum+…) Distributed information system + organization + effective interface User community + collection + services Digital objects, repositories, IPR management, handles, indexes, federated search, hyperbase, annotation

Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Advocacy for interoperability Standard for transferring metadata among digital libraries Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) Simplicity Generality Extensibility Support for PMH => Open Archive (OA)

OAI = Technical Umbrella for Practical Interoperability… Reference Libraries Publishers E-Print Archives …that can be exploited by different communities Museums

OAI – Repository Perspective Required: Protocol DO MDO

OAI – Black Box Perspective OA 1OA 2OA 4OA 3OA 5OA 6OA 7

Discovery Current Awareness Preservation Service Providers Data Providers Metadata harvesting The World According to OAI

Digital Libraries Shorten the Chain from Editor Publisher A&I Consolidator Library Reviewer

DLs Shorten the Chain to Author Reader Digital Library Editor Reviewer Teacher Learner Librarian

Case Study: Education Refactoring Scholarly Communication: Creating, Sharing, Reviewing, Teaching, Learning, … Physics: PhysNet OCKHAM CSTC, CITIDEL, NSDL NDLTD

Part 2 CITIDEL (and NSDL)

Computer Science Teaching Center ( Instead of building large, expensive multimedia packages, that become obsolete and are difficult to re-use, concentrate on small knowledge units. Learners benefit from having well-crafted modules that have been reviewed and tested. Use digital libraries to build a powerful base of support for learners, upon which a variety of courses, self-study tutorials & reference resources can be built. ACM support led to Journal of Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC), accessible from

Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL) Domain: computing / information technology Genre: one-stop-shopping for teachers & learners: courseware (CSTC, JERIC), leading DLs (ACM, IEEE-CS, DB&LP, CiteSeer), PlanetMath.org, NCSTRL (technical reports), … Submission & Collection: sub/partner collections 

Led by Virginia Tech, with co-PIs: Fox (director, DL systems) Lee (history) Perez (user interface, Spanish support) Partners College of New Jersey (Knox) Hofstra (Impagliazzo) Villanova (Cassel) Penn State (Giles)

Overview of CITIDEL architecture

Distributed repository structure

Digital library architecture for local and interoperable CITIDEL services

CITIDEL: Computing & Information Technology Interactive Digital Education Library

Cluster Search Results from CITIDEL

Cluster NDLTD-Computing

CITIDEL -> NSDL A collection project in the National STEM (science, technolgy, engineering, and mathematics) education Digital Library – NSDL National Science Digital Library

Expectations of NSDL ProgramTracks Core Integration: coordinate a distributed alliance of resource collection and service providers; and ensure reliable and extensible access to and usability of the resulting network of learning environments and resources Collections: aggregate and actively manage a subset of the digital library’s content within a coherent theme / specialty Services: increase the impact, reach, efficiency, and value of the digital library in its fully operational form Targeted (Applied) Research: have immediate impact on one or more of the other three tracks

Collections Discovery of content Classification and cataloguing Acquisition and/or linking; referencing Disciplinary-based themes define a natural body of content, but other possibilities are also encouraged Access to massive real-time or archived datasets Software tool suites for analysis, modeling, simulation, or visualization Reviewed commentary on learning materials and pedagogy

Services Help services, frequently asked questions, etc. Synchronous/asynchronous collaborative learning environments using shared resources Mechanisms for building personal annotated digital information spaces Reliability testing for applets or other digital learning objects Audio, image, and video search capability Metadata system translation Community feedback mechanisms

NSDL Information Architecture Essentially as developed by the Technical Infrastructure Workgroup referenced items & collections referenced items & collections Special Databases NSDL Services NSDL Services Other NSDL Services CI Services annotation CI Services discussion CI Services personalization CI Services authentication CI Services browsing Core Services: information retrieval Core Collection- Building Services harvesting Core Collection- Building Services protocols Core Services: metadata gathering Portals & Clients Portals & Clients Portals & Clients Usage Enhancement Collection Building User Interfaces NSDL Collections NSDL Collections NSDL Collections Core NSDL “Bus”

Part 3 NDLTD

A Digital Library Case Study Domain: graduate education, research Genre:ETDs=electronic theses & dissertations Submission: Collection: Project: Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations (NDLTD)

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Leader of the Worldwide ETD (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) Initiative Training Authors Expanding Access Preserving Knowledge Improving Graduate Education Enhancing Scholarly Communication Empowering Students & Universities

Main Message Digital libraries can help advance education. Venezuela is invited to engage in NDLTD, as well as CITIDEL, NSDL, and other DL ventures. UNESCO Analytical Survey on Digital Libraries in Education is recommending DLE in each nation. Local and national support can stimulate activities, including collaboration promote a sharing culture, especially in research and teaching leverage others’ investments (networking, computing, …) encourage / facilitate learning Please join NDLTD!

What led to today’s meeting? 1987 mtg in Ann Arbor: UMI, VT, … 1992 mtg in Washington: CNI, CGS, UMI, VT and 10 universities with 3 reps each 1993 mtg in Atlanta to start Monticello Electronic Library (regional, US Southeast): SURA, SOLINET 1994 mtg at VT: std: PDF + SGML + multimedia objects 1996 funding by SURA, US Dept. of Education (FIPSE) 1997 meetings in UK, Germany, – 1 st symposium – Memphis (20) 1999 – 2 nd symposium – Blacksburg (70) 2000 – 3 rd symposium – St. Petersburg (225) 2001 – 4 th symposium – Caltech (200) 2002 – 5 th syposium – BYU, Provo, Utah 2003 – 6 th syposium – Berlin (215) 2004 – 7 th syposium – U. Kentucky 2005 – 8 th syposium – Sydney, Australia

What are the long term goals? 400K US students / year getting grad degrees are exposed / involved 200K/yr rich hypermedia ETDs that may turn into electronic portfolios (images, video, audio, …) Dramatic increase in knowledge sharing: literature reviews, bibliographies, … Services providing lifelong access for students: browse, search, prior searches, citation links Hundreds/thousands of downloads / year / work

ETDs: Library Goals Improve library services Better turn-around time Always available Reduce work catalog from e-text eliminate handling: mailing to ProQuest, bindery prep, check-out, check-in, reshelving, etc. Save space

NDLTD Incorporation Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations incorporated May 20, 2003 in Virginia, USA Charitable and educational purposes (501 c 3) Can accept donations, collect dues, receive funds LeClair Ryan provides legal counsel Officers Executive Director (Ed Fox) Secretary (Gail McMillan) Treasurer (Scott Eldredge)

Board of Directors Suzie Allard (ETD 2004, U. Kentucky) Denise A. D. Bedford (World Bank) Julia C. Blixrud (ARL, SPARC) José Luis Borbinha (National Lib Portugal) Alex Byrne (ETD 2005, ADT: Australia) Tony Cargnelutti (ETD 2005, Australia) Vinod Chachra (VTLS) Susan Copeland (RGU, UK) Jude Edminster (Bowling Green St. Univ.) Scott Eldredge (Treasurer, ETD 2002, BYU) Edward A. Fox (Exec Director,Virginia Tech) John H. Hagen (West Virginia U.) Thomas B. Hickey (OCLC) Christine Jewell (U. Waterloo, Canada) Delphine Lewis (ProQuest) Joan K. Lippincott (CNI) Mike Looney (Adobe) Gail McMillan (Secretary, Virginia Tech) Joseph Moxley (ETD 2000, USF) Eva Müller (U. Uppsala, Sweden) Ana Pavani (PUC Rio, Brazil) Axel Plathe (UNESCO, Paris) Sharon Reeves (National Library Canada) Peter Schirmbacher (ETD 2003, Humboldt) Hussein Suleman (U.Cape Town, S. Africa) Shalini R. Urs (U. Mysore, India) Eric F. Van de Velde (ETD 2001, Caltech)

NDLTD Committees (Chairs) Awards (John Hagen) Conferences (Tony Cargnelutti) Development (Peter Schirmbacher) Executive (Edward Fox) Finance (Scott Eldredge) Implementation (Ana Pavani) Membership (Shalini Urs) Nominating (Sharon Reeves) Standards (Thomas B. Hickey) Union Catalog (Vinod Chachra)

Selected Projects / Sponsors Australia (ADT) Brazil (BDT, IBICT) Canada Catalunya Chile (Cybertesis) Germany India (Vidyanidhi) Korea OhioLINK: 79 colleges/univs Portugal (National Library) South Africa UK (British Library, JISC, Edinburgh, …) UNESCO (especially Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa) Venezuela

Some Countries Australia Belgium Brazil Canada Chile China, Hong Kong Columbia Finland France Germany Greece India Italy Jamaica Korea Lithuania Malaysia Mexico Namibia Netherlands Norway Poland Russia Singapore S. Africa S. Korea Spain Sudan Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey UK USA Venezuela Yugoslavia

Some Institutional Members British Library Cinemedia Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya Diplomica.com Dissertation.com Dissertationen Online (Germany) ETDweb, a Division of Answer4.com Ibero-American Sci. & Tech. Education Consortium (ISTEC) National Documentation Centre (NDC), Greece National Library of Portugal (for all universities) OCLC Online Computer Library Center OhioLINK Organization of American States (SEDI/OAS) Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET) UNESCO (

UNESCO and ETDs (by Axel Plathe at ETD2003) Promoting the use of the Internet as a tool for disseminating scientific knowledge Facilitating the transfer of ETD expertise from developed to developing countries 1998: Member of the NDLTD Steering Committee 1999: First UNESCO ETD meeting on ETD internationalisation 2002: “ UNESCO Guide to Electronic Theses and Dissertations ” 2003: Model training programmes and training courses 2003: Sponsor pilot projects 2003: Pilot projects (Africa, Europe, Latin-America)

Convene Local Planning Group ETD

ETD project participants Academic administrators Faculty Students Staff Graduate school / provost / registrar Information technologists Librarians

Build Local ETD Site Digital Library Policies Inspection/Approval Workshop/Training ETD

NDLTD Computer Resources Research Literature Student Prepares Thesis/Dissertation

Student Defends & Finalizes ETD My Thesis ETD

Student Gets Committee Signatures and Submits ETD Signed Grad School

Graduate School Approves ETD, Student is Graduated Ph.D.

Library Catalogs ETD, Access is Opened to the New Research WWW NDLTD

Status of the VT Project Approved by university governance Spring 1996; required starting 1/1/97 Submission & access software in place Submission workshops for students (and faculty) occur often: beginner/adv. Faculty training as part of Faculty Development Initiative Over 5000 ETDs in collection – some have audio, video, large images, software, …

Archiving ETDs Every 15 minutes back-ups made of not- yet-approved submissions Hourly back-ups of newly approved ETDs Weekly back-ups of entire ETD collection Copies stored on-site and off-site

VT ETD Cataloging same as current cataloging policies, except: author-assigned keywords (not LCSH) generic (not LC) call no. fields/subfields as required for computer files full abstracts time savings cataloger familiar with computer files equipment, software for word processing 5 minutes avg. (10-15 minutes for paper TDs)

Library Resources Hardware: with Apache web server Maintenance and security Started small; now: Sun 2-processor Enterprise 250--Solaris 2.7 Software Submission scripts written by DLA Includes notifications to authors, advisors, UMI Use it too: Log files analyzed with Analog Survey scripts written by DLA Data from authors and readers Use it too: Search Engine Started small; now: InfoSeek’s ULTRASEEK

Digital Library Benefits: Low margin, high use Incorporate ETDs with other digital library activities Ejournals, online class materials, digital images, etc. Additional equipment, staff may not be necessary Use VT programs, scripts, etc. Online accesses vs. circulation of copies , average circulation per copy per year: 2.2 for theses, 3.2 for dissertations

Access to VT’s ETDs

Info Available at VT Information Automated submission system ready for customization Student guidelines, training materials, FAQ's, multimedia educational materials

ETD Union Collection (OAI)

Union catalog: OCLC OCLC will expand OAI data provider on TDs. Is getting data from WorldCat (so, from many sites!). Will harvest from all others who contact them. Need DC and either ETD-MS or MARC. Has a set for ETDs.

OCLC SRU Interface

Union catalog: VTLS, VT VTLS will enhance search/browse service for ETDs Will harvest from OCLC’s set of ETD records Will receive through other mechanisms Will work with MARC-21 and ETD-MS VT will continue to offer experimental services

ETD Union Search Mirror Site in China (CALIS) ( – popular site!)

VTLS Union Catalog Content Languages The VTLS NDLTD Union Catalog has data in 6 different languages. These are: English German Greek Korean Portuguese Spanish Examples follow

Language = German; hits = 137

Full record display

Relationship with publishers Concern of faculty and students that still wish to publish books or journal articles, voiced: campus, Chronicle, NPR, Times Solution: Approval Form gives students, faculty choices on access, when to change access condition; use IPR controls in DL Solution: by case, work with publishers and publisher associations to increase access AAP, AAUP AAAS, ACM, ACS, Elsevier,...

Summary: ETDs and Publishing Early controversies waning Faculty: prior publication? Protective of future academics Surveys of publishers No specific policies largely Consider submissions individually VT ETD Alumni None had problems getting published Authors Retain some rights, e.g., link to curriculum vitae, online course materials

ETDs and Copyright Author’s rights Retain copyright! Rights include reproduction, modification, distribution, public performance, public display Share non-exclusive rights: Permit library to store / provide access Author’s obligations: fair use Balance factors or get permission

ETDs and Long-term Preservation Concerns: Access without paper Long term preservation Standard multimedia formats Adobe support ( Free (and compatible) PDF Reader, work on PDF/A Addressed Concerns Cooperatives, e.g., OhioLink Commercial options ProQuest: traditional microfilming, CDs, … Frequent, regular back-ups available on-, off-site

ETD-MS ETD Metadata Standard XML-encoded metadata standard (content and encoding) for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in part conforming to Dublin Core (DC) using RDF using UNICODE Will specify relationship with MARC

Complex to Simple MARC ($50)Dublin Core (DC) + thesis

Added Support by NDLTD Links from NDLTD site ETD individuals support – submit ETD ETD discussion (e-prints) – community activities Conference papers and presentations – community activities Automated support to “join NDLTD” Marcel Dekker book now available Edward A. Fox, Shahrooz Feizbadi, Joseph M. Moxley, and Christian R. Weisser, eds., The ETD Sourcebook: Theses and Dissertations in the Electronic Age, New York: Marcel Dekker, 2004

Spirit of NDLTD Help make a better (smaller) world Win-win-win (everyone can benefit) Have fun helping others Helpers/teachers learn more than those they work with Build on standards ETDs are preservable, popular, expressive, “better” Doable, feasible, learnable, affordable, sharable Please join and participate in NDLTD!

Part 4 Conclusion

Digital Libraries in Education Analytical Survey, ed. Leonid Kalinichenko © 2003, Transforming the Way to Learn DLs of Educational Resources & Services Integrated/Virtual Learning Environment Educational Metadata Current DLEs: US (NSDL, DLESE, CITIDEL, NDLTD), Europe (Scholnet, Cyclades), UK (Distributed National Electronic Resource)

Case Studies to Future DLs All are invited to join NDLTD! All are invited to connect with NSDL, in general, and CITIDEL in particular, toward: DLEs in every country, Institutional repositories at every site. Case studies also help us generalize and advance the field, as through 5S (see next slides)

5S Model: Examples, Objectives ModelsExamplesObjectives Stream Text; video; audio; imageDescribes properties of the DL content such as encoding and language for textual material or particular forms of multimedia data Structures Collection; catalog; hypertext; document; metadata; organization tools Specifies organizational aspects of the DL content Spatial Measure; measurable, topological, vector, probabilistic Defines logical and presentational views of several DL components Scenarios Searching, browsing, recommending, Details the behavior of DL services Societies Service managers, learners, Teachers, etc. Defines managers, responsible for running DL services; actors, that use those services; and relationships among them

DL Services/Activities Taxonomy (Gonçalves) Browsing Collaborating Customizing Filtering Providing access Recommending Requesting Searching Visualizing Annotating Classifying Clustering Evaluating Extracting Indexing Measuring Publicizing Rating Reviewing (peer) Surveying Translating (language) Conserving Converting Copying/Replicating Emulating Renewing Translating (format) Acquiring Cataloging Crawling (focused) Describing Digitizing Federating Harvesting Purchasing Submitting PreservationalCreational Add Value Repository-Building Information Satisfaction Services Infrastructure Services

For More Information S: see Gonçalves et al. in ACM Trans. Info. Systems April 2004

Questions/Discussion?