a new (VIRTUAL) chapter

ASEE Prism, Sep 2005 by Sharp, Jo Ellen Myers

Digital libraries make amazing amounts of information available 24/7, but how do you get students to use them?

Digital libraries are quickly becoming the norm at colleges and universities here and abroad as ways to expand the materials available to students and to help them hone their research skills. But this laptop generation-whose idea of research is a quick troll through Coogle-needs to be encouraged to explore its school's digital libraries.

But how? The successful use of these libraries is contingent on several factors, including the way the screen looks and keywords used for searching. There's also a strong link between class assignments and student use of libraries. "We are pushing online access, and most of our faculty members are pretty savvy about incorporating this type of research in the curriculum," said Michael Fosmire, the librarian responsible for science and engineering libraries at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Digital libraries operate at three levels, Fosmire said. The first is any online information. Second comes specialized collections, such as ones for engineers and scientists. Third is an even more narrow collection of papers, research projects, or other materials that may be class-specific, assigned by professors. The latter would be similar to traditional reserved materials, but with the digital library, they are available 24/7 to more than one person at a time, Fosmire said.

As digital libraries continue to develop and become an integral part of student life, the information management systems universities implement will be key to their usage, said Peter Murray, assistant to the director for technology initiatives for the University of Connecticut Libraries. "Our next challenge is to embed our digital library collections and services into the new instructional tools and reposition academic libraries and archives in the creation-acquisition-dissemination flow of our institutions' research," Murray wrote in Library Journal.

These management information systems are organized and driven by variable factors, or business logic, that may be unique to a particular vendor or creator; yet, for example, they need to accommodate digital objects in content systems, he said. "Consider the digitized versions of still images of locomotives and rail yards from the early 1900s in the library's archives. An instructor in engineering pulls selected images into lecture notes on a class Web site to show the mechanics of a steam engine," Murray explained.

Not all digital libraries are for students. Some, such as the www.teachengineering.com, are for teachers. Launched in January 2005, the website provides standards-based curricula and lesson plans for K-12 teachers. Teachers can search the site by keywords, grade levels, standards, subjects, and activities to find classroom-tested materials, complete with a list of needed supplies, that they can download and use, said Jacqueline Sullivan, co-director of the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program and director of K-12 Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Sullivan is a member of the committee that has worked for three years with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) to develop and launch the K-12 Teach Engineering site. The NSDL hosts the site, which is part of a network of downloadable resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Organizing and standardizing access to online digital resources have been NSF priorities since 1994 when grants were awarded to universities and private researchers or corporations to develop software that would allow various collections to interface and allow users to search disparate materials and media, said Lee Zia, lead program director for the NSDL program.

"The consistent message is that Internet usage is way up, and while it might be faster among young people than older, we know that the elder generation is online in a big way," Zia said. Still, he said, "students are driving this as much as anything." Time is a factor for students, who are used to 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week access to what they want online.

"But it's been difficult for folks to find good resources they can use," he said, which is where the NSDL comes into play with its science and engineering niche. Its mission is to deepen and extend science literacy through access to materials and methods that reveal the nature of the physical universe and the intellectual means by which we discover and understand it. Zia said the NSDL has emerged as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education and a community center for groups focused on digital-library-enabled science education.

User-Friendly

Yet most students, faculty members, and the general users muddle through their online experience, according to researchers in the United States and Hong Kong. In the November 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), James Y.L. Thong, Weiyinh Hong and Kar Yan Tam tell of their research students using the Electronic Library of the Open University of Hong Kong. Launched in 1998, the online library has 1,400 databases and 12,000 titles of electronic books, journals, newspapers, and other materials, along with links to another $00,000 volumes at libraries throughout the world. It is the first and largest digital library in Asia.