Ana M. B. Pavani

Toward online, worldwide access to Vatican Library materials

The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare books and manuscripts. Among its 150,000 manuscripts are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year. Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Librarys collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services. A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Librarys most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world. A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts. • In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.

Spreading remote lab usage a system — A community — A Federation

Experiments have been at the heart of scientific development and education for centuries. From the outburst of Information and Communication Technologies, virtual and remote labs have added to hands-on labs a new conception of practical experience, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. This paper aims at describing the features of a remote lab named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, embedded in a community of practice and forming the spearhead of a federation of remote labs. More particularly, it discusses the advantages and disadvantages of remote labs over virtual labs as regards to scalability constraints and development and maintenance costs. Finally, it describes an actual implementation in an international community of practice of engineering schools forming the embryo of a first world wide federation of Virtual Instruments System in Reality nodes, under the framework of a project funded by the Erasmus+ Program.

Integration of an LMS, an IR and a Remote Lab

For over two decades an IR – Institutional Repository (at the time referred to as Digital Library) and an LMS – Learning Management System have been developed and integrated under the Maxwell System at Pontificia Universidade Catolica of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). It supports traditional face-to-face courses and offers distance and blended learning options. It is also a publishing platform. This model has proved very practical for many reasons mentioned in this work. To enhance the options for traditional, blended and distance learning, a Remote Lab was added to the Maxwell System. Adding a Remote Lab is an enhancement to the learning environment since it is a “real” equipment and not only a software for numerical computation. This work addresses this new integration and how it benefits from the original infrastructure of an IR and an LMS implemented as a single platform.

International Cooperation for Remote Laboratory Use

Experimenting is fundamental to the training process of all scientists and engineers. While experiments have been traditionally done inside laboratories, the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies added two alternatives accessible anytime, anywhere. These two alternatives are known as virtual and remote laboratories and are sometimes indistinguishably referred as online laboratories. Similarly to other instructional technologies, virtual and remote laboratories require some effort from teachers in integrating them into curricula, taking into consideration several factors that affect their adoption (i.e., cost) and their educational effectiveness (i.e., benefit). This chapter analyzes these two dimensions and sustains the case where only through international cooperation it is possible to serve the large number of teachers and students involved in engineering education. It presents an example in the area of electrical and electronics engineering, based on a remote laboratory named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, and it then describes how a number of European and Latin American institutions have been cooperating under the scope of an Erasmus+ project, for spreading its use in Brazil and Argentina.

Different Uses for Remote Labs in Electrical Engineering Education: Initial Conclusions of an Ongoing Experience

Laboratories are a fundamental part of engineering education due to the very nature of the engineering profession. This is a characteristic of all engineering courses, though it may vary from one curriculum to the other and even in the same curriculum. This paper is dedicated to the analysis of different applications of a remote lab in an Electrical Engineering curriculum. If the types of experiments it offers are concerned, it is classified as an Electric and Electronic Circuits lab; one in a set that also has Digital Electronics, Analog Electronics, Electrical Machines, Control Systems, etc. But it is not a traditional lab – it is a remote lab, with traditional components remotely accessed over the Internet. This work presents the preliminary results of the deployment of VISIR – a remote lab for Electric and Electronic Circuits in some courses. It discusses the different course contexts and how the use of VISIR was adapted to each one. Results of students’ opinions are presented and discussed.

From traditional to blended learning: A signals and systems course — First results

This work presents the preliminary results of a switch from the traditional face-to-face teaching to the blended learning mode of the Signals and Systems course at PUC-Rio. This change in the way faculty teach to a mode where students learn with their professors was motivated by high rates of underachievements - classes have been showing high percentages of dropouts and of students who fail the tests/exams. Since this course is basic to many curricula, the performance of students is important. Blended learning was an extention of the technology enhanced learning that the university has been using for many years. Though the results presented in this work are from one term only, the authors believe this mode of learning-teaching will be accepted by the students and yield better results - students will get used to a new way of learning. When the results of more terms with blended learning are available, a statistical comparison of the grades in terms using the traditional face-to-face Signals and Systems course will be performed.

An Easy Gateway to Electrical Engineering Contents on an Institutional Repository

This work presents an overview of digital contents created in the different areas of a Brazilian Institution of Higher Learning and a solution that was implemented to make it easy to access items in Electrical Engineering – a significant part of it. Characteristics of the collection (types and numbers of contents) and the compliance to international standards and best practices are addressed too.

Some Considerations on Training ETD Teams in Developing Countries

An ETD project requires various skills besides the interaction of different groups in the university. Among the various skills, a very important one is the knowledge about digital libraries from metadata element sets to the capture, storage and preservation of digital objects. Most universities in developing countries do not have staff with such qualification. In some cases they are not aware of all the tasks to be performed and how to write a project or to model a workflow. Issues of digital preservation, authors rights on the Internet and others must also be brought to discussion. Another important aspect is the multidisciplinary nature of an ETD project. It requires the active participation of the Graduate Programs and of the ICT Team, besides the Library Staff. Last but not least, graduate students play a key role and must be included in the process. This work addresses some characteristics of the training that will help all parts interested in starting an ETD project in a developing nation. It is based on the fact that, in developing countries, infrastructure, training and access to information are not in the same levels of the first world. Besides that, there may exist very sharp different among regions in the same country. This work also addresses the need of team development during the training sessions, so that all parts work together in a cooperative manner.