David McArthur

Creating virtual collections in digital libraries: benefits and implementation issues

Digital libraries have the potential to not only duplicate many of the services provided by traditional libraries but to extend them. Basic finding aids such as search and browse are common in most of todays digital libraries. But just as a traditional library provides more than a card catalog and browseable shelves of books, an effective digital library should offer a wider range of services. Using the traditional library concept of special collections as a model, in this paper we propose that explicitly defining sub-collections in the digital library-virtual collections-can benefit both the librarys users and contributors and increase its viability. We first introduce the concept of a virtual collection, outline the costs and benefits for defining such collections, and describe an implementation of collection-level metadata to create virtual collections for two different digital libraries. We conclude by discussing the implications of virtual collections for enhancing interoperability and sharing across digital libraries, such as those that are part of the National SMETE Digital Library.

Metadata lessons from the iLumina digital library

They follow from the five-year effort to implement metadata standards for learning objects in the iLumina digital library of undergraduate teaching resources in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Developing recommendation services for a digital library with uncertain and changing data

In developing recommendation services for a new digital library called iLumina (www.ilumina-project.org), we are faced with several challenges related to the nature of the data we have available. The availability and consistency of data associated with iLumina is likely to be highly variable. Any recommendation strategy we develop must be able to cope with this fact, while also being robust enough to adapt to additional types of data available over time as the digital library develops. In this paper we describe the challenges we are faced with in developing a system that can provide our users with good, consistent recommendations under changing and uncertain conditions.

Toward a sharable digital library of reusable teaching resources

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM May 2001/Vol. 44, No. 5 79 iLumina is starting with resources from its partner institutions. These include materials from the Computer Science Teaching Center (CSTC; www.cstc.org), and the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee’s Digital Library (SECDL; www.education.siggraph.org), as well as new digital teaching materials from UNCW. Resources from these sites are not placed directly into iLumina, but reside in separate content repositories. iLumina itself actually contains only metadata associated with these resources. In short, iLumina is a partly distributed and partly centralized library. ILumina’s rich metadata, derived from the IMS specifications [1], not only enables powerful searches, but is also the basis for several secondtier user services, including:

Digital libraries settling the score: 10 years hence and 10 before

Six panelists and a moderator leverage knowledge of the first ten years of the digital libraries field, to suggest key future directions.

Library services today and tomorrow: Lessons from iLumina, a digital library for creating and sharing teaching resources

Summary This article is based on the emerging experience associated with a digital library of instructional resources, iLumina, in which the contributors of resources and the users of those resources are the same-an open community of instructors in science, mathematics, engi neering, and technology. Moreover, it is not the resources, most of which will be distributed across the Internet, but metadata about the resources that is the focus of the central iLumina repository and its support services for resource contributors and users. The distributed iLumina library is a community-sharing library for repurposing and adding value to poten tially useful, mostly non-commercial instructional resources that are typically more granular in nature than commercially developed course materials. The experience of developing iLumina is raising a range of issues that have nothing to do with the place and time characteristics of the instructional context in which iLumina instructional resources are created or used. The issues instead have their locus in the democratization of both the professional roles of librarians and the quality assurance mechanisms associated with traditional peer review.