Geneva Henry

Connexions: DSP education for a networked world

Connexions is a new approach to authoring, teaching, and learning that aims to fully exploit modern information technology. Available free of charge to anyone under open-content and open-source licenses, Connexions offers custom-tailored, current course material, is adaptable to a wide range of learning styles, and encourages students to explore the links among courses and disciplines. In contrast to the traditional process of textbook writing and publishing, Connexions fosters world-wide, cross-institution communities of authors, instructors, and students, who collaboratively and dynamically fashion “modules” from which courses are constructed. We believe the ideas and philosophy embodied by Connexions have the potential to change the very nature of textbook writing and publishing, producing a dynamic, interconnected educational environment that is pedagogically sound, both time and cost efficient, and fun. This paper overviews the philosophy and technology behind Connexions and describes a nascent community developing material for DSP education.

Connexions :An alternative approach to publishing

Web technologies offer new methods for quickly sharing and disseminating knowledge. Digital libraries of scholarly assets are proliferating online, with materials being openly licensed and shared. Sharing knowledge provides learners, instructors and researchers with access to the most recent findings, encouraging more rapid breakthroughs that lead to positive impacts to society. These new publication processes pose challenges to traditional publishers by redefining methods for providing quality information in a timely manner. The Connexions project at Rice University is a collaborative, community-driven approach to authoring, teaching, and learning. By collaborating both within and across disciplines, communities of authors work together to pool their expertise in the form of knowledge modules. These modules form the basis for building courses that are authored by many, with each author receiving attribution for his or her contributions. Information can be modified under an open license to tailor the material for the audiences of learners.

Expanding roles for the institutional repository

Purpose – Rice University has adopted the DSpace platform for its institutional repository, but has pushed the traditional limits of how that is defined. To accommodate a wider range of scholarship that includes digitized multimedia source materials integrated with educational modules and geospatial resources, the technical infrastructure of DSpace has been enriched. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the developments and decisions required to support this range of scholarship beyond born‐digital scholarly pre‐prints and reports.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA), a digital archive that makes use of DSpace to preserve and present images and texts, as a case study in using DSpace as both a repository and archive framework. TIMEA integrates two additional systems for presenting digital content, Connexions, which focuses on educational modules, and ArcIMS, which makes available dynamic GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps.Findings – Al...

Enabling exploration: travelers in the middle east archive

In this paper, we describe the travelers in the Middle East archive (TIMEA), a digital archive focused on Western explorations in the Middle East between the 18th and early 20th centuries. TIMEA brings together TEI-encoded texts and digital images stored in DSpace, research and teaching materials in Connexions, and GIS maps made available online through ArcIMS. By using the functionality of three distinct systems, TIMEA enables users to more fully understand the materials, place them in context, and conduct queries. We outline the rationale for this architecture, the challenges it presents, and our approach to providing an integrated user experience

Our Americas archive partnership demonstration

The Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP) project is in year 2 of a 3-year IMLS funded grant led by Rice University in Partnership with the University of Marylands Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Designed to meet the needs of American studies scholars researching the Americas from a hemispheric perspective, OAAP is developing an integrated framework for the discovery of digital resources that are managed in heterogeneous distributed repositories. This demonstration will show the current state of the projects common interface to support resource discovery.

Metababble: a clash of metadata cultures

A tension exists between making digitized resources available to users quickly and providing detailed, item-level metadata and semantic markup that make those resources more discoverable. The Our Americas Archive Partnership (OAAP) project, funded by IMLS in the fall of 2007, is facing these challenges as the project progresses. This poster presents a summary of our approach and future thoughts about descriptive approaches for digital resources.

Feasibility of a primarily digital research library

This position paper explores the issues related to the feasibility of having a primarily digital research library support the teaching and research needs of a university. The Asian University for Women (AUW), a new university in Chittagong, Bangladesh, will open in September 2009. It must make a decision regarding the investment to be made in research resources to support the university. Mass digitization efforts now make it possible to consider establishing a research library that consists primarily of digital resources rather than print. There are, however, many issues that make this consideration quite complex and far from certain. In this paper we explore the issues at a preliminary level. We focus on four broad perspectives in order to begin addressing the complex interactions that must be considered in transitioning to a primarily digital research environment: technical, economic, policy and social issues. The purpose of this paper is to begin to explore a research agenda for transitioning from a model for libraries where resources are primarily print to one that is predominantly digital. Our research in this area is just beginning, so our purpose is to raise the issues rather than offer firm conclusions.