Collegiate Times

The rise of digital libraries is fairly new. Its most primitive ancestry can be traced back 15 years - not nearly long enough for it to have found a niche as a subject at many institutions of higher learning. As a result, it is relatively difficult to find adequately-trained individuals who can design and add to these digital libraries. All of that, however, is about to change.

As of Jan. 1, Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina have been working together towards providing a quality educational curriculum on the development and preservation of digital libraries.

The two schools were awarded a grant of more than half of a million dollars by the National Science Foundation, ensuring funding for three years. Edward Fox, professor of computer science, is directing the project at Virginia Tech while Barbara Wildemuth heads the program at UNC.

This collaborative research is very important because the two schools ?represent the two different disciplines of the digital library,? Wildemuth said. While Virginia Tech has an excellent computer science program, UNC boasts a school of information and library science, ?ranked #1 by US News and World Report,? according to the NSF proposal.

?Our educational resources can be used in CS as well as LIS courses only if we have people from both these backgrounds involved in the development of the materials,? said Fox.

Virginia Tech will most likely be focusing on adding to these digital libraries while Wildemuth said UNC will be concerned with converting from their old system of physical libraries to form a sort of ?hybrid collection.?

The plan is to gather a variety of experts to engineer the curriculum and perform the initial testing. The program is vast: it covers both online and off-line curriculum, and supplementary as well as entire-course material. Eventually, each of the modules developed will be tested in the classroom and receive student feedback.

In order to design this curriculum, the engineers will follow a system called the ?Five S's? -societies, scenarios, spaces, structures and streams. It is hopeful that this system will facilitate collaboration by pushing more libraries to be built around one system instead of disparate ones which will ?also will facilitate interoperability,? Fox said.

As for future expanses and uses of this curriculum, Fox says that a textbook will eventually follow.