Background
Digital libraries offer the prospect of shared resources, accessible from anywhere and intended to link users with distant collections. The National Science Foundation’s Digital Library Initiative has focused on large-scale implementation of the model, but has also funded smaller developments, including the ALSOS project at Washington & Lee. It is clear that the future of academic and public libraries all over the world includes a broad spectrum of electronic services, and that scholarship and pedagogy at all levels will make increasing use of these tools and facilities.
The World Wide Web was born with Tim Berners-Lee’s model for interlinking documents for the use of collaborators at CERN. Although it began as a means to distribute hypertexts, the Web quickly developed protocols to transfer images and other binary formats, and to display the results of queries to databases. In the last decade, the Web has grown to become a pervasive commercial, recreational, and educational arena, but it was first and still remains a communication medium, linking people to data resources. As computers become more ubiquitous and interconnected, individuals can --and collaborations must-- evolve better means to manage the floods of information that surround them. We propose a software development project to model a solution to this problem.
We seek to build a Web-based collaborative environment, a general model for a Web service which can be adapted to the specific needs of consortial projects (linking institutions), working groups, and courses (at a single institution, or among several campuses). At the heart of the collaborative environment is a digital library which grows as users contribute items and pointers to resources. The library consists of materials in many formats and media, which could be housed on a single server or might be located in many places. Each item has associated metadata to enhance retrievability.
The Project
(see also summary for prospective participants)
The specific implementation we propose to build is tailored to the needs of Washington & Lee’s Environmental Studies Program and its participation in a research consortium including Universidade Federal do Amazonas and Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense in Brazil and Fairfield University in Connecticut. The subject matter of the collaboration is development in the Amazon Basin, and projects include work on sustainable forestry, petroleum development, and monitoring of ecological indicators. It is essential for the projects to gather, manage, and distribute a broad range of information, including GIS materials, remote sensing imagery, numerical data, images, bibliographical sources, and text. The service will provide these facilities. Individual participants at the four institutions can also use the software to build and manage their own materials. In addition to the research agendas, each institution will use the information gathered in courses, and the collaborative environment can serve as a portal, supporting the sharing of materials and data among course participants.
The user experiences the collaborative environment as an array of Web pages with entry, upload, search, display and editing capabilities. Behind this user interface, the Web service is built upon active server pages which connect to relational databases. The service provides links to data, texts, maps, images and other forms of information, and may also be connected to specific software applications for display and analysis of data. The service also provides the means for individuals to manage their own personal digital libraries, and to contribute materials to the group’s collection.
The emphasis is on active use of and contribution to a pool of shared resources. The individual and group libraries are working environments, not accessible to the outside world, but the potential for wider linkage is anticipated as well. After a process of editing and vetting, resources from individual libraries can be uplinked to the group, and elements of the group’s digital library can likewise be contributed to public collections via Dublin Core records (or other metadata protocols) in larger digital libraries and/or public Web sites maintained by the group.
The basic structure of forms-based Web pages and database connections is relatively straightforward to build and implement with existing equipment, and (once built) the service could be readily adapted to the needs of other projects. Multimedia interlinkages of databases and Web pages are now under development at Washington & Lee (see odtaa.wlu.edu and ims1.wlu.edu for examples). Frank Settle’s ALSOS project (alsos.wlu.edu) and David Parker’s Latin American Chronology (calmecac.wlu.edu) are examples of successful local application development in the digital library and Web database arenas. Linkages to such applications as ESRI’s Internet Map Server (ArcIMS) and Spatial Data Engine (ArcSDE) are more challenging, but prototypes already exist for the former, and development of the latter awaits implementation of SQL Server.
Details and Timetable
We propose to build this implementation of a collaborative environment with the services of two student programmers (Jitendra Shrestha and Peter Djalaliev), under the direction of Skip Williams. The Scholars will be involved in all phases of planning and implementation, and will develop skills with Access and ASP. They will also have opportunities to explore a number of ancillary technologies (including XML, ColdFusion, JavaScript, Flash, and several ESRI products), which may be useful in this and subsequent projects. We intend to document the development process carefully, and create libraries of reusable code which will be useful in subsequent database projects. We anticipate that this project will produce a model with wide potential applicability, and that it will link with parallel development of an online spatial data library that Skip Williams and I are prototyping with ACS support.
Specific tasks (from 10 June through 9 August) include the following:
Benefits to students
In addition to developing enhanced skills and familiarity with specific software and programming environments, Scholars will have the opportunity to participate in a team effort in application development. They will help to define problems and then design solutions which will have direct and immediate influence on the use of information technologies at W&L and other institutions with which we collaborate.