Dr. Whaley suggested that you might be interested in being a member of this Project. After you've read what follows, take a look at the proposal linked above, and think about how your interests and skills might fit. What Skip Williams (skip@wlu.edu) and I (blackmerh@wlu.edu) need to know pretty soon is: are you interested in joining? Please don't hesitate to talk to either of us for more, but many of the details will be worked out as we discuss the problem as a group. It appears that we can have three and possibly four on the Project, so we'll need to do an interview procedure to decide on the names to submit with the application for funding (which is due on 1 February).
This summer's project is to build an implementation of a digital library for a specific purpose and client. In the process we will also develop and document generic models and reusable code, and so create a basis for later projects with similar goals.
The basic tools we will use are Access, ASP, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL, ArcIMS... and perhaps others that you contribute to solving problems that arise. You'll learn --and teach each other-- a lot of portable skills, and we make no assumptions about your present skills and knowledge. What we want is enthusiasm and energy.
The core technical problem we're dealing with is database I/O with a Web interface. The end product needs to be simple and flexible for end users, powerful and extendable for database managers, and secure and robust enough for Internet use.
A library is an organized collection. The contents may include different media (text, images, maps, datasets, sound...), which need not be in a single physical location. Each item has associated with it a metadata record, and most library operations are interactions with metadata records: creation, search, update, subsetting, etc. Metadata records are essentially pointers, and they may contain a broad range of properties, including description, classification, location information, transaction history, access control information --all of which may be relevant to management of the collections they represent and index.
I use my computer for many different purposes: I communicate with others by e-mail and by making Web pages, I make maps, I scan and manipulate images, I analyze datasets, I search for information in a variety of ways, I read text, I write for myself and for others... the computer is the center of my information life (though I also have and use paper files, books, a telephone, the radio, and so on), and I need to be able to organize what I do in the digital environment. I need to be able to find things I've dealt with in the past, to organize and otherwise make productive use of collections, and to deal with the flow of stuff across my desktop. The User Interfaces of the operating system and various applications are designed and 'supposed to' help me with these management tasks (files have names, are in folders, are located on various network drives, and so on). What's missing for me and the way I work is an effective metastructure (for want of another word) to contain and index my own digital world. I need a librarian to help me manage my (always-growing, always-articulating) information universe.
Similarly, a group of people who are collaborating on a problem or a project needs someplace to store materials they share, and also needs ways to find and retrieve items and sets of items. Some applications (like Microsoft Office and Novell Netware) provide tools for such group activity, permitting sharing of documents and updating functions, but these are designed with intranet working groups in mind, and typically are not very good at handling and interacting with documents created by other applications. The necessity for metastructure and librarian is as great for a collaboration as for an individual, though some of the implementation details are different.
The case is particularly clear for a collaboration which is distributed in space, and relies upon the Internet for much of its communication. Various protocols (ftp, http, etc.) facilitate the movement of data and information across the global network, but I don't know of any existing applications designed to manage distributed collections and facilitate collaborative work of the multimedia sort and complexity described above. And so we propose to build one.