Developing a Digital National Library for Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Report of a Workshop (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A
Appendix A
Pages 59-108
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From page 59... ...
It also permits the scholarly and research community to recapture and reengineer one facet of the scholarly communication process to meet their needs. SELECTED ATTRIBUTES OF AN SMELT NATIONAL LIBRARY The National Library should provide an active learning environment.
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From page 60... ...
A National Library system that supports and encourages the creation of new knowledge by undergraduates could serve as a mode! for reshaping the educational process for other disciplines.
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From page 61... ...
It will also be important that current work of faculty and students be a vital part of the library. Participation in the library as an active learning environment will require faculty and stu dents, if they choose to publish their work else where, to retain the rights that would allow full use of the resource within the National Library.
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From page 62... ...
to the prospectively larger benefit of the social weal has led to an intensified examination of the infrastruc opportunity and the challenge for the establishment of a National Library of Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education, because such a library must incorporate the best of each. ROAD AND LOAD Road as carrier, and load as content are the most basic elements of a digital library.
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From page 63... ...
In the most accurate sense of the word, these libraries are becoming increasingly"bionic" organic, evolving bodies whose collections are growing rapidly in both traditional paper and in digital format, and that are increasingly responsive interactively with their users. It is from the grass-roots growth of information resources into the contemporary"bionic library," and from the creation of pockets of digital information created by multiple agencies and authors and distributed throughout the Web, that the hypertextual fullness of a National Library for Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education can be realizecl.
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From page 64... ...
It may be that it is this group, also-students active in SMELT who can tell us how a National Library might be constructed and how it might best meet the needs of the undergraduate stuclent. In terms of the information content of digital libraries and the services required of them, there is basically little evidence available today to differentiate between the methodologies of the users of science, mathematics, engineering ant]
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From page 65... ...
:er exemplified by the National Library? It is very much the case that many funding bodies for educational institutions have seen the digital future and believe it holds the answer to reducing costs and achieving efficiencies in the learning process.
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From page 66... ...
That will be determined by the marketplace of learning. That is the chief reason why the National Science Foundation must have as clear an understanding as possible of the road and load digital library issues that will 66 confront the effective creation of an as potentially important learning and research resource as a National Library for Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education.
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WILLIAM Y ARMS Corporation for National Research Initiatives DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION Introduction This is a discussion paper for the National Research Council workshop on August 7-8, 1997.
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The Technology of Digital libraries Assumptions The following are my basic assumptions about the proposed library.
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There are no funciamental, technical barriers to the development of digital libraries for scientific education. A rough technical outline might be as follows: 1.
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Information overToad is emerging as a fundamental issue in digital libraries. The undergraduate science library faces this problem.
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At present there is intensive debate about the form that copyright should take in digital libraries. One opinion (which I share)
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Conclusion To build a large-scale distributed library for undergraduate science education is technically difficult. It faces no fundamental barriers, but to do it well requires a skilled and motivated team.
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Since the NSF/DARPA/NASA Initiative ot Research on Digital Libraries was started in 1993, many digital library projects have flourished around the world. In this article we discuss the need and technical issues of a digital library of unclergraduate SME (Science, Mathematics, and Engineering)
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From page 74... ...
As the book, journal, and courseware production expands and spreads, worldwide information output has increased to the point where it is now impossible for a traditional library to acquire all the items produced in any but the narrowest of subject fields. As a result, a national digital library should identify and register the hoIclings of SME education materials around the country.
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Who will be responsible for the editorship of SME education materials? What will be the cost of establishing a national library of undergraduate SME education materials?
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We have been asked to posit the nature of a digital library for undergraduate science, mathematics ant] engineering education, and then to critique what we have invented.
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From page 77... ...
in applying technology to educational needs in a particular content area of high priority (finding good instructional materials was only a small part of this inquiry)
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From page 78... ...
If these four questions serve as a preliminary introduction to NRC's questions about the role of digital libraries of SMET educational materials, then what alternative metaphors can we explore for instantiating a radical alternative to outmoded views of education that focus on one-way transmissions between teachers and students, that depend upon the acquisition of information rather than the evaluation and utilization acquisition of information, and that isolate, individuate, and alienate rather than connect learners. Recent reports have suggested that scientists and engineers have access to "colIaboratories" which enable them to remotely operate expensive and sophisticated scientific equipment.
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From page 79... ...
Since the latter is so much a part of most American higher education reforms in science education (e.g., Priscilla Laws' and Ron Thorton's "Workshop Physics," David Smith's and Lang Moore's "Project CALC" {a calculus reform projectT, and Brock Spencer's and George Lisensky's "ChemLinks") , we simply refer readers to them (links describing their projects are connected to the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium ho~nepage)
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I Considerations about the potential nature and impact of a National Library: VVho and how large is the potential audience?
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Who should make these decisions? Thus, the National Library for SMET Education must store, classify, and make available "every" funded SMET educational innovation in a highly democratic fashion that provides both access and equity.
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CONCLUSION The National Library for SMET Education should enable the instantiation of curricular reform that is fundamentally democratic, open, flexible, an dynamically evolving. But a word of caution is necessary.
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Childers's list was a promising start and a commendable job of trying to carve out a societal niche for the public library before society metaphorically shelves the library in a rundown warehouse on the outskirts of town. But the authors contends that the list deserves fleshing out and expansion..." Herein I have argued that a metaphor based upon open questions from students and unsolved scientific and societal problems and a pedagogy based upon ignorance, error, chaos, and colIaborative learning will be more appropriate metaphors for the establishment of a library which will continue to serve curricular reform.
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From page 84... ...
clisciplines as they relate to this community. The digital library and its development will involve not only integration with the larger information infrastructure, but will also require a careful evaluation of the manner in which it will integrate with the larger organizational process for undergraduate education, including peer review, certification, and the system of professional reward necessary to engage participation in content clevelopment and evaluation.
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From page 85... ...
Technical development of the key functional elements of a national digital library to support undergraduate SMET education can largely be fulfi~led with existing web-capabiTities. It can be built with existing knowledge and tools, but successful use of this resource will require a fundamental rethinking of the larger learning process in which it is intended to operate.
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From page 86... ...
Creative thinking about the opportunity presented by the digital library may be better served by the use of another name, such as the national digital university, or electronic learning resource. One benefit of the continued use of the term "library" is conformance to traditional funding criteria and guidelines in institutions such as NSF.
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From page 87... ...
Market pressures for electronic commerce are pushing the development of these capabilities. Rather than pursue indepenclent solutions to these problems, NSF should encourage participation in ongoing efforts to ensure that they address the needs of the digital library community.
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From page 88... ...
(my 1 / THE ROLE OF NSF As an element of the larger information infrastructure, digital libraries will rely on tools, systems, laws, and regimes developed for a wide array of applications, including but not limited to digital libraries. Ensuring that the particular requirements of digital libraries are addressed in the development of these supporting structures is critical to fostering a robust sub-infrastructure for libraries.
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From page 89... ...
library can best improve undergraduate SMET.
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From page 90... ...
It would be very useful, in examining the case for an undergraduate digital library, to compile data about the number of students per year that take various undergraduate science, engineering, and mathematics courses, and also to gather some data about the distribution of textbook use in these coursesfor example, how many of the students taking first year calculus use one of the five most popular textbooks? How often are new editions of these textbooks issued?
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From page 91... ...
(Note here that the term national need not imply centralized; the computing facilities may be distributed but the point is that they are managed in an organized, coherent fashion for the benefit of a national user community.) We will need to understand how students and teachers interact through the undergraduate digital library.
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From page 92... ...
A digital library designed to support undergraduate education in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering will likely be relevant to thousands of institutions in the United States (even exclucling the widely scattered gifted high school students who might well gain great benefit from access to such a system)
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From page 93... ...
also underscores the need to explore and understand the relationships with the existing library base, and how linkages can be established between the undergraduate digital library and the evolving research library system both at the intellectual and technical levels. It also seems clear that the team needed to develop such an undergraduate digital library will be somewhat different in composition from those leading the development of more research-oriented digital libraries; while it will certainly require librarians, information technologists, and faculty to work in partnership, the focus on education will mean that author-educators will need to take a leadership role.
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1) This conclusion is based in turn on several observations about the growing impact of 94 digital libraries, not only in the realm of research in various fields, but also in terms of how education is changing at all levels because of information technology en cl the availability of electronic information resources.
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From page 95... ...
When library resources are used, there is a strong tendency to limit materials to only those that are very recent and to those that are very specific to their particular projects.2 To sum up, there would seem to be significant data that show that extensive library collections in the areas covered by the proposed library do not have a very close correlation with undergraduate education. Rather, the correlation is with graduate education and established research although even there library collection use has certain limitations and constrictions.
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From page 96... ...
in what manner will a new approach to undergraduate education in the sciences engage students in inclepenclent discovery, analysis, and creation of knowledge which will be dependent on information resources collected in a digital library?
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From page 97... ...
spoke of it in terms of the typical citizen two decades ago. LIBRARY CONTENT CONFLICTING DEMANDS Academic libraries, along with all libraries which serve heterogeneous communities of information users, commonly face conflicting demands with respect to what they are to "acquire" in the way of information resources (i.e., "link to," possibly, in the context of a digital library)
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From page 98... ...
The foregoing is the experience learned from approximately 130 years of the "modern" library of print information-bearing entities, the only kind of library that virtually anyone now working on digital libraries of any kind have ever experienced but of which most are not much aware. Were the library being created for undergraduate SME&T education to observe this normative, "enriched" idea of a modern library, the following questions will need to be addressed.
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From page 99... ...
1994. "Intellectual Realities and the Digital LibraIy." Proceedings of Digital Libraries '94: The First Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital 99
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From page 100... ...
Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science, no.
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From page 101... ...
The main features of a systematic indexing system include a controlled vocabulary for topical and formal attributes of information-bearing entities, a taxonomic and faceted structure (with notation) of the concept terms that shows relationships among terms, and an alphabetical index to the structure.
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From page 102... ...
We include this table first of all in order to provide a general framework for considering various important aspects of indexing when considering how the national SMELT digital library might be indexed, and also to offer a way to distinguish existing indexing approaches. With respect to the latter, for example, traditional library catalogs as they evolved from the late nineteenth century to about 102 the 1950s can most readily be associated with column A of the table.
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From page 103... ...
The second reason for inclucling the foregoing table of indexing factors is to provide a framework for identifying what this paper advocates that is, that regardless of any other indexing approaches which might be taken for the national SMELT digital library, one that should be seriously considered is indexing the library according to a systematic, logically related structure of controlled vocabulary index terms for the topical and other relevant aspects of the information-bearing entities included in the library. This kind of a system will adhere at a minimum to 1A in the table (controlled vocabulary)
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From page 104... ...
Its structure of concept terms is highly (levelope cl, having been modified constantly by including new concepts, modifying ol(1 ones, an(1 restructuring concepts over many years by means of a strong, centralized ecTitorial process. It has adopted faceted structures in various places in the system, has a reasonably thorough index of its concepts, and has many other features that cause it to be one of the best such systems for information retrieval available.
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From page 105... ...
Eclucational support We assume that the focus of the national SMELT digital library, being supportive of undergraduate education in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology, will need a capability for searching that enhances the ability of undergraduates to engage in the personal exploration of ideas, and that given this need, the indexing system of the library will therefore need to include a broac] range of information search types.
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From page 106... ...
from the books themseIves, from their association with other books along side them in the same category, and from differences with books in nearby categories. We assume that this kind of information use and, by extension, information searching, is especially relevant to the national SME&T cligital library as a support for undergraduate education insofar as that education will emphasize the exploration of ideas in the form of personal research and exploration rather than the directed research of seasoned researchers in creating new social knowledge.
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From page 107... ...
7. What alternatives to a systematic indexing system of the kind envisioned here are presently available for meeting the information use needs described in the "rationale" above?
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From page 108... ...
1997. "Evaluating Dewey Concepts as a Knowledge Base for Automatic Subject Assignment." Paper presented at 2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries, Philadelphia, Pa., July 23-26, 1997.
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