Colleges and universities should be among the world's leading institutions in the field of data governance. After all, higher education institutions are dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Why, then, do those who work in colleges and universities often have so much difficulty corralling information about their own operations…

Purpose: This paper aims to present and evaluate a web-based tool, namely ASK-CDM-ECTS, which facilitates authoring and publishing on the web descriptions of (open) academic courses in machine-readable format using an application profile of the Course Description Metadata (CDM) specification, namely CDM-ECTS. Design/methodology/approach: The paper…

Librarians are familiar with the single-line form, the consolidated index, which represents a very large portion of a library's print and online collection. Their end users are familiar with the idea of a single search across a comprehensive index that produces a large, relevancy-ranked results list. Even though most patrons would not recognize…

The open educational resources (OER) movement has gained momentum in the past few years. With this new drive towards making knowledge open and accessible, a large number of OER repositories have been established and made available online throughout the world. However, the inability of existing search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to…

The field of Social Research Methods is shared not only by the social sciences, but by many other disciplines. There is therefore enormous scope for the creation and re-use of open educational resources (OERs) in this area. However, our work with social scientists on a number of recent projects suggests that barriers exist to OER creation and use…

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning…

To increase the interoperability and reusability of learning objects, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative developed a model called Content Aggregation Model (CAM) to describe learning objects and express relationships between learning objects. However, the suggested relations defined in the CAM can only describe structure-oriented…

Digital libraries continue to flourish. At the same time, the principles of user-centered design and the practice of usability testing have been growing in popularity, spreading their influence into the library sphere. This article explores the confluence of these two trends by surveying the current literature on usability studies of digital…

Individualised open and distance learning at the university continuing education and post-graduate education levels is a central issue of today. The advanced information and communication technologies together with several applications offer new perspectives, such as the so-called virtual university. Simultaneously, to gain market share, several…

Describes the evolving information technologies employed at the Digital Library Initiative (DLI-I) Testbed of full-text journal articles at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Examines how XML, XSLT, and CSS can be used in a digital library application and discusses document representation and transmission, metadata schema, and…

This paper reports on trends in cataloging in Thai libraries, focusing on the use of information technology as a tool to accelerate the organization of resources, the benefit of cataloging resources available from the Internet, and cataloging policy for Internet resources. The introduction discusses cataloging Thai documents, managing foreign…

Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to trustworthy, authoritative knowledge. Consequently, academic libraries--along with their private and governmental counterparts--have…

Information technology and the Internet are making inroads into almost all areas of society. The requirements of students and professionals are fast changing, and the information society requires lifelong learning in practically all areas, especially those related to information technologies. The educational sector can profit in particular from…

Supervision of library digitization is the focus of this paper. First outlined are the definition, formalization, implementation, and completion phases of project management. Descriptions of management decisions involved in digitization projects follow on matters such as: collection analysis, resourcing, project personnel, production, access and…

Discussion of the development of distance education in Switzerland focuses on a history of the Swiss Virtual Campus and an explanation of the role of the Educational Technologies Unit of the University of Geneva (TECFA). Topics include the integration of information technologies, teacher training, and the management of metadata. Contains 35…