Defines metadata, noting that standard bibliographic information, summaries, indexing terms, and abstracts are all surrogates for original material, hence metadata. Discusses the need for metadata; creating metadata; search engines and how metadata affects searching; abstracts; and future possibilities. (AEF)

Describes an approach for linking geographically distributed collections of metadata so that they are searchable as a single collection. Describes the infrastructure, discusses advantages of using linked collections of authoritative metadata as an alternative to using a keyword-indexing search engine for resource discovery, and examines other…

Reviews research on digital preservation issues, including born-digital and digitally recreated documents. Discusses electronic records research; metadata and other standards; electronic mail; Web-based documents; moving images media; selection of materials for digitization, including primary sources; administrative issues; media stability…

Thanks to the technological improvements of recent years, distance education represents a real alternative or support to the traditional formative processes. The Internet allows the design of contents, which are able to raise the quality of the traditional formative process. However, the amount of information students can obtain from the Internet…

Purpose: To describe the open-source solution developed by Culturenet Cymru, for the Welsh Books Council, for presenting digitised books and other printed material online. Design/methodology/approach: The challenges faced in the implementation of a pilot e-book collection of nine out-of-print books is described. Findings: The adoption of a number…

The translation into French of the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) DTD tag library has been in progress for a few months. It is being carried out by a group of experts gathered by AFNOR, the French national standards agency. The main goal of this group is to foster the interoperability of authority data between archives, libraries and museums, and…

Educational institutions across the country are adopting guidelines to help assure the quality of e-learning programs and courses. Corporations are also adopting guidelines, but their focus is on the interoperability and reusability of learning objects. While there are commonalities, there are also significant differences between how education and…

Librarians and archivists face challenges when adapting traditional collection development practices to meet the unique characteristics of Web-published materials. Likewise, preservation activities for Web-published materials must be undertaken at the outset of collection development lest they be lost forever. Standards and best practices for…

IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) is a promising technology aimed at supporting learning processes. IMS-LD packages contain the learning process metadata as well as the learning resources. However, the allocation of resources--whether data or services--within the learning design is done manually at design-time on the basis of the subjective appraisals…

Ideally, learning resources should be built over a shared pool of fine reusable granular learning objects. However, in order to avoid contextual lacks, dynamic creation of such resources would mostly rely on the conceptual relationships among learning objects inside a repository. These conceptual relationships, as well as the learning objects…

Learning object repositories and evaluation tools have the potential to serve as sites for interaction among different cultures and communities of practice. This article outlines Web-based learning object evaluation tools that we have developed, describes our current efforts to extend those tools to a wider range of user communities, and considers…

Useful lifetime of educational materials should be defined by their continuing ability to help meet defined learning objectives. More often lifetime is compromised by changes in the educational environment that do not specifically relate to the capacity of the material to assist learning. Approaches for integration of materials into the learning…

The purpose of this article is to introduce end-user development (EUD) processes to the CALL software development community. EUD refers to the active participation of end-users, as non-professional developers, in the software development life cycle. Unlike formal software engineering approaches, the focus in EUD on means/ends development is…

With the expansion of e-learning, the understanding and evaluation of already created e-learning environments is becoming an extremely important issue. One way to dealing with the problem is analysis of case studies, i.e. already created environments, from the reuse perspective. The paper presents a general framework and model to assess UNITE, the…

This paper is about one of the central dilemmas of e-Learning: can we separate content and context, and how should we manage the relationship between the two? Or to put it another way, are Learning Objects just commoditised learning? With the growth of e-Learning over the past few years, learning objects have come into their own. They are the…