One of today's major problems in the field of e-learning is that the creation of high-quality content is still rather time consuming and expensive. In the past, many efforts have been made to produce educational content on the fly, but the results were mainly static blocks of recorded lecture lacking sophisticated navigation facilities. Facing…

This article highlights the LSTA-grant funded California Local History Digital Resources Project (LHDRP) as a case study of a collaborative statewide program involving three primary groups: cultural heritage institutions, grant funding agencies, and digital library service providers. It explores how the infrastructure of the California Digital…

This paper examines the sufficiency of existing e-Learning standards for facilitating and supporting the introduction of adaptive techniques in computer-based learning systems. To that end, the main representational and operational requirements of adaptive learning environments are examined and contrasted against current eLearning standards. The…

This paper describes the experiences of the Colorado Digitization Project (CDP) related to accessing a diverse set of primary resources held by many different cultural heritage institutions. The CDP is a collaborative initiative involving Colorado's archives, historical societies, libraries, and museums. The CDP's goal is to create a virtual…

This survey of 1037 World Wide Web objects on polymer chemistry collected by four search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler) examined document information and use of meta fields, images, and chemical names. Found that the use of meta fields was not widespread and that knowledge of meta fields in HTML varied among Web object creators.…

Character strings were planted in a World Wide Web site (Project Whistlestop) to test indexing and retrieval rates of five Web search tools (Lycos, infoseek, AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite). It was found that search tools indexed few of the planted character strings, none indexed the META descriptor tag, and only Excite indexed into the 3rd-4th site…

Discussion of digital library projects at Rutgers University focuses on publishing bibliographic databases on the Web to provide access to information sources not likely to be published elsewhere. Describes the reusable technology platform concept, bibliographic platform architecture, metadata approach, data entry, and managing the process.…

Incorporated in the National Library of Canada's (NLC) digital library initiatives are projects relating to digitization, collecting Canadian networked electronic publications, development of virtual catalogs, metadata creation, and preservation of digital resources. Issues relating to collaboration, access to digital collections and databases,…

Describes common options and features to consider in evaluating which meta search engine will best meet a searcher's needs. Discusses number and names of engines searched; other sources and specialty engines; search queries; other search options; and results options. (AEF)

Examines file sharing within corporations that use wide-area, distributed file systems. Applications and user interactions strongly suggest that the addition of services typically associated with digital libraries (content-based file location, strongly typed objects, representation of complex relationships between documents, and extrinsic…

Collecting bulky series of paper materials happens very often in an institution as large as the Archives de Paris. Questions arise of how to give access to those materials and how to produce finding aids well suited to their many diverse uses. The numerous specific application programs that are used by the offices of origin of the archives can…

The scholarly communication system is in a critical stage, due to a number of factors. The Open Access movement is perhaps the most interesting response that the scientific community has tried to give to this problem. The paper examines strengths and weaknesses of the Open Access strategy in general and, more specifically, of the Open Archives…

The new e-learning generation depends on Semantic Web technology to produce learning objects. As the production of these components is very costly, they should be produced and registered once, and reused and adapted in the same context or in other contexts as often as possible. To produce those components, developers should use learning standards…

A brief review shows several suggested ways in which cultural historical activity theory has proved valuable to technology supported learning environments. Three of our own design cases are then described (evaluating a peer to peer interface for learning objects, designing an on-line school, and rethinking a public science centre). These are…

Current search engines--even the constantly surprising Google--seem unable to leap the next big barrier in search: the trillions of bytes of dynamically generated data created by individual web sites around the world, or what some researchers call the "deep web." The challenge now is not information overload, but information overlook.…