Even in the age of Google, digital repositories can add tremendous value to an institution. Yet creating and maintaining these collections is no small task. Digital repository advocates will concede that the challenges in building and maintaining these collections can daunt even the most intrepid supporters. Three repository directors share their…

Search engine use is one of the most popular online activities. According to a recent OCLC report, nearly all students start their electronic research using a search engine instead of the library Web site. Instead of viewing search engines as competition, however, librarians at Binghamton University Libraries decided to employ search engine…

An intuitively appealing approach to increasing the flexibility of vocational education and training is to delegate choices on instruction, such as the selection of learning tasks, to students. However, empirical evidence shows that students often do not have sufficiently developed self-directed learning skills to select suitable tasks. This…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

Many web 2.0 sites are extremely popular and contain vast amounts of content, but how much of this content is useful in academia? This exploratory paper investigates the potential use of the popular web 2.0 image site Flickr as an academic image resource. The study identified images tagged with any one of 12 subject names derived from recognized…

This study incorporates the 5E learning cycle strategy to design and develop Sharable Content Object Reference Model-conformant materials for elementary science education. The 5E learning cycle that supports the constructivist approach has been widely applied in science education. The strategy consists of five phases: engagement, exploration,…

Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

The Knowledge Bank is The Ohio State University's institutional repository, which houses various works by students, faculty, and staff. One of the text collections in the Knowledge Bank is electronic honors theses. Training students to submit their theses was initially given in the form of in-person workshops. Turnout for these workshops was…

A questionnaire survey conducted at the State Library of Victoria indicates that users in general, and not just scholars, value the standard elements of bibliographic data found in the Library's catalogues, and consider all these elements useful for finding, identifying and selecting items. Rather than making do with less, users wanted more…

University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

Current E-Learning technologies primarily follow a data and metadata-centric paradigm by providing the learner with composite content containing the learning resources and the learning process description, usually based on specific metadata standards such as ADL SCORM or IMS Learning Design. Due to the design-time binding of learning resources,…

This document provides recommendations for request for proposal (RFP) and contract language that state education agencies can use to specify their requirements for access to test item banks. An item bank is a repository for test items and data about those items. Item banks are used by state agency staff to view items and associated data; to…

This article examines issues faced by scholarly societies that are developing and sustaining online paper repositories. It is based on the AERA Conference on Online Paper Repositories, which focused on fundamental issues of policy and procedure important to the operations of online working paper repositories. The report and recommendations address…

The paper proposes a framework for building ontology-aware learning object (LO) content. Previously ontologies were exclusively employed for enriching LOs' metadata. Although such an approach is useful, as it improves retrieval of relevant LOs from LO repositories, it does not enable one to reuse components of a LO, nor to incorporate an explicit…

The role of catalogers within academic libraries is evolving to meet new demands and cultivating a broader understanding of cataloging--one that focuses on collections, not the catalog, and applies cataloger expertise across metadata activities. Working collaboratively as never before, catalogers are reinventing their place within the library.