Tailored descriptions of online educational resources can support users searching for educational resources on the World Wide Web (WWW) by helping them to assess for themselves the relevance and suitability of each resource. Suitable descriptions can be derived from the online metadata stored with each resource. The descriptions take into account…

The use of e-learning environments to support teaching and learning has had great impact on the way content is developed and managed. In most cases, both teachers and students have had to re-adapt the way they prepare, access and engage with educational matter. The adjustment in human mechanisms for organising and interacting with educational…

The use of contextual information about the creators and users of archival and manuscript resources has always been a critical method for discovering and providing access to them. Traditionally, this information has been unstructured and ephemeral, being part of the knowledge that experienced staff bring to reference queries. The development of…

Significant economies can be achieved in distributed learning systems architected with a focus on interoperability and reuse. The key building blocks of an efficient distributed learning architecture are the use of standards and XML technologies. The goal of plug and play capability among various components of a distributed learning system…

It seems a foregone conclusion that repositories for reusable learning objects (RLOs), based on common standards and supported by suitable search facilities, will foster a global economic market in the production of RLOs. Actual reuse will support producers of high-quality RLOs, and other producers will be unable to compete, i.e. competition…

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…

Online education encompasses a variety of technologies, one of which is lecture capture--a long-standing practice at the University of Geneva. The faculty of arts has recorded most of its lectures on audiotapes since the 1970s, well before the World Wide Web existed. Modernization of the recording technologies, however, which until recently…

Developed as part of CEN/ISSS Workshop on Learning Technology efforts to improve interoperability between learning resource repositories, the Simple Query Interface (SQI) is an Application Program Interface (API) for querying heterogeneous repositories of learning resource metadata. In the context of the ProLearn Network of Excellence, SQI is used…

The main contribution of this paper is a proposal for a universal pedagogical pattern categorization based on teaching values and activities. This categorization would be more sustainable than the arbitrary categorization implied by pedagogical pattern language themes. Pedagogical patterns from two central patterns languages are analyzed and…

This paper examines two fields that contribute to research on digital libraries--information systems and orality-literary studies--and applies them to a particular digital library domain, botanical taxonomic work. Topics discussed include: (1) an introduction to HOSS (i.e., a computationally-oriented hypermedia system) architecture, including the…

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has helped to create a community of people united in the common purpose of promoting cross-disciplinary resource discovery. DC-2001, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001, is the first annual Dublin Core meeting in Asia, recognizing the growth of activities in the Asian…

This paper describes experiences in gathering together metadata from heterogeneous sources for the American Memory project of the Library of Congress, particularly for the collections digitized and cataloged at other institutions. It also reflects on several initiatives to develop rich structured metadata schemes for specific domains and to find…

This paper discusses a generic query tool that enables an end user to query a metadata store through filters that impose search criteria on attributes. The Metadata Query Tool (MQT) is generic in the sense that it dynamically creates its user interface, based on configuration files that define the metadata scheme and the query functionalities.…

Arguably the biggest "buzz word" of the current year has been "learning or knowledge object". To understand the learning object and why it should be such a highly desirable commodity, it is necessary to unpack not only this concept but more importantly revisit some contributing concepts and constructs (more buzz words) that support the building of…

This paper discusses digital libraries on the Internet. The resource repository hierarchy, consisting of two major paradigms, search engines (SEs) and digital libraries, is presented. SEs are classified into three categories: basic-SE, directory, and meta-SE. The following six major characteristics of a library are summarized: collection of data…