Digital Library Research on CCD Funded Educational Repositories

该项目对以前由美国国家科学基金会(NSF)CCD计划资助的教育资源库进行基于数字图书馆的研究。由于这些资源库面向的是供教育工作者用于教育的教育材料，它们包含一些特殊的问题，可以通过这一努力来解决。这些由NSF资助的储存库有几个不同寻常的特性。它们分布在几所不同的大学，每个地点都有特定的定位。它们包含的材料将被各种教育学科使用，如计算机科学、自然科学和物理科学、数学家、艺术家等。它们包含各种不同的媒体类型，包括文本、多种语言的演示程序、Java小程序和程序、图像、现场视频和计算机动画。另一个特点是，不同类型的用户将尝试访问这些网站。他们中的一些人将是K-12教育工作者，一些人将是学院或大学教授。这项提议有两个主要推动力。第一个问题是帮助教育工作者找到他们最感兴趣和最有用的材料。有几种策略，因此有几个常用的研究问题，包括一般导航，例如，浏览以确定库中可能有什么，以及更具体的基于查询的搜索。这项提案中有解决这两个问题的努力。对于教育图书馆来说，一个更具体的问题是这些材料在被发现和使用后的有效性。这个问题也是这个项目的一个重点。

This project performs digital library based research on educational repositories previously funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CCD Program. Because these repositories are oriented towards educational materials to be used by educators for education, they contain some special problems that can be addressed by this effort. These NSF funded repositories have several unusual properties. They are distributed across several different universities and each site has a specific orientation. They contain material that will be used by a variety of educational disciplines such as computer science, natural and physical sciences, mathematicians, artists, and others. They contain a variety of different media types including text, demonstration programs in several languages, Java applets and programs, images, live video, and computer animations. another property is that different types of users will try to access these web sites. Some of them will be K-12 educators and some will be college or university professors. There are two primary thrusts to this proposal. The fist is the general issue of helping educators to find the materials that are of most interest and most useful to them. There are several strategies and thus several research issues that are commonly used including general navigation, e.g., browsing to determine what might be in the libraries, and more specific query-based searches. There are efforts in this proposal that address both of these issues. An issue that is more specific to educational libraries is the effectiveness of the materials after they have been found and used. This question is also a focus of this project.