Digital Library Research on CCD Funded Educational Repositories

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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.