Utilizing the Digital Library at Florida International University

Citation

McMullen, B.E. and Masullo, M.J. (2000), "Utilizing the Digital Library at Florida International University", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aac.015

Utilizing the Digital Library at Florida International University

Barbara E. McMullen and Miriam J. Masullo

Art Gloster, Vice President and CIO of Florida International University (FIU) http://www.fiu.edu, during this half-day workshop, told participants the story of a multitude of interests that FIU found competing for scarce resources as they started building a University digital library. Gloster described how an early naïveté resulted in one false start in the development of the FIU digital library as well as other encountered problems that participants at the workshop took away as lessons learned.

Florida International University, comprising the University Park campus and the North Campus on Biscayne Bay, as well as two shared campuses in Broward County and the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, has partnered with IBM, BellSouth, AT&T, and Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) to use technology to deliver asynchronous learning applications. FIU is committed to expanding content, delivering off campus, as well as providing access to move support materials through the Digital Library http://fiudl.fiu.edu/

In talking about a digital library infrastructure and support structures, Gloster reminded us that the word "library" is as important as the word "digital" in the idea of a "digital library." In an open critique of the FIU effort to build a digital library, he explained how a lost year pointed to the need to shift control of the effort from the technologists to the librarians. It was only after the shift that any real progress was made in the cataloging and metadata areas. Gloster further emphasized the fact that the project has served as a change agent at the university and by identifying competing resources has resulted in a focus on potential new markets and a pragmatic awareness of the growing importance of the edutainment to the University. The Master of Business Administration is the first complete degree program to take advantage of the digital library technology. FIU will offer this program in South America.

Sherry Carrillo, Assistant Director of the FIU Libraries, discussed metadata, copyright, process, and organization. Although the librarians are now very involved in the digital library project, the impression was that there continues to be a need to effect change in library personnel, particularly catalogers. Catalogers must think broader than MARC records and librarians must pursue more actively their responsibilities in the area of faculty and curricular support for the digital library. For those interested in the problems of faculty rights management, the FIU approach is that the school owns the digital materials while the faculty retain the rights to the original materials. Carrillo concluded with some of the challenges that are yet to be met including incorporating metadata creation into the workflow and applying cataloging skills in a new way.

Elizabeth Cobb, Director of Administrative Computing and Instructional Technology, spoke on the hardware, software, specifications and uses of the digital library. The FIU configuration is based on the IBM digital library product running in an AIX and DB2 environment. A deviation from the standard configuration, a product called Blue Angel Technologies Enterprise Server Z39.50, was discussed by Cobb although participants would have benefited from a more in-depth presentation than took place at this workshop. Cobb explained how metadata are stored in the Blue Angel repository database using the Dublin Core standard and that this works in conjunction with the Blue Angel Z39.50 server with Fulcrum search engine. The Z39.50-compliant search allows a user to initiate a single gateway search across other Z39.50-compliant digital libraries or library catalogs. A template guides through the metadata and maps Dublin Core to MARC. It will be interesting to hear if next year this repository has been enhanced to include the IMS standards. This would demonstrate the kind of progress that the focus on organizational structures by the project team should expect to see as development moves forward to increased curricular integration of the digital library.

Cobb also discussed specific collections that make up the FIU digital library including The Wolfsonian Museum collection http://www.goflorida.com/south/miami/see/artmuseum/wolfson.html that investigates the ways in which design shapes and reflects human experience, the Everglades Digital Library http://everglades.fiu.edu/library/index.html developed in collaboration with the Everglades National Park, and the James Nelson Goodsell Digital Library http://americas.fiu.edu/goodsell/. Other collaborations with Northwestern University, Penn State, and Indiana University were discussed. North-western's emphasis on leading the way with digital video delivery stood out at EDUCAUSE this year. The FIU digital library includes movies, images, photographs, recordings, and text images among other materials. In extending the environment to support instruction, the idea of a distributed teaming model was implemented. This model relies on the network to emphasize a student-centered environment and encourage greater collaboration among students. Emphasis is placed on interactive problem solving, where the teacher is not just an expert, but increasingly takes the role of facili-tator. Asynchronous Learning Network Courses are at http://aln1.eng.fiu.edu/

The FIU project also considers the state of course shells used increasingly by educational institutions as rapid development environments for distributed learning and distance education. The development plan includes an interface between World Wide Web servers and the IBM Digital Library with WebCT and Web Course in a Box. This development, when complete, should have much appeal to institutions seeking efficiencies in storage and access of digital materials while enabling flexibility in presentation. More and more, it becomes clear that one shell environment cannot appeal to all faculty, disciplines, and schools and that, with standards imposed by a digital library, any form of course shell or mix-and-match Web-based curricular support front-end can be adopted without any loss in searchability. Interactive dialog is enabled and collaboration can take place within the digital library. The simplicity of integrating e-mail attachments with the digital library so that any digital file in the library can be accessed to supplement a class or research is almost elegant as a solution. The publishing metaphor is also being explored in the FIU digital library environment since materials that have been posted to the distributed learning network are not only easily updated but also disseminated. The convenience and cost advantages of publishing information in this digital format are obvious.

More technical detail and demonstrations of the actual digital library workflow would have been an enhancement to this workshop. Builders of digital libraries want to see under the hood of existing projects and have little interest in seeing the presentation Web pages. Perhaps next year, this group will provide this kind of in-depth presentation.

Barbara E. McMullen is Director of Academic Technology, Tufts University, Medford, MA. Barbara. mcmullen@tufts.edu

Miriam J. Masullo is Research Staff Member, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY. Masullo@us.ibm.com