No abstract

To be successful in the university environment, a digital library must be able to integrate content from faculty and students, as well as traditional library sources. It must have a robust metadata structure that can accommodate and preserve a variety of discipline-specific metadata while supporting consistent access across collections. As part of the Mellon-funded project, the Visual Image User Study at Penn State, a prototype centralized digital image delivery service was created and explored. In creating a metadata schema for the project, the authors anticipated both a wide variety of content and users across many disciplines.This schema employed three very different standards (VRA Core Categories, Dublin Core, IMS Learning Objects Meta-data).The project validated the need for highly individualized content, the importance of individual faculty collections, the need for editorial intervention to supplement and modify contributed metadata, and the importance of addressing discipline-specific vocabularies and taxonomies.igital libraries are developed within a context, and that context determines the character of the design. Most digital libraries are organized and administered by libraries, but many exist within a university system. In this context, the teaching and research functions of the university are determining factors. Members of the university community are rapidly becoming accustomed to using digital objects in their teaching and research. They have their own content (both digital and not-yet-digital), and they seek additional content relevant to their work. Faculty members are also likely to be users of university course management systems that provide an electronic environment for the classroom experience and which make digital learning objects available to their students. If a digital library is to be successful in this environment, it must integrate these sources of content and these systems into its design. This paper seeks to validate one aspect of this argument-the design of an appropriate metadata infrastructure-based on the authors' participation in a project to study the needs of users of images in an academic environment.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract