This article examines issues encountered over a two-year period by a faculty librarian at the Penn State University Libraries while developing and delivering course-related library instruction employing problem-based learning (PBL) in the First-Year Seminar (FYS) of the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The process of curriculum development involved close cooperation between the school's instructional designers, faculty, and the libraries' faculty. Findings regarding the practical aspects of delivering information literacy instruction using PBL are discussed, including the issues of transitioning to PBL from more traditional forms of course-related library instruction. The evolution of the instructional goals is expressed in the terminology of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education."

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.

The Penn State Taxonomic Tags group, with representatives from Information Technology, Business Administration, and the Penn State Libraries, was formed to examine whether a taxonomic set of tags, systematically applied across the university's Web pages, could (a) make finding specific pages easier from among the University's greater than 500,000 Web pages, (b) simplify Web content management tasks and (c) prove useful over time as search engines continue to evolve and despite whether open source or commercial (and often, proprietary) search algorithms are employed. The University has had broad experience with several search engines, and currently holds a University-wide license for the Google Appliance. The Tags Group has developed recommendations that it believes will address issues found in the current environment and yet remain useful during and after what it expects will be the increasing adoption of Content Management Systems across Penn State University.

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