Digital Libraries

This article reviews available cost-effective options libraries have for updating and maintaining pathfinders such as subject guides and course pages. The paper discusses many of the available options, from the standpoint of a mid-sized academic library which is evaluating alternatives to static-HTML subject guides. Static HTML guides, while useful, have proven difficult and time-consuming to maintain. The article includes a discussion of open source database-driven solutions (such as SubjectsPlus, LibData, Research Guide, and Library Course Builder), Wikis, and social tagging sites like del.icio.us. This article discusses both the functionality and the relative strengths and weaknessess of each of these options.

This presentation focuses on a collaborative local history project between Duke University undergraduates and Durham eighth graders. Through their research seminar, Duke students conduct original research in local archives and then mentor eighth graders in how to use technology, particularly the Digital Durham website http://digitaldurham.duke.edu

In creating a digital library collection on World War II, Texas A&M University-Commerce discovered an opportunity to work in partnership with local museums, public libraries, and historical societies. This diverse community greatly expands our ability to preserve historical resources and make them available to scholars worldwide.

Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. By building bridges among various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation.

Texas A&M deployed Shibboleth single sign-on and federating software to control access to on-campus applications as well as licensed third-party course content through the InCommon Federation and the Texas Digital Library initiative. This session will discuss how this infrastructure can be leveraged to address a variety of business needs.

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

Charles Henry raises fundamental questions about the nature of the university now that
communication and scholarship are so ingrained in academe.

New cyberinfrastructures require not only collaboration across
disciplines, but collaboration across organizations. In The Virtual
Observatory Meets the Library, G. Sayeed Choudhury tells of the lessons
learned - academic, technological, and sociological - when Johns Hopkins
University created an astronomical database.