Digital Library Repositories and Instructional Support Systems

Abstract

This project briefing is from the CNI spring 2004 meeting. The past decade has seen the simultaneous growth of large-scale digital library collections and of widely deployed course management systems (CMS). CMS provide a potentially powerful delivery environment for digital collections, but the issues of interoperation between the two application domains are just beginning to be examined. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an ad hoc group of experts in CMS, digital libraries, and electronic publishing has been looking at some aspects of interoperation. A key observation is that there are today significant practical impediments to instructors making use of digital library content in course systems. This briefing will review the work of the group, focusing on two key topics: 1) what repository owners can do to encourage the use of their content in instructional systems and 2) the need for tools that help instructors gather together relevant materials from across highly heterogeneous and distributed content repositories.