Outline for Digital Libraries Tutorial at SIGIR'96

TUTORIAL TITLE: Building and Applying Digital Libraries

INSTRUCTOR: Edward A. Fox

SCHEDULE: Sunday, August 18, 1996, 2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

PARTICIPANTS: Level: introductory to intermediate

Participants are encouraged from those working in fields like computing, library science, information science, and publishing. Those with little background on digital libraries are invited.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Objectives:

Attendees should be able to help in design, development, evaluation, and standardization efforts related to digital libraries. They should understand the key aspects of representative digital library projects, as well as their successes, failures, and implications for the future.

Planned Activities:

1. Participants will use Sun workstations (alone or in small groups), working with materials on the WWW, with the instructor coaching. Learning/reference modules developed by the instructor, in conjunction with Virginia Tech courses and an in-process book on digital libraries, will be the basis for this session.
2. Content will be drawn from many SOURCES. There will be in-depth coverage of the following PROJECTS:
   • TULIP (material science & engineering, with Elsevier, OCLC)
   • CS technical reports (WATERS, NCSTRL)
   • ETD - electronic theses and dissertations
   • Envision - CS literature
   • Interactive Learning with a Digital Library in CS - courseware
   • Monitoring, analyzing, visualizing and modeling WWW traffic
   • Applying IBM's digital library software
3. Participants will look at all of the relevant content from a number of PERSPECTIVES:
   • user and social needs;
   • interfaces and user interaction;
   • architectures, components, protocols;
   • content, publishing, and capture;
   • systems, engines, and operations.
4. Finally, participants will engage in discussion for the final part of the course regarding whichever of the following they find most interesting:
   • developing a world-wide digital library of theses and dissertations,
   • developing a world-wide digital library for computer science, or
   • another topic or topics selected by the class.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Edward A. Fox is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director for Research in the Computing Center at Virginia Tech. He was chair of ACM SIGIR (1991-95), program chair for ACM Digital Libraries '96, and Founder and Chair (1992-94) of ACM Multimedia Conferences Steering/Advisory Committee. He prepared the Sourcebook on Digital Libraries: Report for the National Science Foundation, Dec. 1993. In this special field he was editor of 3 special journal issues, and is or has served as PI on 6 grants.