Digital Repositories in LIS curriculum

1
Digital Repositories in LIS curriculum

• Xia Lin
• College of Information Science and Technology
• Drexel University

2
The Digital Libraries Course

• Drexel DL course started at 2001
• An introductory course to the research,
  development, application and practice of digital
  libraries.
• for both LIS and Systems students
• Emphasize hand-on learning experience and
  projects
• Teach both face-to-face and online

3
The environment

• The environment has changed a lot since then
• There are much more digital libraries,
  collections, and repositories for students to
  explore.
• Much more DL technologies and projects are
  available.
• It is still difficult to find a good textbook.

4
Two ways to use repositories

• Seeing digital repositories in Action
• Many digital repositories are available online.
• Creating your own repositories
• A lot of technologies and tools are available for
  repository building.

5
Digital repositories in action

• An assignment in the digital libraries course
• Each student to identify and review 4 digital
  online repositories that
• include significant collections
• are accessible on the Web
• follow and use good practice of digital libraries
  theories and technologies

6
Results

• Students discover a wide range of digital
  repositories
• Image repositories
• Video/multimedia repositories
• Text/literature repositories
• Education/learning object repositories
• Subject-specific repositories
• Medicine, law, science, social science,

7
Issues

• How to distinguish among Digital collections,
  Digital repositories, and Digital Libraries
• They might be used interchangeably on the Web,
  But each has a different emphasis.
• How to evaluate digital collections or
  repositories
• by Sizes of collections, quality, accessibility,
  management, easy of use, and/or domain/coverage,
  and ?

8
Learning repositories by building a repository

• Students are very interested in learning abut
  those online repositories
• Particularly when their learning efforts are
  contributed to building a repository about
  digital repositories.

9
Self-Built Repositories

• are excellent teaching tools
• Promote reuse
• Let this years student see last years students
  work
• Promote sharing
• Each student contribute only a small part,
• The accumulated result is significant
• Promote collaboration
• Make it easy for students to work on group
  projects
• And see or critique other groups projects.
• Promote hand-on activities
• From repositories users to repositories
  contributors.

10
Example 1 Digital repository Review
11
Example 2 Dspace collection for metadata review
12
Example 3 Image Indexing
13
Example 4 Historic Costume Collection
14
Discussion

• What do we want students to learn?
• the availability and range of digital
  repositories
• good practice of digital repositories
• use of metadata
• services and users
• ?

15
Discussion

• What are the challenges of using digital
  repositories in LIS courses?
• Technologies
• Many open-source technologies are available
• But they keep changing
• Management of digital repositories
• We do not have full-time staff to maintain
  repositories we create ourselves
• Unbalance of students technical skills and
  backgrounds

16
Panel Abstract

• Online repositories are increasingly important
  for information management, and as such, are
  being incorporated into LIS curriculum. This
  panel explores the educational opportunities and
  challenges in four areas related to the
  incorporation of online repositories in library
  education principles of online repositories
  technology issues student engagement and future
  directions.