ANNUAL PROGRESS REPORT AND PROGRAM PLAN
(beyond Cooperative Agreement specification)

PROJECT SUMMARY

DATE PREPARED: February 15, 1996

ORGANIZATION: The University of Michigan

PROJECT DIRECTOR:

Daniel E. Atkins
atkins@umich.edu
Telephone: 313-747-3576
Fax: 313-764-2475

TITLE OF EFFORT: University of Michigan Digital Library Project: An agent-based architecture for federating information collections, services, and users.

ACCESS INFORMATION: http://www.sils.umich.edu/UMDL/HomePage.html

OBJECTIVE:

The University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) is a large-scale effort to provide digital information collections and services for research and education, in university and high school environments. The objective is to define, implement, and evaluate in selected user environments an architecture for federating a large collection of heterogeneous digital information resources that are both physically and organizationally distributed.

APPROACH:

The approach to the above objective is to design an open, distributed system architecture where interacting software agents cooperate and compete to provide library services. The distributed architecture promotes modularity, flexibility, and incremental development, and accommodates diversity in current and future library environments. At the same time, distribution presents difficult problems in interoperability, coordination, search, and resource allocation. The UMDL architecture addresses these problems by dynamically forming agent teams to perform complex library tasks. A virtual economy of information goods and services directs resource allocation in the distributed system. Deployment of the UMDL in high school science classrooms provides a context for the design of specialized agent services and appropriate user interfaces.

PROGRESS:

In the first two years of the project, we wanted to establish the basic software system--the UMDL agent architecture--and get initial feedback from users on the usability and value of UMDL to them in getting work done. We have mostly met those goals now The agent architecture is running, and is ready for third parties to add either content (which will be done this year by high-school students) or to create new services (which will be done this year by students in various classes at the University). The agents in the architecture have met the goals of being locally controlled (semi autonomous), and having the ability to coordinate their actions to perform large-scale task (e.g., search for information which no single agent can do on its own).

The future activities will focus on populating the architecture with specific agents to provide a collection of services relevant to the educational user community. We will add the commerce substrate, and will continue to evolved a more integrated and transparent search and fusion of information resources. We will also continue to demonstrate interoperability with other DLI projects.

We have done well in getting UMDL into the schools; it is really there and being used by students and teachers, but we greatly underestimated the effort We have not gotten information up quickly enough for students to use, and more importantly, the interface to the system has not been well accepted; it is too hard to use. Based on this feedback, we are putting more effort into developing both new interface and new services to support students. We have also realized the need to radically rethink the way users will interact with digital libraries in the future. Based on this experience and with the addition of Professor George Furnas to the project, we will seek a more interactive interface combining browsing, search, and social filtering.

RECENT ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

PLANS:

TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION, SHARING, PARTNERING:

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