For additional information contact: Laurie B. Crum, (313) 763-6035
SILS receives funding from National Science Foundation, the Advanced Projects Research Agency of the Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency for the Digital Library Project
The University of Michigan has been awarded a four year, $4 million cooperative agreement by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) to conduct coordinated research and development to create, operate, use and evaluate a testbed of a large-scale, continually evolving multimedia digital library. The content focus of the library will be earth and space sciences. In addition, The University of Michigan and other commercial sponsors including IBM, Elsevier Science, Apple Computer, Bellcore, UMI International, McGraw-Hill, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Kodak have committed an additional $4.5 million in funding, technology, and information content to the project. Other partners are expected to join the coalition in the near future.
Two additional companion projects have also recently been funded. The Mellon Foundation has granted the University $700,000 to apply technology from the University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) Project to a pilot project to support digital access to a collection of history and economics journals in liberal arts and humanities programs. A second grant of $4.3 million by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation is enabling the University to form and lead a national consortium which will define and pilot a new graduate professional program to educate librarians and knowledge access professionals in the areas of the new age of digital libraries.
The NSF/ARPA/NASA project is a multidisciplinary collaboration among faculty and staff from the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies; the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; the University Libraries; the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences; the Information Technology Division; the School of Business Administration; the School of Education; and the Department of Economics. Initial use and evaluation of the digital library will take place in science classes in Ann Arbor, Michigan high schools and the Stuyvesant High School in New York City as well as instruction and research at the University. Access will also be available through Ann Arbor and New York City public libraries. The digital library will eventually be accessible from many locations throughout the Internet. The Project Director is Daniel E. Atkins, Dean and Professor of the School of Information and Library Studies and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The UMDL will consider a complex array of technical and socioeconomic issues and will focus the research through the design, construction, and evaluation by real users of a testbed system. The overall goal of the system is to assist people, in a easy and personalized environment, to harvest information from the information wilderness of cyberspace -- the large and growing web of information available through the Internet. The research will focus on building a system consisting of a cooperating set of three types of software agents.
The first type of agent, user interface agents, will conduct interviews with users to help establish their needs such as what they need to know, when they need the information, and the breadth and depth of the scope of information they require. The interface agent will also enable the user to specify areas of interest so that the system can explore collections automatically and notify the user of items of potential relevance to their needs.
The second type of agent, mediator agents, will coordinate searches of many distinct but networked collections by taking orders, in part, from the interface agents. This will allow the user to search many libraries simultaneously in ways that meet time, relevancy, and economic constraints. The mediator agents will depend upon ontologies which describe the contents of the various collections on the network, but without implementation specific details.
The third type of agent, collection interface agents, are associated with each specific collection and can handle searching within specific collections of text, images, graphics, audio and video. Information held in the collections may be owned by various entities, some of which may demand some control over dissemination of contents or compensation for access to their copyrighted material. The system design will provide mechanisms to protect information access and support remuneration operations.
The users of the digital library testbed will include expert researchers; graduate, undergraduate, and high school students; and the general public. The library will be a microcosm of content levels and media types ranging from page images to interactive, compound documents and eventually real-time interaction with scientific data, replays of collaborative sessions, and human expertise.
Participants in this part of the project include clients and staff of the University of Michigan Libraries; clients and staff of the Business and Science Division of the New York City Public Library system; faculty, science teachers, media specialists, librarians and students involved in creating and applying knowledge scaffolding strategies for learner- centered science education at selected sites in the public schools and libraries mentioned above; and the international research community.
Currently, learners -- be they high school students or library patrons -- have very limited access to timely scientific information. Students must make do with textbooks that can be years out of date, while library patrons are confronted with digests of scientific information. The UMDL effort should provide a model for how learners can make "interesting use" of timely, primary source, scientific information. That is, learners of all types can access, manipulate scientific information to answer questions they have and can carry on informed discussions and arguments using these data. The challenge from the educational standpoint of this effort is how to scaffold the process so that learners can indeed transform information into knowledge and understanding.
Critical to the exploitation of these resources will be ongoing programs of training, user assistance, and outreach to promote use of the digital library. Closely associated with these issues of user support is the ongoing development of the collection of information resources through continued partnerships with information providers including commercial, government or academic sources.
Comments or questions may be sent to: UMDL.INFO@umich.edu