Virginia Tech and Villanova University researchers have received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to extend the benefits of its free, online library by developing technology that will allow college students and professors to conduct flexible and customized information searches directly from course Web sites.
The project is directed by Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science. Other team members are: Weiguo Fan, assistant professor of accounting and information systems, and Edward Fox, professor of computer science, both at Virginia Tech, and Lillian Cassel, professor of computing sciences at Villanova University. "Our goal," Pérez said, "is to get content from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) closer to its intended audience." The project's target beneficiaries are students and professors in all areas of computing....The NSDL has a vast collection of resources for education and research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics....As its collections grow, the NSDL is placing more emphasis on user services and higher-level functionality, Pérez said. But in helping to expand the library's usefulness, he adds, researchers must not assume that a "feature-rich" Web site -- with browsing, searching, recommendations, and discussion forums -- would be enough to draw users. That would be like "building a large library with lots of facilities, but placing it at the outskirts of campus -- few teachers and students will interrupt their daily routine to use the new facilities." The project focuses on course Web sites, he said, as they are "the most commonly used application in today's educational environment, typically providing access to a course syllabus, schedule, assignments, grades, and discussion forums." The technology that the researchers will develop will allow a course Web site to be the entry point into the NSDL's collections. The product would be "a flexible and personalized information interface that supports both exploratory and focused searches and provides the ability to obtain context-sensitive services at various levels of interaction."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/22/2006 10:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
