Encouraging and Utilizing Linked Data from Open Online Courses

Access to affordable education to achieve printed and digital literacy helping all learners to acquire knowledge, coping with change, and seeding mindsets for creativity and intellectual curiosity are considered major indicators and measures of quality of life worldwide. The emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) promising new, scalable models that can provide an �education for everyone� has generated a new and broad interest in rethinking learning and education. Frames of reference (identifying underlying assumptions, conceptualizations, and perspectives) are needed to conceptualize the meaning and the implications of MOOCs in the context of rich landscapes for learning. Most of the discussions and analyses about MOOCS have been based on economic perspectives and technological perspectives. This contribution critically assesses MOOCs from a learning sciences perspectives. This paper focuses on integrating all the trending websites which includes Coursera ,Udacity and Swayam and searches for the best optimal course that the user requires. Information is retrieved using web crawler with the help of ontology schema

Supporting the N Gen learner by integrating e-resources within a university VLE

E-learning has become an integral part of many students learning experience. Over the last three years the availability of e-books and e-journals has increased dramatically and in many higher education libraries there has been a steady movement from print to electronic materials. At Bournemouth University over 50% of the total Library budget is now spent on electronic resources. In some Schools within the University it is in the region of 70 %. The ways in which students are using the resources are changing. In 2005, the number of electronic downloads from databases, e-books and e-journals, far exceeded the number of books borrowed. Statistics gathered from the Athens authentication service make it clear that many students access the resources remotely, and some rarely visit the Library. In 2005 Bournemouth University decided to implement a single VLE across the University and following many discussions and an extensive tendering process Blackboard was selected. The aim was to approach the potential of Blackboard from the perspective of our learners and so chose the unit of study as our standard for integration, which is the equivalent of a course in Blackboard. Thus the focus was on providing the materials where they would be most accessible to the students. The first phase of the implementation, involving the roll-out of the Blackboard to four Schools, presented an opportunity to review the Library provision and identify what could be done better at the unit level. There were several areas which had presented challenges for some time, namely the provision of reading lists, management of the Short Loan Collection and the storage of past exam papers. Implementing Blackboard gave us an ideal opportunity to address these problems. This paper will look at what has been done in these areas, and how the use of Blackboard can be tied in with the information skills sessions already being delivered by the Library Subject Teams and materials already available on the Library web page. It will also consider the second phase of the implementation and the opportunities it will present

Integrating digital document acquisition into a university library : A case study of social and organizational challenges

In this article we report on the effort of the university library of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration to integrate a digital library component for research documents authored at the university into the existing library infrastructure. Setting up a digital library has become a relatively easy task using the current data base technology and the components and tools freely available. However, to integrate such a digital library into existing library systems and to adapt existing document acquisition work-flows in the organization are non-trivial tasks. We use a research frame work to identify the key players in this change process and to analyze their incentive structures. Then we describe the light-weight integration approach employed by our university and show how it provides incentives to the key players and at the same time requires only minimal adaptation of the organization in terms of changing existing work-flows. Our experience suggests that this light-weight integration offers a cost efficient and low risk intermediate step towards switching to exclusive digital document acquisition

Development and construction of China

Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p

Manuscriptorium Digital Library and ENRICH Project: Means for Dealing with Digital Codicology and Palaeography

Codicology and palaeography in the digital age can be developed both through adapting existing methods and using information and communication technologies. This can be achieved e.g by projects focusing on the integration of individual resources under a single user interface. This is the aim of the Manuscriptorium digital library as well as the ENRICH project. The integration is based on the centralisation of metadata from various resources and on the distributed storage of data, mainly digital images. This is implemented through a distributed complex digital document, containing the so-called identification record and more data types. The construction of the integrated Manuscriptorium digital library within the ENRICH project is being done in four basic ways: automatically, or semi-automatically respectively manually, and those both online and offline. This has made it possible to amass more than 5,000 documents. For Manuscriptorium, a search is important, which allows information to be gathered through special fields and the differences in graphics to be harmonised. The aim of the ENRICH project is also the creation of tools for the compilation of virtual collections and documents. In its method of integrating resources, the Manuscriptorium endeavours to be an instrument of codicological and palaeographic research

Digital archiving of manuscripts and other heritage items for conservation and information retrieval

Expression of cultural heritage looking from the informatics angle falls into text, images, video and sound categories. ICT can be used to conserve all these heritage items like; the text information consisting of palm leaf manuscripts, stone tablets, handwritten paper documents, old printed records, books, microfilms, fiche etc, images including paintings, drawings, photographs and the like, sound items which includes musical concerts, poetry recitations, chanting of mantras, talks of important persons etc, and video items like archival films historical importance. To retrieve required information from such a large mass of materials in different formats and to transmit them across space and time, there are several limitations. Digital technology allows hitherto unavailable facilities for durable storage and speedy and efficient transmission / retrieval of information contained in all the above formats. Hypertext and hypermedia features of digital media enable integrating text with graphics, sound, video and animation. This paper discusses the international and national efforts for digitizing heritage items, digital archiving solutions available, the possibilities of the media, and the need to follow standards prescribed by organizations like UNESCO to enable easy exchange and pooling of information and documents generated in digital archiving systems at national and international level. The need to develop language technology for local scripts for organizing and preserving our cultural heritage is also stressed