Planning, Building, and Using A Distributed Digital Library

There have been many reports on the construction of digital libraries. We find three shortcomings in many of these reports. (1) They fail to articulate the organizational need for a digital library. (2) They ignore the important operational details in establishing the library, including the end user classroom. (3) They fail to provide any quantitative data concerning the ability of the digital library to deliver multimedia files, a primary objective of digital libraries. In this paper, we discuss the U.S. Army's Army Training Digital Library as a necessary component of the Army Distance Learning Plan. As we are well on our way to implementing this plan, we present lessons learned from the project so far, specifically in the areas of classroom construction and results from experiments with delivering multimedia files. Please Cite: Adams, W. J., Jansen, B. J., and Smith, T. L. 1999. Planning, building, and using a distributed digital library. Third International Conference on Concepts i..