Digitized Archival Primary Sources in STEM: A Selected Webliography

Popular connotations of archives and special collections are most closely aligned with the arts and humanities fields, with history being the most seamless affiliation. However, archival documentation extends far beyond common disciplinary assumptions, with strong holdings relevant to the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, as well as medicine and other allied disciplines. These archival collections provide largely untapped educational, enrichment, and research opportunities for STEM students and researchers. Given the profound influx of digitization during the last two decades, many archival primary source materials have been digitized and are now freely available online, with more assuredly in progress. This digital content is in large part unique, oftentimes representing digital surrogates of the only tangible copy of a document, image, object, or unique assemblage of materials ever created. An intrinsic value in archives is their uniqueness in addition to their authenticity, diversity, breadth, and depth of documentation. Digitized archival collections can serve to supplement an institution\u27s physical archival holdings, if available, as well as make particularly unique or historically significant physical collections (i.e., the papers of Charles Darwin), once limited by geography, easily accessible to librarians, archivists, researchers, educators, and students around the world. Accessibility and findability of digitized archival resources can be a challenge, particularly for students or researchers not familiar with archival formats and digital interfaces, which adhere to different descriptive standards than more widely familiar library resources. Numerous aggregate archival collection databases exist, which provide a means by which to search across collections from many institutions. However, no single database is comprehensive, and many also lack robust capabilities for subject-based browsing to target STEM collections. The selected resources in this webliography are intended as a starting point by which librarians, archivists, educators, and students may discover digitized archival primary sources related to STEM and allied disciplines, which may be creatively used as tools to inform instruction, teaching, research, library collection development, marketing, and reference services. The resources embody a wide-ranging selection of noteworthy, historically significant STEM-focused archival primary source collections currently digitized and publicly accessible

Simple Strategies for Broadcasting Repository Resources

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersNSDL's data repository for STEM education is designed to provide organized access to digital educational materials through its online portal, NSDL.org. The resources held within the NSDL data repository along with their associated metadata can also be found through partner and external portals, often with high quality, pedagogical contextual information intact. Repositories are not, however, usually described as web broadcast devices for their holdings. Providing multiple contextual views of educational resources where users look for them underscores the idea that digital repositories can be systems for the management, preservation, discovery and reuse of rich resources within a domain that can also be pushed out from a repository into homes and classrooms through multiple channels. This presentation reviews two interrelated methods and usage data that support the concept of â resource broadcastingâ from the NSDL data repository as a method that takes advantage of the natural context of resources to encourage their additional use as stand-alone objects outside of specific discipline-oriented portals.National Science Foundatio

Planning strategically, designing architecturally : a framework for digital library services

In an era of unprecedented technological innovation and evolving user expectations and information seeking behaviour, we are arguably now an online society, with digital services increasingly common and increasingly preferred. As a trusted information provider, libraries are in an advantageous position to respond, but this requires integrated strategic and enterprise architecture planning, for information technology (IT) has evolved from a support role to a strategic role, providing the core management systems, communication networks, and delivery channels of the modern library. Further, IT components do not function in isolation from one another, but are interdependent elements of distributed and multidimensional systems encompassing people, processes, and technologies, which must consider social, economic, legal, organisational, and ergonomic requirements and relationships, as well as being logically sound from a technical perspective. Strategic planning provides direction, while enterprise architecture strategically aligns and holistically integrates business and information system architectures. While challenging, such integrated planning should be regarded as an opportunity for the library to evolve as an enterprise in the digital age, or at minimum, to simply keep pace with societal change and alternative service providers. Without strategy, a library risks being directed by outside forces with independent motivations and inadequate understanding of its broader societal role. Without enterprise architecture, it risks technological disparity, redundancy, and obsolescence. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this conceptual paper provides an integrated framework for strategic and architectural planning of digital library services. The concept of the library as an enterprise is also introduced

Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies

Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users.published or submitted for publicatio

Bridging the gap between digital libraries and e-learning

Digital Libraries (DL) are offering access to a vast amount of digital content, relevant to practically all domains of human knowledge, which makes it suitable to enhance teaching and learning. Based on a systematic literature review, this article provides an overview and a gap analysis of educational use of DLs.The research work presented in this paper is partially supported by the FP7 Grant 316087 AComIn ”Advanced Computing for Innovation”, funded by the European Commission in the FP7 Capacity Programme in 2012-2016.peer-reviewe

Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin

Machinima interventions: innovative approaches to immersive virtual world curriculum integration

The educational value of Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) seems to be in their social immersive qualities and as an accessible simulation technology. In contrast to these synchronous applications this paper discusses the use of educational machinima developed in IVW virtual film sets. It also introduces the concept of media intervention, proposing that digital media works best when simply developed for deployment within a blended curriculum to inform learning activity, and where the media are specifically designed to set challenges, seed ideas, or illustrate problems. Machinima, digital films created in IVWs, or digital games offer a rich mechanism for delivering such interventions. Scenes are storyboarded, constructed, shot and edited using techniques similar to professional film production, drawing upon a cast of virtual world avatars controlled through a human–computer interface, rather than showing real‐life actors. The approach enables academics or students to make films using screen capture software and desktop editing tools. In student‐generated production models the learning value may be found in the production process itself. This paper discusses six case studies and several themes from research on ideas for educational machinima including: access to production; creativity in teaching and learning; media intervention methodology; production models; reusability; visualisation and simulation