National Technical Library

05 Research and Education in Digital Libraries

Vittore Casarosa, Anna Maria Tammaro, Donatella Castelli

Audience: System Librarians and Digital Librarians

Short description: Research in Digital Libraries can be tackled from many different perspectives and angles. Digital Libraries are, for example, information systems and their technology can be researched as such; but they are also organizations and they can be researched also in that respect; they are arenas for information seeking behaviour and for social processes such as learning and knowledge sharing, which can be another dimension of research; they are collections of content that need curation (collection, description, preservation, retrieval, etc); they are social institutions with a social mandate, and as such they are affected by social, demographic and legal issues.

From this multifaceted perspective it appears that Digital Libraries are a new topic in existing research fields, and education in Digital Libraries has to take into account this interdisciplinary aspect. This workshop aims at establishing a forum for discussion on how to better exploit the results of research for education in Digital Libraries. The main thread of discussion will be interoperability in digital libraries, which means that research has to consider not only the technical dimension, but also other dimensions that may be affected by interoperability issues, such as policy, quality, user profiles, legal aspects, etc. The discussion will not focus just on the content that should be included in LIS programmes, but will try to explore the many implications, conceptual and practical, that arise when working (in a very broad sense) in the “information field”.

Workshop outcomes:

Start a discussion to understand what are the aspects of research in Digital Libraries that can affect in a significant way education in Digital Libraries.

Start a discussion on how results of research in Digital Libraries can be timely transferred to education in Digital Libraries, e.g. how to implement a European scale mechanism for exchanging, sharing and integrating research results into education.

Outline the content of a report to be distributed to the research and education communities interested in Digital Libraries, for furthering the discussion of those topics.

Audience: System Librarians and Digital Librarians

Short description: Research in Digital Libraries can be tackled from many different perspectives and angles. Digital Libraries are, for example, information systems and their technology can be researched as such; but they are also organizations and they can be researched also in that respect; they are arenas for information seeking behaviour and for social processes such as learning and knowledge sharing, which can be another dimension of research; they are collections of content that need curation (collection, description, preservation, retrieval, etc); they are social institutions with a social mandate, and as such they are affected by social, demographic and legal issues.

From this multifaceted perspective it appears that Digital Libraries are a new topic in existing research fields, and education in Digital Libraries has to take into account this interdisciplinary aspect. This workshop aims at establishing a forum for discussion on how to better exploit the results of research for education in Digital Libraries. The main thread of discussion will be interoperability in digital libraries, which means that research has to consider not only the technical dimension, but also other dimensions that may be affected by interoperability issues, such as policy, quality, user profiles, legal aspects, etc. The discussion will not focus just on the content that should be included in LIS programmes, but will try to explore the many implications, conceptual and practical, that arise when working (in a very broad sense) in the “information field”.

Outline the content of a report to be distributed to the research and education communities interested in Digital Libraries, for furthering the discussion of those topics.

Here is the material prepared for the workshop, which is largely based on the results of the European project DL.org (http://www.dlorg.eu/).

What is a Digital Library?
Defining the DL Universe
The Reference Model for the DL Universe
Questions for discussion

Expected workshop outcomes:

Start a discussion to understand what are the aspects of research in Digital Libraries that can affect in a significant way education in Digital Libraries.

Start a discussion on how results of research in Digital Libraries can be timely transferred to education in Digital Libraries, e.g. how to implement a European scale mechanism for exchanging, sharing and integrating research results into education.