Over the next few class meetings, we want each of you to have a major area of concentration. In effect, you will become the class expert on this topic, make reports to the class on your findings, and develop a helpful web page (or site) concerning your area. You will do this by exploring many sources, trying to capture the most important ideas related to your topic. Your job will be to communicate your findings to the class via your reports, and especially by effective presentation in your page.
Our hope is that this will provide the class with breadth of understanding via a number of related topics and give us depth within the topics. Ideally we will be able to relate the findings later in the course.
We are open to a variety of topics. Here are some that we think would be good choices. We would like for you to do some initial investigation of these topics, see what they are all about, what materials might be available, chat with us, whatever. Then you should make a web page with a paragraph or so, related to each of your first three choices for topics. Here you should explain what aspect(s) of the topic you would like to explore. If you would like to give reasons for your preferences, that will be helpful also. If you have an idea not listed, then you may write it up as one of your choices making clear why you think it is an important topic for us to learn about. These pages are due when we come in on Tuesday morning. We will then make the assignments based on our judgment as to what would serve the class best in terms of the importance of the topics and balance of topics.
In no particular order (all as relate to digital libraries, of course):
- User interface issues.
- Search, retrieval and resource discovery systems
- Metadata
- Object models and representations
- XML
- Architectures and interoperability
- Educational and social concerns
- Use of thesauri
- Building DL with open source software