CPSC 689/602
Special Topics in Digital Libraries

Description of Course

The course surveys current research and practice in Digital Libraries, which seek to provide intellectual access to large-scale, distributed, digital information repositories. The course will be based on current readings taken from the research literature and will cover the breadth of this highly interdisciplinary area of study.

Prerequisites: Graduate standing in CPSC or permission of the instructor

Course information

Course Instructor

Richard Furuta, HRBB 402C, 845-3839, furuta@cs.tamu.edu
Office hours: WF 3-4, or by appointment

The course Web pages are located at http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~furuta/689dl/
Please check them regularly for new announcements.

Tentative course grading plan

This grading scheme is subject to change. In particular, if class characteristics warrant, additional elements may be added to the course requirements.

Notes

1. Check the course's Web pages regularly for new announcements. If you need to contact me outside of regularly scheduled times, please use electronic mail.
2. If examinations are necessary, they will be comprehensive and will cover all course material to date (i.e., both readings and discussions). Examinations will be closed-book unless otherwise specified. There will be no makeup examinations. If you have a valid medical excuse, the examination component of your grade will be computed based on the other examination.
3. Assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due date. Due dates will be set to give ample time for completion of the project and will not be extended save for the unexpected and unlikely major, long-lived catastrophy. Individual accomodations will be discussed if you have a valid medical excuse. Last minute computer malfunction or work assigned in other classes will not be accepted as valid reason for delaying an assignment's due date. (Changes to an assignment's due date will generally be avoided because they are unfair to those students who have organized their time to complete the assignment). Late assignments will be decremented by 30% per day or fraction of day late, starting at class time.

Course topics outline

• Introduction
  Overview of contributing scholarly disciplines: technological, social, policy, and economic; Overview of current projects
• Overview of digital information and metadata
  data and metadata; digital data types: Text, hypertext, video, audio, GIS, etc.; characteristics of physical data types
• Use environments and their effect on systems
  user communities; work environments; choices of what portion of environment to support; collaboration support.
• Organizing information
  theory: from relevant areas such as knowledge representation, hypertext, document structure, metadata representation, cataloging, etc.; practice: example systems, electronic books and journals, application and extension of standards such as SGML and XML
• Locating information and communicating found information
  contributing research: information retrieval, databases; systems: MG, support for bibliographic queries, Walden's Paths, system-generated information aggregates
• Information and information space visualization
  Spatial representations, timelines, information disaggregation, etc.
• Information space personalization
  Multivalent architectures, annotations, etc.
• Archiving information
  Digital preservation issues; versioning; architectures to support archiving
• Evaluation
  Case studies determining what users want and how well implementations work; discussion of relevant techniques for carrying out evaluations.
• Current issues and techniques
  issues: copyright and intellectual property, economic issues, federated systems, internationalization support; techniques: watermarking, agents, e-commerce support