Anne Gilliland-Swetland, Yasmin Kafai & Anthony Maddox
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Significance: The growing global information infrastructure places increasing demands for materials to be available in digital format for research, business, and learning. While much information today is digitally produced, there still remains a considerable amount of potential digital library content in the form of primary or historical source materials that needs to be transferred into digital formats and further transformed or enhanced to be used effectively, especially in educational settings.
Science educators have stressed repeatedly the crucial role that knowledge of scientific history and the changing nature of the boundaries between scientific disciplines plays in building a foundation for scientific literacy. Students need understand the cultural and social contexts within which advances in science were achieved. While primary source materials in digital format present opportunities to enrich classroom activities, many teachers and students are unfamiliar with how to assess critically the quality and origination of content of varying quality and origins that they access through digital means such as the World Wide Web. Content holders, such as archives and museums, need to understand better how to prioritize their collections for digitization, and the most effective means for describing and visually representing digital versions of primary content for use by teachers and students. Digital library developers need to understand better the design and process issues associated with digitizing, storing, and retrieving contextualized and authenticated primary content.
Objectives and methods: This project will develop a process models that (1) transform primary sources into digital library content, (2) allow teachers to build a personalized information system or "Digital Portfolio Archives" (DPAs) which contains the content + descriptions, and (3) enables students to incorporate components of the teacher's DPA and additional project-related materials into their own DPAs; and facilitates the optional incorporation of these DPAs back into the digital library, but as a distinct layer of user-created content distinguished by provenance. Content for the base digital library will be drawn from the seven archival, manuscript, and museum repositories at UCLA. This content will be digitized, described using both the emerging SGML standard for Encoded Archival Description and teacher annotations, and incorporated into a prototypical digital library structure. This process model will be applied in case studies in health and natural science education at the UCLA laboratory elementary school.
The development and testing of the DPA process model builds on the work of, and feeds into several educational underway at UCLA including innovative, cross-disciplinary collaborations with the Smithsonian Institutions, Los Angeles County Museum, and the University Research Library. This exploratory CRLT grant will strengthen the foundation for these and other larger research projects by generating: (1) generalizable processes for structuring digital libraries and enriching content descriptions that meet the needs of primary content creators, providers, and non-traditional users such as elementary school teachers and students; (2) knowledge of how teachers might select primary content and integrate it into classroom activities if it were digitally accessible; and (3) knowledge of how digitized primary sources might contribute to students' science understanding, and engagement in the health and natural sciences.
Results of this research will be disseminated through professional papers and publications in education; library, information and archival science, and computer science and engineering forums; as well as through the World Wide Web and other appropriate channels.
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
pbe: 16Oct96