Digital libraries are widely recognized as strategic for the future of the global information environment. By making digital resources available over computer networks, they enable previously unreachable audiences to access vital information and services. As a result, countries around the world consider digital libraries of national interest. In its report Digital Libraries: Universal Access to Human Knowledge (pdf), the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) stated that digital libraries have a "profound relevance ... to advancing quality education in every school, learning center, and home in the country." U.S. federal and state institutions have established various research programs in digital libraries such as the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library. The School of Information at UT is a leader in the field of digital libraries. Approximately one third of the faculty is conducting fundamental research in this field, promoting the creation and study of novel social and technological solutions, and bolstering the broader goal of improving and advancing the quality of research and education both nationally and globally.
Research in digital libraries is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that requires knowledge of multiple academic disciplines and technologies. The faculty at the School of Information at UT includes experts in the key areas and technologies required for advancing the state of the art of digital libraries including, among others, process-based and spatial hypermedia systems, multimedia and new media artifacts, electronic document modeling and publication, computer-human interaction, user studies, information retrieval, collaborative systems, and digital preservation. The faculty publishes in the top academic venues, receives external funding from prestigious institutions such as the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and organized the premier international conference ACM/ IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in 2009.
Luis Francisco-Revilla's
Luis Francisco-Revilla's work on digital libraries has focused on studying and improving the delivery, presentation, adaptation, management, use, and analysis of information. In particular, he has investigated topics such as: how to present information in ways that match the users' needs, activities, and context such that people can understand it and use it effectively; how to manage digital collections containing links to materials held by third parties; and how to seamlessly integrate digital and physical libraries. His research activities include: studying people's work practices to identify patterns of behavior, challenges, and opportunities; designing solutions that solve existing challenges or open new possibilities for people to use and interact with information; and building systems to evaluate and study alternative designs and solutions in real contexts of use, as well as to discover new work practices and research directions. As a co-director of the IMLS-funded Cultivating Digital Librarianship Faculty (CDLF) program -a research-intensive Ph.D. program- Dr. Francisco-Revilla is helping shape tomorrow's leaders in digital libraries research. He is an active member of the international research community, contributing articles and helping in the organization and review process of international conferences and journals. Dr. Francisco-Revilla served as Program Co-Chair of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in 2009.
Lynn Westbrook's
Lynn Westbrook's work centers on meeting the complex needs of individuals facing personal crises. Her goal is to use digital libraries to strengthen experts' interventions and participant information-interaction infrastructure. Her expert intervention foci include: 1) the use of boundary objects to facilitate resource identification, 2) the use of critical thinking interactions to support participants' movement through processes outside of their knowledge domains, and 3) decision support structures in small world contexts. Her information-interaction work analyzes fluid, developing information nexus points in contextually and temporally situated conditions. Integrating these two library fundamentals in a digital library involves policy decisions, power dynamics among community user groups, and technology needs of low-resource communities. The interactions of formal agency, informal community, and individual experience are particularly intense in the often-hidden communities of personal crisis. Her current research, funded by IMLS, develops library programming and evaluation tools for serving domestic violence survivors and their support networks.
Lecia Barker's
Lecia Barker's work in digital libraries has focused on understanding and supporting users' habits and needs for finding educational resources. As co-principal investigator of the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Evaluation Core Service Center, Dr. Barker conducted several studies on different aspects of the usefulness of DLESE as an educational resource for science teachers, science faculty, and informal educators. For example, she conducted two observation- and interview-based studies that focused on how science teachers search for educational resources and the enablers and barriers to integrating them into their classrooms. The results of these studies were integrated into a large survey sent out to science teachers all over the United States (and a handful of other countries). Dr. Barker also evaluated DLESE outreach and educational projects, such as the DLESE Ambassadors Program, the DLESE Teaching Boxes, and teachers' and librarians' awareness and use of DLESE. Using survey methods, she increased understanding of why unidentified users came to DLESE. She also co-developed the DLESE Evaluation Toolkit and conducted several workshops on evaluation to build capacity for "do-it-yourself" evaluation. Today, Dr. Barker is principal investigator of the Broadening Participation in Computing Collection of the Engineering Pathway Digital Library. The goal of the "BPC Collection" is to enable educators at all levels to easily and quickly identify, select, and use educational resources shown by research to be effective for increasing the participation of members of under-represented groups in information technology careers. Dr. Barker is presently studying the possibility of using a journal-like reviewer service to ensure that the collection's special sub-collections, "Key Research" and "Promising Practices," contain research-based resources. She has also initiated a study to discover whether library users can tacitly learn conceptual knowledge based on the selection of prominent browse terms. Both DLESE and the BPC Collection are funded by the NSF.
Megan Winget
Megan Winget is primarily interested in the act of collecting and providing access to complex new media artifacts like digital art, videogames, and scientific data sets. Her interests lie in building models to describe these materials for meaningful retrieval and access, and to represent the context of their creation and use for more robust models of preservation. Because Dr. Winget's work focuses on representation and curation issues, her research scope is broad, and spans the digital libraries, archives, digital preservation and new media communities. Dr. Winget is currently working on an IMLS-funded early career grant to examine issues related to videogame preservation. The primary goal of this research project is to come to a better understanding of the video game industry's creation methods, behaviors, and attitudes for the purpose of building more meaningful models of preservation and collection of these materials. Most of the current preservation projects for new media and video games focus on the end products: the "final" art objects or the released video games themselves. Within the archival community, however, there is the realization that digital preservation starts with creation; it is impossible to reliably and authentically preserve an object without having a very good idea of the circumstances and particulars of that object's creation. This project team (comprised of faculty and students) hopes to shed light on those conditions. The products of this research project will support better collection, access, and preservation of these cultural artifacts. Dr. Winget also teaches a course in digital curation, which covers issues related to collection development and data acquisition, representation, organization, access, and preservation of "very large digital libraries," of both scientific and humanities data. Dr. Winget co-chaired the Doctoral Consortium at the Joint Conference in Digital Libraries (JCDL) in 2009.
Unmil Karadkar's
Unmil Karadkar's research in digital libraries explores the issues involved in designing digital collections and user interfaces that support individuals and groups in performing specific tasks. He is interested in employing the rapidly emerging mobile technologies to aid people in accomplishing significant educational and scholarly tasks. In particular, his research focuses on how to adapt information content within the constraints imposed by different devices (such as iPhone, desktop computers, or large-screen displays) while maintaining the integrity of the information from a human perceptual standpoint. His approach is intrinsically multi-disciplinary and collaborative, as he continuously works with scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines, including humanities, art, sciences, and education. His projects in digital libraries include the Multi-device Integrated Dynamic Activity Spaces (MIDAS)--an architecture that retains the informational value of digital collections regardless of the diversity in access device characteristics, the Picasso project--enhancing a collection of Picasso's art for use in scholarly and educational settings, and eBat--a digital library of cardio-vascular images of bats, for training life science researchers.