Projects

Virginia Tech is involved in a wide variety of Digital Library projects.

• Petaplex:
  Consulting in the development of software for the Petaplex efforts and running the Petaplex protocol on our systems that run KMS.
• Hyper-G, JUCS:
  Running a number of Hyper-G servers, including one for J. of Universal Computer Science.
• TULIP:
  Using OCLC's Guidon client and Newton server in an add-on year of TULIP activity. The server is an RS/6000. We have 40 journals on material science in page-image form, plus bibliographic data.
• NCSTRL:
  Virginia Tech was part of the Wide Area Technical Report Service (WATERS) funded with assistance of NSF. This involvement has continued into the NCSTRL project. Virginia Tech Computing Center runs the backup central server for NCSTRL. Virginia Tech CS runs both Lite and Standard servers.
• MEL, ETDs:
  Playing lead role in the Monticello Electronic Library of SURA and SOLINET. Virginia Tech now accepts electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in PDF and may make electronic submission a requirement. We will develop a DTD for theses and dissertations and work with other universities to accept submissions in PDF and SGML. This effort has tremendous potential effect on graduate education and the future electronic publishing of recently graduated scholars.
• BEV:
  There are a wide variety of efforts related to the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), the most wired community, with almost 40% of people on the Internet. The local schools have T1 connections to the Village, and local networks inside. See http://www.bev.net/
  • NSF NIE (Network Infrastructure for Education): collaboration, tools, virtual classrooms, virtual schools, human-computer interaction.
  • Dept. of Commerce's TIIAP Program: connecting schools, education technology
  • NSF-funded Design History:
    • timelines, multiple views,
    • multimedia support with multiple media forms of items,
    • automatic generation of Web pages after filling-in forms,
    • automatic construction of sets of pages from templates / forms for community groups, ...
  • Busch Enterprises: Educational multimedia from Seaworld is accessible from BEV to the world. 10-20K accesses occur each day.
• CODER, MARIAN, Envision:
  Since the mid-1980's we have been developing a variety of retrieval systems. The CODER system was a type of distributed expert-based information system. It led to the MARIAN catalog search system, accessible at http://opac3.cc.vt.edu/ and to the 1991-94 Envision effort to build A User-Centered Database from the Computer Science Literature with ACM.
• EI:
  NSF has helped fund the 1993-97 project Interactive Learning with A Digital Library in Computer Science from its Education Infrastructure (EI) program. Information providers include ACM, IEEE-CS, and Morgan Kaufmann. An early paper explains many of the initial efforts.
• RI, CHCI:
  NSF has helped fund the 1993-99 project Interactive Accessibility from its Research Infrastructure (RI) program. Some 3000 square feet of laboratories have been renovated to support HCI and Information Access studies. Equipment purchased supports many of the other digital library initiatives
• SUCCEED:
  NSF has helped fund a 1993-95 project studying caching and prefetching for multimedia information in connection with its large engineering education consortium, SUCCEED.