Projects
Virginia Tech is involved in a wide variety of Digital Library projects.
- Hyper-G, JUCS:
Running a number of Hyper-G servers, including one for J. of Universal Computer Science.
- TULIP:
Using
Since 1992, have partnered with Elsevier and OCLC, using the latter's
Guidon client and Newton server.
In 1996 this will switch to OCLC's
SiteSearch
package adapted to Elsevier journals
for 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/htbin/marian
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 EI
project Interactive Learning
with a Digital Library in Computer Science from its Education
Infrastructure
program. Information providers include ACM, IEEE-CS, and Morgan Kaufmann.
- 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.
There is a new Center
for Human-Computer Interaction too.
- IBM
Digital Library:
Through its SUR program, IBM has donated over $250K worth of equipment and
software to supplement over $180K spent by the University for a powerful
digital library system with:
- 4 RS/6000 processors (SMP architecture)
- 512M RAM, 30 Gbytes disk
- 2 terabytes DLT storage
- a separate RS/6000 for ACM Headquarters
There are many efforts and products inside IBM and with collaborators
such as
- 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.