iLumina

iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for science, mathematics, technology, and engineering being developed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Eduprise, Virgina Tech, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State and The College of New Jersey. The iLumina project is funded by a DLI-Phase 2 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Work on the project began in August of 2000; my role in the project has been to design and develop the information architecture and general look and feel of the digital library's Web site; and to work on ideas for user services, in particular the facilities for browsing, recommendations, and personalization.

Some of the interesting aspects of this project include:

• Cataloging resources with IMS-compliant metadata, which captures education-specific data about each resource
• Resource metadata is stored as XML; XSL and XSLT is used to transform the data to produce the displayed web pages
• We are developing methods for importing and exporting resource metadata to and from other collections of educational resources

More Information

• Geisler, G., Giersch, S., McArthur, D., McClelland, M. (2002). "Creating Virtual Collections in Digital Libraries: Benefits and Implementation Issues." Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2002).
• McClelland, M., McArthur, D., Giersch, S., and Geisler, G. (2002). "Challenges for Service Providers when Importing Metadata from Digital Libraries." D-Lib Magazine, April.
• iLumina Web site
• Geisler, Gary, McArthur, David, and Giersch, Sarah (2001). "Developing Recommendation Services for a Digital Library with Uncertain and Changing Data [short paper]." JCDL ’01, ACM - IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (June 24-28, 2001, Roanoke, Virginia).