Digital Libraries

MECCA uses state of the art digital library technology for asynchronous information delivery possibly in a self paced manner that complements in-class instruction. Specifically, digital library technology supports the MECCA eLearning infrastructure. The following figure presents to use of digital library technology for educational content management.

The image shows the stakeholders in information production and consumption, and namely information providers, which can include instructors, information consumers, which can include both instructors and learners, and repository administrators, who are responsible for the organization of content in a manner that allows straightforward discovery and efficient delivery, even from a distance.

One thing to consider is who is actually a producer of information. In the more traditional way of thinking, information producers are experts, for example instructors, that develop content and feed it to consumers. A more modern approach acknowledges the fact that all users in a community, both experts and novices, can exchange valuable information. This is very common on the Internet, where peers answer each other’s questions. This is concept is played in the above image, which shows that the traditionally defined information consumers can also be information producers.

The following digital library technology aspects are used in the MECCA eLearning man-agement infrastructure:

• Heterogeneous content management (i.e. audio, video, images, and text)
• Metadata-based descriptions of educational entities
• Metadata-based queries
• Text-based searching
• Distribution of metadata and content for scalability with respect to content volume and number of organizations connecting into a wider digital library network
• Autonomy of participating organizations
• Distributed queries
• Synchronization of distributed metadata management repositories
• Single point of access to distributed content
• Support of metadata standards, namely the Dublin Core