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Diane Harley is Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project, Center for Studies in Higher Education at UcBerkeley.
The final report Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences was released on April 5, 2006. The following quotes are based on the first-year report. I will need to reconcile the interim work with the final report here.
Digital Collections Research Project:
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The Higher Education in the Digital Age Project is embarking on a two-year research project to investigate the use of digital collections in undergraduate humanities and social science education.
Specifically,
Conclusions and Next Steps from first year report:
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The relationship between user needs and the functionality of resources and tools. As this study is specifically about use of digital resources in undergraduate teaching contexts in the H/SS, it is worth noting that, based on our work to date, we can say that it is not at all easy for most faculty to use the plethora of digital resources available to them. Many want a one-stop shop in which they can find and re-aggregate snippets from available resources into a customized resource for their own use. In other words, they would like to build their own reaggregated resources, using their own materials, mixing them with resources they have collected along the way. How to manage the array of available resources and integrate them into teaching practice is a concern for those involved in tools development. For faculty, there may be an array of tools available to them for collecting, developing, and managing resources, but the efficacy and interoperability of these tools for the immediate tasks faculty need supported are questionable.27 And yet another challenge, for those directly providing support to faculty, is the integration of learning management systems with library resources and other course content. Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) appear to have limited overall functionality, especially since existing LMS may not allow easy integration with many types of digital resources.
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The difficulty, if not current impossibility, of re-aggregating objects that are bundled and "locked" into fixed, often proprietary resources.
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Managing and interpreting digital rights, which may include pulling data from one given resource for integration into another one.
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The increased unevenness of interface usability and aesthetics. (In some disciplines, such as art history, faculty may care a lot about resolution quality. Yet in other disciplines, faculty may create “hodgepodge” resources, often not caring about varying resolution quality from one record to the next.)
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The growing demand from users for granularity (e.g., the ability to search and find the one particular image or piece of text that they need within an entire resource).
The challenges faced by those charged with building the future tools to "re-aggregate" varied resources for easier use, include:
