Rice Digital Library Initiative

Geneva Henry

At Rice University in Houston, Texas, (Rice) administrators and faculty are aggressively seeking to upgrade the quality of information services traditionally provided by the campus research library, Fondren Library, by coupling its relatively small but distinctive paper-based collection with a substantial investment in digital multimedia resources.  A rich digital landscape exists at Rice, with electronic content growing at a rapid pace.  The digital library project will integrate the many existing repositories of digital data, text, video, audio and images into a coherent and comprehensive architecture to allow digital information to be shared and enhanced to effectively support teaching and research at Rice.

In addition to serving the needs of the Rice community, the Rice digital library will be a critical resource for the International University Bremen (IUB) in Bremen, Germany, a new private research institution that is in the process of creating from scratch an Information Resource Center (IRC) to serve the information needs of its faculty and students.  The new IRC will develop its collection of information primarily by borrowing and purchasing digitally-based resources from partner institutions--primarily Rice--and through coalitions and licensing agreements with libraries at other academic institutions.  The resulting international information resource environment will be based upon shared digitized information resources housed at both institutions in the interests of concentrating resources and manpower and increasing the scope of accessibility.  These resources will be simultaneously and constantly available to users at both universities through a dedicated trans-Atlantic high-bandwidth data connection.  In tandem with the establishment of this link between Rice and IUB, each institution is developing strategies for collaborative research and educational programs facilitated by the content available through the digital library.

Creation of a comprehensive, integrated digital library will establish Rice as a leader in this area, where other US institutions have focused their digital library projects on digitization of content or ad hoc hosting of digital repositories whose owners are no longer able to manage the information.  Tools and technologies that will be part of the digital library include storage and management platforms, rights management software, multiple search engines to support searching a variety of multimedia content, workstations and applications for capture and creation of digital content, a robust, multi-tiered networking environment, and technologies that will ensure the preservation of the digital content through changing digital environments

The digital library will support the necessary assessment of these new technologies in higher education.  The following are some of the research questions to be addressed in three interrelated areas: technical, cognitive, and social.

  1. How should digital content be stored and made available for effective scholarly use?
  2. What are the most effective search tools/techniques needed to support the international academic digital environment?
  3. What are the necessary/adequate networking environments required to support global sharing of digital information?
  4. How is curriculum developed using materials that are digitally available internationally?
  5. What technologies are needed in supporting collaborative, interactive courses between IUB and Rice?
  6. Who creates new digital scholarship and how is it created and stored in the digital library?
  7. What new learning strategies will the concentrated reliance on digital resources and tools entail?
  8. What research methodologies will be privileged by the proliferation of multimedia digital resources and which will not?
  9. How does a distributed information model impact the perception of information?
  10. What does it mean to be educated in a pervasively digital environment?
  11. What is the role of the traditional library on campus with the implementation of the digital library?

The research results are expected to demonstrate substantial shifts in the use of electronic information within the undergraduate and graduate instructional environment. These results will be significant for budget planning, information management organization and building international collaborations among institutions, offering valuable experience that will benefit institutions not only in Germany and the United States, but throughout the world. The significance of the research results gathered here will apply to many other areas in addition to the library and information resources facilities.


Home URL: < http://www.rice.edu/projects/code >
Copyright © 2000 by Geneva Henry.
Last updated July 6, 2000 by Lisa Spiro for CODE (Committee on Digital Environment at Rice University).