XplanaZine

The excitement surrounding digital library projects is palpable - take a look at some of the materials about the FEDORA project and you’ll see why (I especially recommend this article “The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System” - a great overview of the technology and standards, just on the edge of comprehensibility for us mere mortals; it’s great stuff). New (or at least new-ish!) technologies like XML and SOAP are allowing digital libraries to make enormous advances. The question I would like to ask is what are teachers going to be doing to make use of these new opportunities? How are we as teachers going to make sure that these digital libraries function not just as enormous research repositories, but also as something vital and transformative for how our students learn?
Think about it: libraries, good old-fashioned libraries with books and books on endless shelves, are great. I still recall with utter reverence the days and months that I spent prowling the Berkeley libraries as an undergraduate (the “old” library in the heart of the Doe Library building that has since gone underground, literally), and again as a graduate student (where I returned six suitcases filled with books the day that I filed my dissertation). Yet at the same time we all know that there is a gap or distance between the work we do in the classroom and the experiences that our students have in the library - or the experience that students fail to have in the library. I would regularly meet undergraduate students at Berkeley who had not spent substantial time in the library, or who had sometimes never been to the library - not once! And that is even more true at the University of Oklahoma where I teach now. These students attended class… but they did not visit the library.
What creates this gap between library books and classroom reading? One part of that answer is very simple: having enough copies for everybody. A traditional library is just not going to have enough copies for every student in the class. As teachers, we usually order books for our classes, or create course packs - exactly because we usually want all the students in our class to have access to a given text. You can imagine students who have never been to their campus library - but you know they have been to the campus bookstore. This puts an enormous, and sometimes very unwelcome burden on the students: they have to buy books for the class. Even worse: this creates a gap between the students’ reading experience in the class and their experience of the library itself. Reading in class is something that you can feel a sense of ownership about: you’ve bought the book (like it or not!), you can bring it with you to class, you can write in the margins, you can keep it after the class is over. None of these things holds true for traditional library books.
Once again: digital libraries change everything! When you teach online, you can provide your students with reading materials that are taken directly from a digital library. You can reformat and shape those materials for your students’ particular needs - while at the same time being just one click away from the digital libraries’ bookshelves. For both my online Mythology-Folklore and Medieval Latin classes, I use materials that had already been digitized for the readings. So if the students enjoyed the stories of the Ovid’s Metamorphoses that we read in class, they could read the whole thing, all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, available online. Indeed, they could read all of Ovid while sitting there in their pajamas doing their homework in their dorm room at 2 a.m. The complete Metamorphoses - at the touch of a finger.
And of course, if they really wanted to, they could also go to the OU Library and check out a copy of the complete Metamorphoses. At least some of them could do that… at the moment, though, of the nine copies in the OU stacks, three are checked out - leaving six. I’ll have sixty students in Myth-Folklore next fall - those six copies are not going to go very far.
So, yes, wonderful, digital libraries to the rescue! But here’s the catch - digital libraries, by themselves, are not going to engage the students. It is going to be enormously important for teachers to be building “teacherly paths” that will help the students find their way through these digital libraries, with meaningful learning experiences built on the resources available at these increasingly massive repositories. We know that students find the traditional academic library a sometimes confusing and intimidating place - and the world of digital libraries is even more confusing and, therefore, even more intimidating. At least in a traditional physical library, you have the reassuring sense of physical layout (the Folklore section is downstairs, to the left, sort of under the stairwell, near the old xerox machine…). The books are more or less similar to one another, reassuringly arranged on shelves of regular size and shape (alas for the teeny-tiny and super-jumbo books, which require special accommodations). You can even use all kinds of physical clues to identify the books that interest you, especially when you are dealing with paperback books whose covers still exist to advertise and tantalize.
None of this is true for most of the digital archives that are online today. Even a genius website like the amazing Perseus Digital Library is absolutely daunting for beginners, and is much more likely to suit the needs of advanced researchers than the casual student. Yet we all know that most students are casual students… at least to begin with.
So what I will be doing this week is to survey some of the strategies being used by digital libraries to increase their “user friendliness” along with some of the very important contributions that each and every teacher can make to the overarching project of bridging the gap between the classroom and the digital libraries. The technology gurus and the teaching wizards are going to have to have to work together on this one - although this might be too much fun to count as work…