Over the past few years, our NSF-funded project has developed a number of specific lesson plans/modules that can be incorporated into courses that address digital libraries. Faculty at UNC and Virginia Tech, as well as members of the project's advisory board and others, have participated in the development of these modules. If you are teaching a course on digital libraries or could use this content in a related course, we hope that you will assist in the field testing of one or more of these modules.

The modules are part of a curriculum framework, available at:
http://curric.dlib.vt.edu/DLcurric_images/ModuleFramework2008-08-23.pdf

Modules currently available for use include:
Module 1-b: History of digital libraries and library automation
Module 3-b: Digitization
Module 4-b: Metadata
Module 5-a: Architecture overviews
Module 5-b: Application software
Module 6-a: Information needs/relevance
Module 6-b: Online information seeking behaviors and search strategies
Module 6-d: Interaction design and usability assessment
Module 7-b: Reference Services
Module 9-c: Digital library evaluation, user studies

Draft versions of these modules, along with evaluator comments, can be viewed on the project wiki at:
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In addition, several other modules are in preparation and may be ready for your use this spring. They include:
Module 3-e: Web publishing
Module 7-a: Search engines
Module 8-a: Preservation
Module 9-e: Intellectual property

If you are willing, we will send you full documentation of one or more of the modules that have been created. You may select any of those modules that you think will be most useful to you in your teaching (either in a DL course or in a related course). You will then implement it (as developed or as you adapt it) in your course(s).

For the evaluation, we will be collecting three types of data:
1) Your opinions about the quality of the lesson/module, as expressed in an interview. The interview will take 30-45 minutes.
2) Your students' opinions about the quality of the lesson/module, as expressed in a very brief Web-based questionnaire. The questionnaire will take no longer than 2 minutes to fill out, and respondents will be offered a small incentive. We will ask that you provide us with a list of the students and their email addresses, so that we can invite them to participate in the evaluation.
3) Your students' performance with the module. We will ask that you provide copies of all your students' work completed as part of the module. We will use it to assess how well the module supported their learning. If a student does not grant us explicit permission to use this data for our evaluation, we will destroy it upon receipt.

Your participation in this evaluation is, of course, entirely voluntary, as is the participation of your students. Please contact us if you are willing to participate in this evaluation process, or if you have any questions about this request for your assistance.

We hope that you will become a participant in this important effort to improve DL education throughout the U.S. and the world.

Sincerely,

Edward Fox (Virginia Tech),

Barbara Wildemuth (UNC), and

Jeffrey Pomerantz (UNC)
(send all correspondence to Barbara Wildemuth, wildem@ils.unc.edu)

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Forwarded by

Anup Kumar Das

New Delhi, India

http://anupkumardas.blogspot.com

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