Grant brings 'deep' Web to surface

Updated 10:00 AM January 30, 2006

Grant brings 'deep' Web to surface

By Laura Bailey
News Service

A $438,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow U-M libraries, in partnership with Indiana University (IU), to develop online tools to make it easier for students and faculty to integrate online databases and journals into teaching and learning.

Tools developed as a result of the grant will link full-text library resources to the Sakai collaboration and learning software environment.
U-M was a founding partner of Sakai, community source software for collaboration and learning in higher education.

Just as consumers subscribe to their favorite news magazines, libraries subscribe to electronic scholarly journals, indices and databases. These online resources contain information essential to scholarship but often are invisible to search engines such as Google.

Librarians call this trove of knowledge the invisible or "deep" Web, and some studies suggest as much as 80 percent of the information sources available on the Web are part of this hidden resource.

"The University Library licenses and provides vast collections of scholarly content for use by the campus that currently is not easily accessible from CTools, the U-M implementation of Sakai," says Brenda Johnson, associate University librarian for public services at University Library. "Our goal is to integrate these resources with the Sakai online teaching and learning environment so students and faculty can easily utilize these resources in the context of a course."

Innovations developed as part of the project will enable professors to link to thousands of licensed online library resources from within the course management software.

Current software offered by universities to professors to manage their courses—post assignments, link required readings or access student work—requires the instructors and students to visit the library Web site separately, with few ways to effectively link resources between the two environments. Overwhelmed by this complex environment, students sometimes turn to Web search engines to find information for scholarly research.

"We want to increase the visibility of the invisible Web," says Patricia Steele, the Ruth Lilly Interim Dean of University Libraries at IU. "Our goal is to integrate library resources seamlessly and easily so students think of and use these powerful resources first. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for recognizing this priority."

Steele says many users of the Web incorrectly believe all information on it is freely accessible and free of charge. Vendors license many online resources and research libraries typically pay a fee based on the number of students enrolled on their campuses.

The IU Bloomington libraries spend about $4.1 million a year on electronic resources, Steele says, "so working to integrate these resources more fully into online teaching and learning makes good economic sense as well."

Because the project calls for the development of open-source software, other universities will benefit from the results. The grant from the Mellon Foundation will support the project over an 18-month period and will provide for project management, programming, interface design and evaluation.

Grant brings 'deep' Web to surface

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