World Wide Web Library Support for Distance Learning at the State University of New York at Buffalo by Nancy Schiller

World Wide Web Library Support for Distance Learning at the State University of New York at Buffalo

by Nancy Schiller
MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship, v4#1, Summer 1996

Project Overview and Background

The State University of New York (SUNY) is committed to the development of high quality distance education programs as a means of providing enhanced learning opportunities for both traditional and non-traditional students. One such program is EngiNet, SUNY's distance learning initiative in engineering. EngiNet is a cooperative project between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo (UB) and the SUNY engineering schools at Binghamton, Stony Brook, and New Paltz. Now in its third semester, EngiNet was developed to enhance graduate engineering education within SUNY and to provide New York State industry with state-of-the-art engineering instruction. Through the program graduate engineering courses are shared (currently on videotape) among the participating schools in addition to being offered at industrial sites around the state.

Programs like EngiNet challenge librarians to find creative solutions to the problem of providing library support to distance learners. To meet the challenge, the UB Libraries have developed an experimental service which makes use of digitizing technologies and the hypertext linking and organizational capabilities of the World Wide Web to provide access to course- related materials as well as electronic library services and Internet-based information resources. In place since the fall of 1995, currently a Stony Brook student enrolled in an EngiNet materials science course taught by a professor in Buffalo can check her homework answers online, then download the handouts for the last two lectures. This spring the service was expanded to include classes offered by the UB School of Nursing's Distance Education Program, which delivers graduate nursing instruction via interactive video to rural counties of Western New York through a grant funded by the New York State Department of Health. In addition, starting next fall, the UB Libraries will begin a one-year project to collaboratively develop and link similar World Wide Web services at Binghamton University and SUNY Plattsburgh in support of distance education in engineering and nursing at those two institutions.

Project Development

The prototype for the service was developed in the fall of 1995 specifically for the five UB EngiNet courses offered that semester and was the result of close collaboration between the UB Libraries and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Libraries project team, based in the Science and Engineering Library, consisted of the Engineering Librarian and three part- time student assistants including two graduate students from the School of Information and Library Studies and an undergraduate graphic arts major. The project team worked closely with the EngiNet Program Coordinator and the Head of Computing Services in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the design and overall administration of the service. In addition, input and support for the project was provided by others within the UB Libraries, specifically the Director of the Science and Engineering Library, the Head of Access Services of Lockwood Library, and the UB Libraries Web Manager.

UB Libraries project staff designed and then built the basic Web structure for the service during the summer of 1995. Access to the course materials on the system was organized both by course number and instructor's last name. UB's School of Engineering established a link from its EngiNet homepage to the service and the Libraries featured it prominently on the main menu of its own homepage. In addition, the other EngiNet schools at Binghamton, Stony Brook, and New Paltz were invited to link to the service. It was decided to limit the scope of the project, at least initially, to non-copyrighted materials. A policy for the project was drafted which specified the types of materials that would be accepted, specifically materials developed by the EngiNet course instructors themselves, as well as the types of materials that would not be accepted, including journal articles, excerpts from books, and other published documents. In addition, the Libraries developed guidelines for submitting materials. Although the guidelines stated that electronic submissions were preferred, it was decided that hardcopy submissions also would be accepted. These guidelines were given to EngiNet faculty before the beginning of the Fall semester at a presentation at which the Engineering Librarian demonstrated the Web service.

EngiNet faculty opted not to restrict access to their course materials, although they were given the choice and it was technically feasible to do so. A notice appears on the Web pages which states that the course related materials on the system are the intellectual property of the faculty members who have created them. They are intended for instructional and research purposes and may be reproduced only in accordance with fair use guidelines as set forth in the Copyright Law, Title 17 of the U.S. Code. Access to course materials on the system remains unrestricted, although it is highly likely that once the UB Libraries begin accepting journal articles and other published materials, all of the files will be passworded and access limited on a course-by- course basis to only those students enrolled in each course.

Materials placed online included syllabi, class schedules, lecture notes, handouts, and homework assignments. These comprised both text and image files, which could be viewed online, printed out, or downloaded on terminals in computer labs on campus or remotely from student workstations at home or work. The University Libraries have purchased UNIX workstations which will be available in the libraries beginning in the summer of 1996 from which students will be able to access these materials as well as other Web-based library and information resources.

Throughout the fall semester, the EngiNet Program Coordinator, forwarded course materials to the Engineering Librarian for processing for the Web. The actual processing of these materials was done by the student assistants assigned to the project. The service proved to be quite dynamic. Certain materials, such as course syllabi, are not subject to frequent change, although a few revised syllabi were received and these were processed and the revision dates noted online. Homework assignments, however, have a short "shelf-life" and require quick turnaround. In most instances, deadlines for dated materials of this type were met, but it was difficult to predict in advance the amount of material that would come in from week to week or the amount of time it would take to process the materials received. Moreover, most of the materials received was submitted not in the preferred electronic format, but as typed or handwritten photocopies. These required scanning before being formatted in HTML. The accuracy of the scanning varied greatly, particularly for handwritten materials, and this necessitated substantial proofreading and correction. In addition, because much of the EngiNet course materials contained mathematical notation, which HTML does not handle very well, much of what was scanned was scanned in and put up on the Web as GIFs or JPEGs.

Although the Web site was designed for Netscape, the project team was sensitive from the start to the fact that many students might not have convenient access to a Internet-connected machine running a graphical browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. Since all registered SUNY students are given a computer account and through their computer accounts have access to the text-based Web browser Lynx, the emphasis of the project was on text-based materials. The layout of the Web pages themselves is not highly graphical, so that they load quickly, and the focus is on content rather than on design. For the same reasons, a concerted effort was made to format as much of the course materials as possible as HTML documents. However, the large amount of material received that was handwritten or contained graphs, charts, equations, and other mathematical notation tipped the scales so that the service as a whole developed into a much more intensively graphical one than was originally anticipated. In time a statement was added to the Web pages alerting students to the fact that they would not be able to view the many image files on the system using Lynx, although they could download them or contact the EngiNet Program Coordinator for copies of these files.

An HP ScanJet 4c scanner was purchased for the project. OmniPage OCR software was used to scan text, while HP DeskScan II software was used for scanning images. Fine-line drawings required special handling, including considerable touch-up work after they were scanned, and this additional work was done using Adobe's Photoshop software. HTML Assistant Pro 2 was purchased to automate as much as possible the HTML formatting of text files.

As part of this initial project phase, an attempt was made to keep a project log for statistical purposes but this was not done consistently and consequently the data collected were not comparable.

Project Enhancements

Beginning with the spring 1996 semester, the service was expanded to include courses offered by the UB School of Nursing through its distance learning program. Currently, materials for graduate courses in nursing theory and pharmacotherapeutics are available as well as materials for eight EngiNet courses in engineering management, technical writing, business marketing, optimization, composites, energy conservation in motor drive systems, multisource information fusion, and assessment, repair and retrofit of structures. As new distance learning programs are developed in business, education, and library science at UB, subject librarians are being asked to work with faculty in those departments to make them aware of the service and encourage them to participate in the project.

Beginning with the fall of 1995, the system has included links to relevant Internet-based information resources selected by subject librarians. For example, students enrolled in the EngiNet course on mobile cellular telecommunications last fall also had access to World Wide Web sites containing information on government- funded research, commercial products and services, online journals and newsletters, and discussion lists devoted to wireless communication. This spring, students taking the course on pharmacotherapeutics in advanced nursing practice have access to the Web-based Pharmaceutical Information Network, which is a drug information database, as well as Pharmaceutical Web and RxList. In addition, students logging on this spring now have access through the system to a variety of electronic library resources and services. They can ask a reference question, renew a book, request a journal article on interlibrary loan, or search the UB Libraries online catalog as well as the online catalogs of other SUNY schools.

As an alternative to GIFs, JPEGs, and HTML files, the UB Libraries project team has recently begun experimenting with the Adobe Acrobat PDF file format. Adobe's Portable Document File format has a number of advantages. It preserves the original page layout and design of a published document (in particular, it preserves mathematical notation) while at the same time it creates an electronic file that is fully searchable and is more compressed than most other image file formats. In addition, unlike GIFs and JPEGs, a PDF file is not a static image but a dynamic document that can be enhanced to include hypertext links. It can be viewed and printed out from all platforms or even downloaded and edited in any number of standard wordprocessing packages. The Adobe Capture software, which converts printed documents into PDF files, has a menu-driven interface that includes certain features such as a dictionary that are expected to increase the accuracy of the work and generally help streamline that entire process of readying course materials for the Web.

A special software program, or external application, is required for viewing PDF files. This program, the Adobe Acrobat Reader, is available for free on the Internet. In addition, the latest version of Netscape which runs on Windows 95 has the Acrobat Reader bundled with it. To increase students options for accessing these files, the UB Libraries new UNIX workstations will be configured with the Acrobat Reader and instructions on how to ftp and install the program will be added to the Libraries Web pages as well as a hypertext link to Adobe's Acrobat ftp site.

Copyrighted materials continue to be excluded from the project while the UB Libraries work on developing a policy for copyright and the electronic reproduction and distribution of published works. In the meantime, full bibliographic citations are provided for required course readings and their availability in the UB Libraries is noted. Currently this information is being supplemented with information on the availability of these same materials in the libraries at Binghamton, Stony Brook, and New Paltz in the case of the EngiNet courses. On a limited experimental basis, the full text of materials published by the federal government, including an article on electrochemical chloride extraction which appeared in a government agency newsletter, are being made available on the system as PDF documents.

A log is being kept which records the date and time an item is received; its corresponding program, course number and lecture number, if appropriate; the nature of the material (handout, homework assignment, class notes, etc.); the format the material is received in (either electronic or hardcopy; handwritten, ASCII, Microsoft Word, etc.); the name of the person assigned to process it; its filename; the date and time it is linked; and the total time it took to process. The log also provides space for comments, which have included information on the file format of the finished product (HTML, GIF, JPEG, and/or PDF), and whether any unusual problems were encountered along the way. Once the scope of the project is expanded to include journal articles and other published works, one of the primary purposes of the log will be to make possible a cost comparison of traditional and electronic delivery methods for such materials, including relative workload measures for library staff involved in both delivery systems. The data collected will be used to assess the potential for use of the system for delivering traditional print reserve materials on a broader basis electronically.

The Libraries project team currently includes the Engineering Librarian and the Electronic Resources Librarian in the Science and Engineering Library. They are assisted on an as-needed basis by students who work for the UB Libraries Web Manager.

Future Plans

With funding from the SUNY Office of Educational Technology (OET), the UB Libraries, in partnership with the libraries at Binghamton and Plattsburgh, will be embarking on a one-year project that will build on the prototype service described above. Specifically, the project will explore the feasibility of delivering library resources and services via the Internet to engineering and nursing students enrolled in distance education programs offered by the three partner institutions at Stony Brook, New Paltz, Canton, Potsdam, Adirondack Community College, North Country Community College, and Jefferson Community College.

As part of that project, the three sites will experiment with providing access through the system to reserve course readings. Other key components of the project include:

Designing and developing models for innovative library services for distance learners as a collaborative effort among several SUNY institutions.
Exploring issues related to current copyright law and fair use guidelines and their applicability and relevance to the new electronic information environment.
Experimenting with a variety of hardware and software "solutions" for the delivery of electronic library materials and services across the Internet.
Experimenting with providing remote access to multimedia materials, including video and audio files, as well as specialized databases, such as Ei's Engineering Information Village on the Web, a year's subscription to which includes Internet access to the last five years of Engineering Index. Buffalo will serve as a source of information and expertise for the other two sites. As one of the EngiNet partners, the Binghamton Libraries will provide access on a limited basis to non-copyrighted course-related materials using the World Wide Web for two or more of Binghamton's EngiNet courses. If the project is successful, the Binghamton Libraries will explore the possibility of expanding the service to include other Enginet courses originating out of Binghamton's Watson School of Engineering

Decker School of Nursing

The Telenursing Program at Plattsburgh involves the delivery of a full RN to BSN nursing program to six remote sites in rural upstate New York. Instruction is provided via compressed video technology. Students in the Telenursing Program have access to photocopies of their reserve readings through participating site libraries. These libraries have limited open hours and different academic schedules, making access to these materials by students difficult to impossible. To increase access to reserve readings for these traditionally reserve-heavy courses, Plattsburgh will provide electronic delivery of reserve materials over the World Wide Web and will pilot it to support the six remote Telenursing sites beginning in the fall of 1996.

Project Benefits

While a major focus of the project is gaining expertise in the specific technical, staffing, and workflow issues surrounding electronic library projects supporting distance learning, these projects have wider applicability and potentially broader benefit to librarians. Such projects serve as test-beds for experimenting with Internet and multimedia tools and technologies that will enable the libraries to expand their ability to deliver all types of digital information for other needs and services. With the information and expertise gained from such projects it will be possible to begin to answer questions crucial to the development of the Digital Library of the future, questions concerning copyright, access, staffing, and re-skilling.

The OET-funded project in particular emphasizes both a commitment to distance learning as a model for flexible, enhanced education but also the development and the cooperative sharing of staff expertise across campuses and libraries. In a tight budgetary environment, sharing experiences and expertise in this way will allow libraries to make the most effective use their limited resources. Such projects also provide libraries with the opportunity to develop new ways of offering user-centered rather than library-centered information services.

The URL for the UB Libraries World Wide Web distance learning system is http://wings.buffalo.edu/libraries/course/course.html.

Nancy Schiller is Engineering Librarian in the Science and Engineering Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has an MLS from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the impact of networked computer and tlelcommunications technologies on the mission of the academic library and the role of the academic librarian.

ISSN 1069-6792
Lori Widzinski, Editor (widz@acsu.buffalo.edu)
Revised: 08/27/98
URL: http://wings.buffalo.edu/publications/mcjrnl/v4n1/schiller.html