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The “author” is a concept central to many publication and documentation practices, often carrying legal, professional, social, and personal importance. Typically viewed as the solitary owner of their creations, a person is held responsible for their work and positioned to receive the praise and criticism that may emerge in its wake. Although the role of the individual within creative production is undeniable, literary (Foucault 1977; Bloom 1997) and knowledge organization (Moulaison et. al. 2014) theorists have challenged the view that the work of one person can-or should-be fully detached from their professional and personal networks. As these relationships often provide important context and reveal the role of community in the creation of new things, their absence from catalog records presents a falsely simplified view of the creative process. Here, we address the consequences of what we call the “author-as-owner” concept and suggest that an “author-as-node” approach, which situates an author within their networks of influence, may allow for more relational representation within knowledge organization systems, a framing that emphasizes rather than erases the messy complexities that affect the production of new objects and ideas.

A user-centered, iterative design philosophy requires a common language between users, designers and builders to translate user needs into buildable specifications. This paper details the rationale, evolution and implementation of use scenarios—structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use—in the development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype. This paper discusses the strengths of the scenario approach, obstacles to their use, and lessons learned in the overall development process.

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

The Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project (ADEPT) is a 5-year (1999-2004) effort, with a goal of developing effective models for implementing digital libraries in undergraduate instruction. The ADEPT team has created a digital learning environment (DLE) that adds educational value to a digital library by offering a suite of services for teaching. Encouraged by the results of implementations in undergraduate geography classrooms, the team now shifts its focus from experimental prototype to deployable system. Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theories are used as frameworks for analyzing this complex transition. Recommendations for lowering the barriers to adoption related to complexity, trialability, and observability include the prioritization of development efforts focused on stabilizing the system, the creation of documentation and an online demonstration, and anonymous logins to the system. To increase perceived relative advantage, existing technical and copyright issues in integrating the Alexandria Digital Library must be overcome. To increase compatibility, the speed at which pedagogical change is achieved must be rethought. Finally, recruitment efforts should focus on innovators and early adopters before moving on to early majority, late majority, or laggard adopters.

The Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) Project (1999--2004) builds upon the Alexandria Digital Library Project (1994--1999) to add functions and services for undergraduate teaching to a digital library of geospatial resources. The 'Digital Learning Environment' (DLE) services are being developed and evaluated iteratively over the course of this research project. In the 2002--2003 academic year, the DLE was implemented during the fall and spring terms in undergraduate geography courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Evaluation of the fall term implementation identified design issues of time and complexity for creating and organizing course domain knowledge. The spring term implementation added new services to integrate course content into class presentation formats. The implementation was evaluated via interviews with the course instructor, development staff, and students, and by observations (in person and videotaped) of the course. Results indicated that usability and functionality for the instructor had increased between the two course offerings Students found classroom presentations to be useful for understanding concepts, and Web access to the presentations useful for study and review. Assessments of student learning suggest modest improvements over time Developers are now applying lessons learned during these implementations to improve the system for subsequent implementation in the 2003--2004 academic year.

The evaluation plan for the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) centers on two investigations: a study of classroom use of the system by faculty and students and lab-based usability studies. The classroom-based study is primarily an investigation of the digital library's impact on student learning, using multiple research methods. The five-year work plan includes investigations of the use of ADEPT in non-geography classes.