Collaborative ownership in Educational Digital Library design

Pauline Ngimwa on how the democratisation of content creation  and how learning design could help develop models of use. Two case studies were presented - a traditional digital library at an African university. It is a controlled system. The second study is informal learning in the VeSeL project - Village e-Science for Life. This is an EPSRC funded project that uses mobile deices with farming communities to make the user part of the overall approach to resources to form a distributed "digital library". Pauline had studied user experience of the traditional digital library - which showed weak links between learners, teachers and in particular librarians. The same students were also involved in the VeSeL work and there they were much more engaged. The information journey approach that Ann Blandford talked about earlier in the week was used to show the better integration that is part of VeSeL. The collaborative approach meant that VeSeL overcame cross-context issues while the simpler case of the digital library. Next steps are to model the design process to bring together end-users, librarians and designers.