CREATING DIGITAL READING PACKS FROM THE PROQUEST DIGITAL VAULT WITH THE SITEBUILDER SOFTWARE

摘要

Providing reading packs of articles from scholarly and professional journals and newspapers for students has been the bane of administering courses. Complying with copyright requires the instructors to follow a lengthy and cumbersome procedure and to have a generous budget to pay for the fee. Bell & Howell (formerly UMI, Inc.) set a landmark in digital librarianship when it opened its Digital Vault and made available on the Web the full-text, text+image and page image (PDF) versions of more than half a million articles from scholarly and professional journals for subscribers of the ProQuest service. The SiteBuilder software tool allows faculty to select from the Digital Vault the documents appropriate for their courses, and create a reading list with direct link to the documents for instant display and printing in page image or other formats, preserving the original layout, typography, along with charts, tables and photographs. The technology lets faculty spare the cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive process of applying for copying rights, and spares students the disdained process of locating specific issues of journals and spending hours at the copying machines. Most importantly, it solves a vexing problem for distance education, bringing the source documents to the desktop of students at locations where there are no college libraries in a 100-mile radius. The paper evaluates the options offered by the SiteBuilder software and the Digital Vault, and makes recommendations for improvements, based on the author's experience in creating reading packs for his information technology courses at the University of Hawaii.