| Abstract: | This study examines the needs of digital library stakeholders and how a collaborative
digital library might be designed to meet these needs. The collaborative digital library has
been conceived to support secondary school students information needs in conducting
school-based history projects. Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture is used as
the approach to investigate the user requirements and define the digital library organisation,
processes, technology and information flows to realise the following two objectives: (a) To
conduct a needs assessment by understanding the existing stake holder’s needs, conditions
and environment that would ensure the reception of a collaborative digital library for school
projects; and (b) To develop a framework and design a prototype for the collaborative
digital library for school projects, which enables management, creation, processing,
searching and browsing of digital documents and objects. In applying Zachman Framework
and to holistically control the study, the case study approach and an urban secondary school
in Malaysia was chosen as the case sample. The study adopted multiple data collection
techniques which incorporate (a) survey questionnaire involving 397 Secondary 2 and 3
students; (b) focus group interview involving 30 students who were willing to participate in
the digital library project; (c) interview with six History subject teachers, teaching the
Secondary Year 2 and 3 students; (d) site observations involving a series of visits to the
school to observe specific environment of the collaborative digital library implementation;
(e) document analysis of students projects and other documents related to the goals and
objectives, as well as processes and procedures of implementing school-based projects; (f)
user testing and evaluation of the digital library prototype; and (g) literature review of
digital library projects. Information obtained from these data gathering techniques helps to
populate the requirements of the top three layers (18 cells) in Zachman Framework to
ascertain the design details of the digital library’s scope, business and system model. The
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framework abstracts the characteristics and features of the digital library based on six
artifacts, Motivation, Data, People, Process, Place and Time, as well as explains their
structures and processes from the perspectives of the planner, owner and designer of the
digital library. This study contributes to another dimension of a framework for digital
library research and development, the Collaborative Digital Library Framework. It shows
how Zachman Framework is used as an analytical tool as a basis for modeling and building
digital libraries, and has embedded the requirements in a system’s architectural framework
and presents them more systematically. The findings indicate that the teachers and students
in this study are ready to collaboratively build the digital library as evidenced by the
following: (a) Students digital library readiness score of >60%; (b) Strategic readiness or
governance support as indicated by the school’s comprehensive strategic master plan for the
integration of ICT-mediated learning in education and training; (c) Technical readiness
related to infrastructure requirements for ICT-mediated learning; and (d) Teachers
willingness to collaborate. The study also reveals all students see the usefulness of a digital
library and the need to create portals for project works, and 64.7% of them are willing to
produce and submit their project work to the digital library. Teachers see the value of
digital resources and online publishing for their students. Over 75% of the respondents in
the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. As a
testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its
capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive
feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. The beta tester demographics (n =
105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities. To date, CoreDev
has developed a useful collection of 777 resources consisting of 126 documents, 35
projects, 437 images, 23 audios, 34 videos and 90 hyperlinks. CoreDev is now available at
http://coredev.fsktm.um.edu.my. |
