Journal · 2001
DocML: A digital library of University data
Ioannis Papadakis, Vassilios Karakoidas, Vassileios Chrissikopoulos
A web-based digital library for university coursework — the assignments students hand in, which otherwise sit in a lecturer's office or on a personal web page and are lost to everyone who comes after.
- Published in
- Library Hi-Tech, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 378--387, 2001
- Citations
- 7 on Google Scholar, read 5 September 2026 — 18 of 30 by count
- Cite as
- PKCH02
The idea
Students produce a great deal of material to pass their courses, and it varies from a plain text document to a VRML model. Under normal practice it is stored physically in the lecturer's office, or at best on the author's own website — so a student who would benefit from reading relevant assignments from previous years has no way to reach them. Digital library technology handles large, diverse collections; DocML applies it to this one.
Contributions
- A system that follows the logical structure of a university — University / Department / Course / Assignment — over a distributed repository, so the organisation of the library is the organisation people already use.
- A three-tier architecture typical of distributed web applications, with XML as the communication medium between the layers and between the components of the middle tier.
- A distributed metadata management system, also in XML, describing where the library's documents are and what they contain.
- Delivery through the web, deliberately: the academic community was already there, so adoption needed no new tools beyond a browser.
Written from the paper itself — the PDF linked above, which this site hosts.