Mid-South Instructional Technology Conference
Teaching, Learning, & Technology
The Challenge Continues
March 30-April 1, 2003
Institutional, Public and Individual Learning Dynamics of the Andy Holt Virtual Library
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By: Robert Peckham |
Abstract
The Andy Holt Virtual Library, with a focus on the Humanities and Fine Arts, is free and open to the public, though designed to serve the learning communities within the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Tennessee-Martin. It also plays a resource role in UT's New College and the Tennessee Governors School for the Humanities. This independent information source is linked to in key places to the Paul Meek Library on the UT Martin campus.
Description
The Andy Holt Virtual Library (website) is researched and programmed by the Globe-Gate Intercultural Web Project at the University of Tennessee-Martin. It was launched in May of 2001 with full awareness that virtual resources are never a substitute for those physically present in a brick and mortar establishment, with knowledgeable and willing librarians in a number of specialized sub-disciplines. Indeed, a physical library can contain and access a virtual library, but the opposite is not generally true. Appropriately, it is linked in key places to parallel physical and virtual resources provided by the Paul Meek Library on the UT Martin campus. All of these, save subscription services, are open to the general remote public. At the same time, this is an independent information conduit, with its own World catalog metasite, an extensive set of free bibliographic databases, a periodical literature collection (including hundreds of full-text journals), A "General Reference Desk" (almanacs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographies, maps, etc.), a "Book Reviews" page, "Docu-Stacks" with access to well over a million digital documents (in dozens of different languages), and other resources associated with the six discipline clusters of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UT-Martin.
I will demonstrate how this library, linked in over 500 places to sites in 20 countries on 5 continents, is a transformative force for its connective and interdisciplinary role in our newly-founded College of Humanities and Fine Arts, for its use as an electronic database in a powerful initiative from our campus library, for its use in support of UT's New College and the Tennessee Governors School for Humanities, for its developing role in home schooling and for homework assignments, as well as its more general and symbolic role in the democratization of knowledge.
Proceeding