ARIEL Project Overview

The first decade of digital library research provided ample evidence that humankind's ability to generate and collect data exceeds our ability to organize, manage, and effectively use it…These data will continue to seem chaotic, lacking sufficient organization, stability, and quality control. Moreover, individual communities may lose the ability to control access to and manage their own data. The effective use of data and information resources must scale with their ever increasing abundance and variety; this will take continued research and technology development.¹

Recent conferences and studies underscore the enormous potential of transformations in academic disciplines induced by new technologies and digital tools. In the sciences and the humanities, the breadth of innovation and conceptual metamorphosis are without precedent. Historians, classicists, art historians, engineers, media studies professors, computer scientists, and representatives of cultural and educational institutions have begun to speak of the revelatory changes and the emergence of new objects of scholarship, profound shifts in disciplinary research focus, new academic partnership, and new academic disciplines, some of which exist only in silicon.

The implications of these changes require rigorous and ongoing exploration and evaluation. At present, there is no means to routinely track, evaluate, and apply information about the transformations affecting the academy. A more sophisticated understanding of the ways traditional strategies of intellectual inquiry are undergoing change would benefit scholars and their professional societies, but also libraries, which must expend limited resources to the greatest effect in support of the academic mission of their institutions. Traditional printed reports and publishing constructs have been steadily modified by the rise of databases and the use of Websites for promulgation of research results. The role of the investigator has similarly been changed by the increasing reliance on special project teams that include computer specialists, programmers, librarians, and other participants not trained in the field of research undertaken. The next iteration of the traditional library remains a question of enormous complexity; the absence of a means to capture and apply this array of information is one of the most fundamental elements in planning for the library of the new century, and one that is often overlooked in favor of smaller, more manageable iterations of digital projects. The emerging library-the library that combines traditional print media, a breathtaking array of digital multimedia assets, and the profound effect it will have on the production and preservation of the cultural heritage and the organization and perpetuation of knowledge-will touch upon every aspect of society, every facet of academic research, and every human being who comes of age in the decades ahead. The emerging library is one of the most important concepts challenging the 21st century.

Institutional Document Repository

Rice Digital Library - The digital library project integrates the many existing repositories of digital data, text, video, audio and images into a coherent and comprehensive architecture to allow digital information to be shared and enhanced to effectively support teaching and research at Rice.

DSpace - DSpace is a groundbreaking digital library system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves and redistributes the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats.

TIMEA (Travelers in the Middle East Archive) - TIMEA is adigital archive of narratives documenting travel to the Middle East published between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries--along with related images and interactive maps. This archive facilitates defined searching and analysis within and across texts and will integrate images, maps, and text.

Advanced Placement Digital Library (APDL) - The APDL is a collection of Internet resources that have been reviewed for their educational merit in an AP* or Pre-AP* classroom.

Connexions - Knowledge should be free, open, and shared. Connexions is a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful set of free software tools to help authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines.

CITI (Computer and Information Technology Institute) - CITI at Rice strives to build a community of scholars that engages in collaborative research and education covering virtually every aspect of information technology and computing by bringing together scholars with complementary expertise to solve complex problems.

ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) - The mission of the ACLS, as set forth in its Constitution, is "the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies."

SHOAH (Shoah Foundation Archives Collaboration Project)  - Following the pioneering example of Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to collect the testimonies of survivors and other eyewitnesses to the Holocaust.

¹Knowledge Lost in Information. Report of the NSF Workshop on Research Directions for Digital Libraries