Building a Digital Library of Captured Educational Experiences

Since 1995, we have been researching the application of ubiquitous computing technology to support the automated capture of live university lectures so that students and teachers may later access them. With virtually no additional effort beyond that which lecturers already expend on preparing and delivering a lecture, we are able to create a repository, or digital library, of rich educational experiences that is constantly growing. The resulting archive includes a heterogeneous mix of materials presented in lectures. In this paper, we discuss access issues for this digital library that cover short-term and long-term use of the repository. While our efforts have focussed quite a bit on short-term access that occurs over the duration of a course, it is clear that significant value is added to the archive as it is tuned for long-term use. These long-term access issues for an experiential digital library have not yet been addressed, and we highlight some of those challenges in this paper.