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John L. Schnase[1], John J. Leggett[2], Ted Metcalfe[1], Nancy R. Morin[3], Edward L. Cunnius[1], Jonathan S. Turner[4], Richard K. Furuta[2], Leland Ellis[5], Michael S. Pilant[6], Richard E. Ewing[6], Scott W. Hassan[1], and Mark E. Frisse[1]
[1]Advanced Technology Group, School of Medicine Library, Washington University School of Medicine;
[2]Hypermedia Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University;
[3]Missouri Botanical Garden;
[4]Department of Computer Science, Washington University;
[5]W.M. Keck Center for Genome Informatics, Institute of Bioscience and Technology, Texas A&M University;
[6]Institute for Scientific Computation, Texas A&M University
The CoLib Project is a multi-institutional, inter- and intra-disciplinary effort aimed at establishing a large-scale, distributed, botanical digital library and research facility. Its initial focus is on enabling the Flora of North America Project (FNA), a collaborative effort to gather and disseminate information on all the plants of North America. CoLib's long-range goals, however, are the following: (1) to scale FNA into a comprehensive, world-wide, internetworked, botanical digital library, (2) to enable the scientific practice of botany, (3) to use digital library technology to create new opportunities for cross-disciplinary sharing, and (4) to create a context wherein the librarianship that is intrinsic to systematic botany can be extended to the work that is currently underway on digital libraries.
Large-scale hypermedia technology and broadband communications will be key components of future digital libraries. CoLib's research agenda focuses on collaborative hypermedia library systems, interactive multimedia computing and communications systems, and librarianship in the botanical digital library. The CoLib Project is providing a rich environment for research on large-scale, distributed, digital library systems and organizational processes associated with the use of digital libraries.
Keywords: ATM, botanical informatics, collaborative hypermedia library systems, hypermedia-in-the-large, scientific practice, systematics, digital library machine.
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