Electronic books in digital libraries

Abstract

Electronic book is an application with a multimedia database of instructional resources, which include hyperlinked text, instructor's audio/video clips, slides, animation, still images, etc. as well as content-based information about these data, and metadata such as annotations, tags, and cross-referencing information. Electronic books in the Internet or on CDs today are not easy to learn from. We propose the use of a multimedia database of instructional resources in constructing and delivering multimedia lessons about topics in an electronic book. We introduce an electronic book data model containing (a) topic objects and (b) instructional resources, called instruction module objects, which are multimedia presentations possibly capturing real-life lectures of instructors. We use the notion of topic prerequisites for topics at different detail levels, to allow electronic book users to request/compose multimedia lessons about topics in the electronic book. We present automated construction of the `best' user-tailored lesson (as a multimedia presentation.