Supporting collaborative learning activities with a digital library and annotations

Abstract

Digital Libraries (DLs) usually provide facilities for browsing and searching their collections, and can enhance noticeably learning activities. The integration of an annotation tool with a DL can foster knowledge exchange between instructors and learners. It is important that an annotation system for DLs should be easily integrated with existing DLs. This paper presents an annotation system, called DLNotes, which can be easily embedded in DLs in order to enable free-text and ontology-based annotations. DLNotes also supports supervised annotation activities and allows discussion threads to be associated with each annotation, what is particularly important for e-learning. © 2009 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.