A course on Parallel was given in Spring 1996, and covered scheduling and load balancing techniques used in WWW and distributed systems.
At Colorado, Barbara Buttenfield taught a four-week module on evaluating Web-based interface design as part of a course on animation and multimedia being taught in the Fall of 1996 in Geography. The course had just under twenty students, and focused on hands-on work, lab exercises, and programming skills for multimedia products including interface tools.
A ``virtual seminar'' being held concurrently at 9 American universities in early 1997 semester has a digital library component. The seminar is sponsored by a consortium of 34 universities having a multi-departmental research and teaching strength in geographic information science. Both UCSB and CU are founding members of the consortium (UCGIS), and are running sections of the seminar. An electronic conferencing mechanism (Motet) permits active inter-site discussion and debate; assignments at each site for short position papers and longer seminar papers are running along parallel schedules. Ten research topics are being covered, with one or more faculty at each site taking the lead in electronic discussions, assisting students in contacting others working in similar areas, and grading students' work at all 9 sites the country.
Barbara Buttenfield leads the Colorado site seminar, and also has responsibility nationally for leading the research topic on the ``Future of the Spatial Data Infrastructure''. The highest levels of interest in this theme consider applications of digital library technology to spatial data delivery. A number of students have become ADL beta testers and it is expected that a number of seminar papers may be produced at various sites. It is hoped that these students will pursue thesis or dissertation research on digital libraries as a result. In computer science or engineering graduate programs, topical interest in digital libraries is taken for granted.
In disciplines such as geography, where natural and social sciences mix, the digital libraries interest is just beginning to surface widely. The major contribution of inserting an information infrastructure theme into the virtual seminar may be to introduce geography graduate students to this very important are of research. Results of the virtual seminar process will be presented at the Association of American Geographers meeting in April, 1997, with a panel of students and participating faculty.