Database and Metadata Support of a Web-Based Multimedia Digital Library for Medical Education

Digital Libraries play an important role in education; they are beneficial to both instructors and students. Many Web file-based course material systems have been built, but most of them do not have effective management mechanisms. Instead, they often have broken links and do not support metadata. To transfer these course materials from a file repository to an integrated and searchable educational digital library, database and metadata supports are needed. In this paper, we report our design and implementation of a Web-based multimedia digital library for medical education with database and metadata support. Our system is built on top of SQL Server, a relational database management system. It adopts the Instructional Management System (IMS) standard for metadata representation and the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Heading controlled vocabulary to remove ambiguity and inconsistency in metadata definitions. It includes a sophisticated search engine for both database content and metadata. It also supports the IMS Content Packaging Specification for learning materials export and exchange.