iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for science, mathematics, technology, and engineering. I worked on this project as a consultant from its inception in 2000; my role was to design and develop the information architecture and general look and feel of the digital library's Web site, and to develop ideas for user services, particularly features for browsing, recommendations, and personalization.
The iLumina project was initially funded by a Digital Library Initiative, Phase 2 grant from the National Science Foundation; it is part of the U.S. National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The original project team included researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Eduprise, Virgina Tech, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State, and The College of New Jersey. My involvement in the project concluded with the initial release of the digital library in 2002.
Although many of the ideas we implemented in iLumina are now commonplace, aspects of the project that were innovative at the time included:
- Resources were cataloged with IMS-compliant metadata, which captured education-specific data about each resource
- Resource metadata was stored as XML; XSL and XSLT was used to transform the data to produce the displayed web pages
- Import and export features made possible interoperability of resource metadata with other collections of educational resources
