ANN ARBOR—University of Michigan Libraries, in partnership with Indiana University Libraries, will develop online tools that will make it easier for students and faculty to integrate online databases and journals into teaching and learning.

The project is funded by a $438,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Tools developed as a result of this grant will link full-text library resources to the Sakai collaboration and learning software environment. Sakai is community source software for collaboration and learning in higher education, and U-M was a founding partner.

Just as consumers subscribe to their favorite news magazines, libraries subscribe to electronic scholarly journals, indexes, and databases. These online resources contain information essential to scholarship but often invisible to search engines such as Google.

Librarians call this trove of knowledge the” invisible” or” deep” Web, and some studies suggest as much as 80 percent of the information sources available on the World Wide Web are part of this hidden resource.

“The University Library licenses and provides vast collections of scholarly content for use by the campus that is currently not easily accessible from CTools, the U-M implementation of Sakai,” said Brenda Johnson, associate university librarian for Public Services at the University Library at U-M.” Our goal is to integrate these resources with the Sakai online teaching and learning environment so students and faculty can easily utilize these resources in the context of a course.”

Currently the software offered by universities to professors to manage their courses?to post assignments, link required readings, or access student work?requires the instructors and students visit the library Web site separately, with few ways to effectively link resources between the two environments. Overwhelmed by this complex environment, students sometimes turn to Web search engines to find information for scholarly research.

Innovations developed as part of this project will enable professors to link to thousands of licensed online library resources from within the course management software.

“We want to increase the visibility of the invisible Web,” said Patricia Steele, the Ruth Lilly Interim Dean of University Libraries.” Our goal is to integrate library resources seamlessly and easily so students think of and use these powerful resources first. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for recognizing this priority.”

Steele says many users of the World Wide Web incorrectly believe that all information on the Web is freely accessible and therefore free of charge. Many online resources are licensed by vendors, however, and research libraries typically pay a fee based on the number of students enrolled at their campus. The IU Bloomington Libraries spend about $4.1 million a year on electronic resources, Steele says,” so working to integrate these resources more fully into online teaching and learning makes good economic sense as well.”

Because the project calls for the development of” open-source” software, other universities will benefit from the results. The grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support the project over an 18-month period and will provide for project management, programming, interface design and evaluation.

The Sakai Project,