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This paper aims to present a model for the quality assurance of digital educational material that is appropriate for adult education. The proposed model adopts the software quality standard ISO/IEC 9126 and takes into account adult learning theories, Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives and two instructional design models: Kolb’s model (the learning cycle) and Gagne, Briggs and Wager’s model.

The structure of this paper is as follows: in the second section, the theory of “the learning cycle of Kolb” is discussed. The third section discusses the model of Gagne, Biggs & Wager. The fourth section discusses and categorizes the characteristics and sub-characteristics of the quality of digital educational material. The fifth section discusses and categorizes the quality attributes of digital educational material. Moreover, the correlation of the sub-characteristics of the material with the model of Gagne and that of Kolb are examined.

The authors developed a quality model that adopts the structure of ISO/IEC 9126 standard, using basic notions of theories of adult education to define its characteristics and sub-characteristics. The model has been successfully applied in the quality evaluation of educational material distributed to distance learning adult students.

The innovative combination of an established quality model with sound educational theories yields a comprehensive model that allows both a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the appropriateness of digital educational material. The applicability of the model is demonstrated by applying it to specific digital materials specially developed for adult education.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of the baseline study on the state of digital heritage material preservation in Botswana.

The study was part of a three‐country United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Digital Heritage Preservation Project on the state of digital material preservation in Africa involving Botswana, Ethiopia and South Africa. The study uses the survey method consisting of various components data collection strategies including field work, document research, observations and the holding of a national consultative seminar an additional data input tool. The field study involved visiting 26 institutions that were identified as having the actual or potential of managing heritage materials in the country. Two other categories of institutions that were surveyed included the service providers of digitisation systems in the country.

Findings revealed weak policy formulation on digitization both at the institutional and national levels; weak legislative framework for digital preservation; ill‐defined national digitisation co‐ordination for digitisation activities at institutional, national and regional levels; lack of awareness about the potential of digital preservation by national heritage institutions; a dearth of human resources for digitization; and lack of common standards on digital heritage materials preservation in Botswana.

Although the study was limited to institutions dealing with digital heritage materials preservation, the outcome of the study sheds more light on the challenges of preservation of digital materials in most of the institutions in Botswana.

The results of this study presents useful strategic policy options for the management and preservation of digital materials in Botswana and other countries of Africa facing a similar environment.

There is a dearth of literature on preservation of digital heritage materials in Africa, and this study provides useful insights that are unique and comparative experiences that exist on this subject.

The purpose of this paper is to present a high‐level investigation of the physical‐conceptual continuum occupied by both digital and physical libraries.

A framework is provided for thinking about the notions of place and library. The issue of materials and the ideas they represent is considered. Places for people are considered, including issues of people's sense of place in physical and digital spaces. The issue of physical and digital spaces as places for work, collaboration, and community‐building is considered.

As more digital libraries are built, and as more physical libraries offer electronic access to parts of their collection, two trends are likely to result: the role of the library as a storage space for materials will become decreasingly important; and the role of the library as a space for users, for individual and collaborative work, and as a space for social activity, will become increasingly important.

Digital libraries are unable to fulfill some of the functions of the physical library as physical spaces, but are able to offer functions beyond what the physical library can offer as cognitive spaces.

Areas of likely future development for digital libraries are suggested, as vehicles for enhancing cognitive space by augmenting representations of ideas in materials.

This paper argues that in many ways digital libraries really are places in the conceptual sense, and will continue to broaden and enrich the roles that libraries play in people's lives and in the larger social milieu.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the challenges imposed on libraries by the presence of digital resources.

The paper reviews the main challenges and key issues of digital archiving from the point of view of librarians.

Information technology and the presence of the web are challenging the role of librarians in preserving library materials for future generations. Preserving digital resources is not going to be the same as preserving traditional resources and is absolutely a new responsibility for digital librarians. They are facing many new issues and concerns in digital preservation. These issues can be divided into three areas: technical issues, organisational issues and legal issues.

The paper provides insights into the current issues and challenges in digital archiving.

This study examines how applying innovative I4.0 technologies at the design stage can help reduce construction waste and improve the recovery, reuse, and recycling of construction materials.

The study adopts a three-stage sequential mixed methods approach, involving a thorough review of current literature, interviews with six experts in digital construction, and a survey of 75 experienced industry practitioners.

The study identifies and discusses how ten specific digital technologies can improve design stage processes leading to improved circularity in construction, namely, (1) additive and robotic manufacturing; (2) artificial intelligence; (3) big data analytics; (4) blockchain technology; (5) building information modelling; (6) digital platforms; (7) digital twins; (8) geographic information systems; (9) material passports and databases; and (10) Internet of things. It demonstrates that by using these technologies to support circular design concepts within the sector, material recycling rates can be improved and unnecessary construction waste reduced.

This research provides researchers and practitioners with improved understanding of the potential of digital technology to recycle construction waste at the design stage, and may be used to create an implementation roadmap to assist designers in finding tools and identifying them.

Little consideration has been given to how digital technology can support design stage measures to reduce construction waste. This study fills a gap in knowledge of a fast-moving topic.

PolyJet technology allows printing complex multi-material composite configurations using Voxel digital designs' capability, thus allowing rapid prototyping of 3D printed structural parts. This paper aims to investigate the processing and mechanical characteristics of composite material configurations formed from soft and hard materials with different distributions and sizes via voxel digital print design.

Voxels are extruded representations of pixels and represent different material information similar to each pixel representing colors in digital images. Each geometric region of a digitally designed part represented by a voxel can be printed with a different material. Multi-material composite part configurations were formed and rapidly prototyped using a PolyJet printer Stratasys J750. A design of experiments composite part configuration of a soft material (Tango Plus) within a hard material matrix (Vero Black) was studied. Composite structures with different hard and soft material distributions, but at the same volume fractions of hard and soft materials, were rapidly prototyped via PolyJet printing through developed Voxel digital printing designs. The tensile behavior of these formed composite material configurations was studied.

Processing and mechanical behavior characteristics depend on materials in different regions and their distributions. Tensile characterization obtained the fracture energy, tensile strength, modulus and failure strength of different hard-soft composite systems. Mechanical properties and behavior of all different composite material systems are compared.

Tensile characteristics correlate to digital voxel designs that play a critical role in additive manufacturing, in addition to the formed material composition and distributions.

Results clearly indicate that multi-material composite systems with various tensile mechanical properties could be created using voxel printing by engineering the design of material distributions, and sizes. The important parameters such as inclusion size and distribution can easily be controlled within all slices via voxel digital designs in PolyJet printing. Therefore, engineers and designers can manipulate entire morphology and material at each voxel level, and different prototype morphologies can be created with the same voxel digital design. In addition, difficulties from AM process with voxel printing for such material designs is addressed, and effective digital solutions were used for successful prototypes. Some of these difficulties are extra support material or printing the part with different dimension than it designed to achieve the final part dimension fidelity. Present work addressed and resolved such issued and provided cyber based software solutions using CAD and voxel discretization. All these increase broad adaptability of PolyJet AM in industry for prototyping and end-use.

Virtual voxels (3D pixels) have traditionally been used as a graphical data structure for representing 3D geometry. The purpose of this paper is to study the use of pre‐existing physical voxels as a material building‐block for layered manufacturing and present the theoretical underpinnings for a fundamentally new massively parallel additive fabrication process in which 3D matter is digital. The paper also seeks to explore the unique possibilities enabled by this paradigm.

Digital RP is a process whereby a physical 3D object is made of many digital units (voxels) arranged selectively in a 3D lattice, as opposed to analog (continuous) material commonly used in conventional rapid prototyping. The paper draws from fundamentals of 3D space‐filling shapes, large‐scale numerical simulation, and a survey of modern technology to reach conclusions on the feasibility of a fabricator for digital matter.

Design criteria and appropriate 3D voxel geometries are presented that self‐align and are suitable for rapid parallel assembly and economical manufacturing. Theory and numerical simulation predict dimensional accuracy to scale favorably as the number of voxels increases. Current technology will enable rapid parallel assembly of billions of microscale voxels.

Many novel voxel functions could be realized in the electromechanical and microfluidic domains, enabling inexpensive prototyping of complex 3D integrated systems. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of a 3D digital fabricator, but an instantiation is out of scope and left to future work.

Digital manufacturing offers the possibility of desktop fabrication of perfectly repeatable, precise, multi‐material objects with microscale accuracy.

The paper constitutes a comprehensive review of physical voxel‐based manufacturing and presents the groundwork for an emerging new field of additive manufacturing.

Material jetting approximates composite material properties through deposition of base materials in a dithered pattern. This microscale, voxel-based patterning leads to macroscale property changes, which must be understood to appropriately design for this additive manufacturing (AM) process. This paper aims to identify impacts on these composites’ viscoelastic properties due to changes in base material composition and distribution caused by incomplete dithering in small features.

Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) is used to measure viscoelastic properties of two base PolyJet materials and seven “digital materials”. This establishes the material design space enabled by voxel-by-voxel control. Specimens of decreasing width are tested to explore effects of feature width on dithering’s ability to approximate macroscale material properties; observed changes are correlated to multi-material distribution via an analysis of ingoing layers.

DMA shows storage and loss moduli of preset composites trending toward the iso-strain boundary as composition changes. An added iso-stress boundary defines the property space achievable with voxel-by-voxel control. Digital materials exhibit statistically significant changes in material properties when specimen width is under 2 mm. A quantified change in same-material droplet groupings in each composite’s voxel pattern shows that dithering requires a certain geometric size to accurately approximate macroscale properties.

This paper offers the first quantification of viscoelastic properties for digital materials with respect to material composition and identification of the composite design space enabled through voxel-by-voxel control. Additionally, it identifies a significant shift in material properties with respect to feature width due to dithering pattern changes. This establishes critical design for AM guidelines for engineers designing with digital materials.

Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.

Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.

The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.

Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.

Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

This paper aims to examine how technology presents both problems and opportunities for the historian, the researcher, small organisations, and cultural heritage institutions. Ways of safeguarding historical material in digital form are suggested, and the role of cultural heritage bodies as managers of sustainable digital collections is examined.

The tools available for online access to historical material are discussed, with some comparison made between current efforts on access provision and long‐term preservation.

At present, access to historical material in digital form is often given precedence over its preservation. This could have potentially serious long‐term implications. Lack of funding for the traditional collecting bodies suggests that new mechanisms for dealing with digital archive collections need to be found. Managing digital material from its creation moves responsibility back to owners, but can provide a platform for effective transfer to new custodians at the appropriate time. Small organisations can participate, increasing the volume and diversity of available material, enriching the base of knowledge upon which history is created.

Further research is required into possible models to enable seamless transfer through the custodial chain. Limitation: lack of quantitative analysis of existing and planned digital preservation projects.

The paper challenges the status quo and sets out some radical ideas concerning the creation, acquisition, management and preservation of digital records, and the roles of the key stakeholders in the cultural and historical domains.