Motivating and supporting faculty use of educational digital libraries: an example from the geosciences

The authors explore how the portal of a digital library can be designed to influence the behavior of its users. The example is the Starting Point Digital Library, an education digital library designed primarily for faculty teaching introductory level geoscience. The specific goal of the Starting Point library is to increase faculty knowledge of the full range of teaching methods that can be used in their classes so that they will be better positioned to design and implement introductory geoscience courses that support student learning. Our design is based on an in-depth look at how geoscience faculty think about and prepare for teaching developed through one-on-one interviews with a small sample of geoscience faculty