Funded by Minerva Programme, the e-Resources and Distance Learning Management (eDilema) project has been carried between 2001 and 2003 to promote access to efficient methods and high quality educational resources as well as to promote the access to the best practices in the field of e-learning. One of the tasks of eDilema has been to develop DILLEO, a repository for learning resources and related materials.

This article summarizes the document E-Dilema: Expectations and Achievements, by J. Mikulecka In the following lines there is a brief description of DILLEO and four other Digital Libraries that has been analyzed by the authors. The following information could be useful to introduce good examples of what Digital Libraries can offer.

1. ARIADNE - Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe was supported by the Commission of the European Union in the framework of the Education and Training sector of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The primary goal of ARIADNE is to foster the share and reuse of electronic pedagogical material, both by universities and corporations.

2. GEM - The Gateway to Educational Materials is a Web site created through the efforts of several groups, including US department of Education, The national Library of Education, and a team from Syracuse University. The goal of the project is to provide teachers with a broad range of educational materials on the www. The Gateway allows users to search for educational materials in variety of formats, including lesson plans, educational Web pages, books for sale, and web pages for national museums by subject, keyword or grade level. The majority of these resources are free. In addition, the interface of the gateway allows users to browse through hierarchical lists organized by subject, keyword or grade level. Equally important, the resources found through The Gateway have been reviewed, accepted and catalogued by experts within member organizations.

3. National SMETE Digital Library is a federation of collection and service providers to support the learning and teaching needs of a broad community of learners in the sciences, mathematics, engineering and technology education. This resource is envisioned as something that is much more than a traditional academic library in digital form, it is a digital learning community where learners and instructors can come together to locate and discuss teaching and learning. It provides ready access to a wide range of resources to enhance learning and it helps users identify quality materials from the vast variety of materials currently available on the Internet. It provides its members with mechanisms to adapt and build on the work of others to strengthen SMET educational programs

4. iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. It is designed to quickly and accurately connect users with the educational materials they need. These resources range in type from highly granular objects such as individual images and video clips to entire courses. Resources in iLumina are catalogued with IMS compliant metadata, which captures both technical and education-specific information about each resource. An advanced search engine, quick search feature, and browse utility provide multiple methods for accessing resources in the library. Library resources can be browsed by discipline, resource type, structure, media type or contributors. The hierarchical taxonomy has three levels and is based for biology on Biology Classification Scheme, for chemistry on Modified Library of Congress Chemistry Subject Heading, for computer science on ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 Classification Scheme and for mathematics and physics on iLumina Classification Scheme.

5. DILLEO - Digital Library of Learning Objects has been implemeted within eDILEMA project. The motivation for building the digital library was the lack of digital learning materials available in Czech language. Czech universities tend to develop all materials “in house” without sharing resources. Teachers, developing WebCT support for the students would like to have some “building blocks” available for the course development. On the other side, the students are asking for easy and convenient accessibility of all study materials, which are now split over the university intranet (or accessible only within WebCT courses, in which they are registered). Teachers and students lack a repository where they can submit their materials, find related material, create new content, and, collectively improve both the quantity and quality of digital teaching resources. Therefore it was decided to build DILLEO - a digital library of learning objects. According to IEEE definition, Learning Object is any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training. All learning objects stored in DILLEO are in digital form and all objects are logically stored in the hierarchical directories. Digital library DILLEO is targeted to teachers and students of study programmes in the field of information systems, economics, tourism and management. Teachers could use learning objects of different granularity when preparing courses, seminars, presentations and testing. Students can self-study learning objects in the library. Before adding to library is every learning object reviewed and proper metadata is provided. Users can search learning objects in digital library by content, selectively by type of document (text, presentation, sound, video etc.) and/or pedagogic category (for example courses, seminars, presentations, and tests). All metadata for every learning object can be viewed and printed. Every learning object can be:

· viewed directly in the library, if relevant;
· printed directly in the library, if relevant and
· downloaded directly from the library and if it is not in the library, it displays information about location of learning object and its terms of access and use.

Metadata schema is based on ARIADNE standard, Educational Metadata Recommendation, Version 3.1, published in May 2001. This schema is compatible with LOM standard and was modified to conform our requirements. The description of DILLEO architecture and technical project of DILLEO are available at the project web page, the library is available by clicking here.