Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program Office plays a key part in helping NASA maintain this important role. The NASA STI Program Office is operated by Langley Research Center, the lead center for NASA's scientific and technical information. The NASA STI Program Office provides access to the NASA STI Database, the largest collection of aeronautical and space science STI in the world. The Program Office is also NASA's institutional mechanism for disseminating the results of its research and development activities. These results are published by NASA in the NASA STI Report Series, which includes the following report types:

This paper describes an agent-assisted approach to the construction of floristic digital libraries, which consist of very large botanical data repositories and related services. We propose an environment, termed Chrysalis, in which authors of plant morphologic descriptions can enter data into a digital library via a web-based editor. An agent that runs concurrently with the editor suggests potentially useful morphologic descriptions based on similar documents existing in the library. Benefits derived from the introduction of Chrysalis include reduced potential for errors and data inconsistencies, increased parallelism among descriptions, and considerable savings in the time regularly spent in visually checking for parallelism and manually editing data. KEYWORDS: agents, agent-based interfaces, floristic digital libraries, FNA, Chrysalis. INTRODUCTION Constructing the vast data repositories that will support knowledge-intensive activities in digital libraries poses problems of enormo...

this paper is funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation (DEB-9505383 and DEB-9626806).

Digital libraries can be regarded as virtual spaces in which collaborative scholarly research can be conducted. Floristic digital libraries provide such collaboration spaces for scientists working on solutions for Earth's biodiversity problems. However, group awareness and collaboration are not easily achieved in an increasingly distributed environment such as the virtual space in which digital library users (particularly botanists and biologists) do their work. We describe an environment that enables group awareness, communication, and collaboration among users in a globally accessible floristic digital library. This is achieved by extending existing library facilities with recommendation and alerting services, as well as various communication interfaces.