Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In the Spring 2026 semester at Old Dominion University (ODU), I taught CS 450 (Undergrad) / CS 550 (Graduate): Database Concepts . The course was fully online, with synchronous live Zoom sessions held twice a week. The attendance was not mandatory but strongly encouraged. All lectures were recorded and made available for students to access whenever needed. Figure 1: Canvas course page for CS 450/550: Database Concepts Through this blog post, I want to share my experience of teaching a senior-level undergraduate/graduate course for the first time, the behind-the-scenes realities of course preparation through to the end of the course, and how student feedback actively shaped the course as it progressed.  Since the course had been taught previously by other instructors, materials were already available, which made things easier. Rather than building everything from scratch, I started by copying over the existing course structure and then carefully updating it to align with the current...

  If LLMs can write abstracts, what's our job?  The Uncanny Valley and Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in the ACM Digital Library Michael L. Nelson 2026-05-28 I serve on the ACM Digital Libraries Board , and we are navigating a number of changes to the ACM's Digital Library , which as a professional society and memory organization, is arguably the ACM's primary asset.   A recent article (March, 2026) by Jack Davidson and Wayne Graves provides a status update of the ACM's move to open access , which includes establishing a "basic" and " premium " service level. Although there are some questions regarding the long-term implications of moving to open access, I, and presumably all authors, welcome the ACM's bold strategy for ensuring that our content reaches the widest possible audience.   Jack's and Wayne's article also addressed the DL's recent experimentation with AI/LLM enrichment of articles, specifically landing pages.  And unfortunate...