Inquiry-based learning is becoming an important way of engaging learners in information-rich inquiry-based activities, as called for by various educational groups. Digital library services can play a significant role in inquiry by helping learners search the vast repositories of information that now exist. However, digital libraries do not support the full range of online inquiry activities, which also involve planning the inquiry, seeking and making sense of information, and synthesizing information into a final argument. We are exploring the notion of a "Digital IdeaKeeper" environment to extend digital libraries by other tools and scaffolds for online inquiry. IdeaKeeper will provide an online inquiry context supporting the full range of online inquiry activities, support analysis of the resources found in a digital library, and provide for annotating and saving connected pairs of library resources and learner notes and observations about those resources for contextualized information review and synthesis.

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