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- Leslie Johnston
- University of Virginia Library
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- People:
- John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania
- Leslie Johnston, University of Virginia
- MacKenzie Smith, MIT
- William Ying, ArtSTOR
- Goal: Creation of a Checklist that outlines both essential and desirable
interoperability functionality between Repositories and Learning
Applications.
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- The Checklist focuses on the flow of information from repository to user
rather than on content deposit.
- The Checklist is intended primarily for those developing repository
systems of any type and learning applications intended to work with
them.
- Metadata only, available digital media files, publications/pre-press,
or learning objects within a learning application.
- Academic, not-for-profit, and commercially-run repositories will benefit
from the Checklist.
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- Tasks in Gathering
- Discover sources of potentially useful content.
- Search for content that meets their needs.
- Collect references to relevant items they find.
- Import items, descriptions of those items, or references to those items
into learning applications.
- Save copies of some of these items to local applications or storage.
- Find Related items to those they have collected, in the same or
different repositories.
- Of the activities above, the essential activities that a digital
repository must directly support are searching, collection, and import.
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- The Checklist assumes a simple data model:
- There exist distinct, identifiable pieces of digital content, or items,
that can be searched for, collected, and imported for instructional
purposes.
- Items can be found by searching collections, groupings of items that
can be addressed and queried through a common interface or set of
services.
- Items, and possibly collections as well, have metadata associated with
them, information that describes them and otherwise aids in their use
and management.
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- Repositories provide content, not simply metadata, to users.
- Teachers and learners use the content of digital repositories through learning
applications.
- Courseware packages, citation managers, and presentation and analysis
software.
- With the wide selection and range of repository interfaces, there has
also emerged a layer of mediators between repositories and applications,
or gateways, that help users locate content they need in appropriate
repositories.
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- Each section includes:
- Rating of Essential or Desirable for each category of interoperability
functionality.
- Description of the functionality and what purpose it serves.
- The place in the architecture of a repository.
- Some technical recommendations, but not meant to be proscriptive.
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- Finding content:
- Support search for items. (ESSENTIAL)
- Provide standard or documented metadata for items. (ESSENTIAL)
- Support search via software agents.
(DESIRABLE)
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- Collecting content:
- Provide stable references to items. (ESSENTIAL)
- Support citations in recognized scholarly formats for items. (DESIRABLE)
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- Accessing content:
- Provide ways to get and use item content. (ESENTIAL)
- Provide views of item content. (DESIRABLE)
- Allow items to be copied into local systems. (DESIRABLE)
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- Documentation:
- Document policies and functions of the repository. (ESSENTIAL)
- Make the repository, and its content, known to other applications.
(DESIRABLE)
- Document the technical profile of the repository. (DESIRABLE)
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- Creation of a questionnaire spreadsheet based on the Checklist.
- Representatives of six repository projects were asked to fill in the
questionnaire.
- Answers were reviewed to judge both compliance of the project to the
proposed interoperability standards and to gauge the successfulness of
the questionnaire in determining compliance.
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- The questionnaire answers produced a number of issues.
- The questionnaire was not deemed fully successful, especially for
larger environments where some portions of the infrastructure might
comply and others do not.
- Who answers the questionnaire changes the compliance.
- How can the questionnaire take into account the necessary
interoperability differences between repositories and catalogs, which
are metadata repositories?
- A revised questionnaire will be created.
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- Use Cases:
- The use cases developed by the other working group led to a number of
changes in the Checklist, especially in the definition of the process
of scholarly research, the delineation of activities that make up the
"Gathering" stage of research, and the categorization of
functionality as essential or desirable.
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