This morning the first presentation is by Jon Dunn from Indiana University, and as you might guess is about working with the Sakai course management system.
Later in the session, I’m contributing to the panel session, describing and discussing what we have done, and aim to do with Moodle and library systems at RHUL.
Jon is starting with an overview of course management systems or VLEs. He is making a strong case that it is essential for the library to go out and work with the VLEs – we cannot rely on the fact that students, or even lecturers, will come to the library (perhaps especially ‘virtually’), and so we must invest in integration between the VLEs and the library systems and resources.
At Indiana, they have been working specifically with Sakai (I hadn’t realised that Sakai comes from Hiroyuki Sakai – from the Iron Chef TV programme!)
Anyway Sakai began in 2003, with 4 institutions which wanted more control over institutional CMS and felt it would be more cost effective to develop in house, than to pay a vendor. From this Sakai has grown into a group of 105 paying partners, although only 8 institutions are in production, with 11 more scheduled for Q3 2006.
Sakaibrary is (unsuprisingly) a project to integrate library systems/resources with Sakai. It is a partnership between Indiana University and University of Michigan, and runs until 2008.
The project goals are:
To build tools to provide seamless integration of content from licensed library datases within Sakai for instructors
Leverage existing library technology infrastructure
Prototype functionality for librarians to present content in Sakai and students to discover licensed content within Sakai
Engage librarians, students and faculty in this process
Once the tools have been developed they will be released as open source (although you’ll obviously need Sakai to use them)
The project started with some tasks that different stake holders might do – a selection of these are:
Lecturers
Search for articles
Import references from Refworks etc
Create persistent links to articles for student access
Create customized search box or ‘canned search’ for students (e.g. automatically add keywords to search to keep it on topic)
Obtain assistance from library
Students
Access article found by instructor
Search for articles
Export references
Obtain help from librarian
Librarians
Create links to appropriate databases
Create customized search boxes
Create help guides and suggestions
Sakai defines ‘tools’ (frontend interface) and ‘services’ (backend functionality). Sakaibrary is working on the folloing deliverables:
Phase 1:
Library search tool – based on existing work (Twin Peaks Navigator, OKI), but to leverage metasearch technology.
Citation management tool
Phase 2:
Subject research guides
Jon is just demonstrating the integration. A nice interface add library resource appears as an option within the html wysiwyg editor, and this pops up a search window (just prototype at the moment), and then inserts a selected link into the course material. It wasn’t entirely clear what html was behind the link, but sounds like they are using a combination of OpenURL and RDF.
For the citation management tool, they have only got prototype screens at the moment, but the basic idea is to be able to import citations, or search for citations using library resources, and then add to your citation list.
The subject research guides will provide functionality like ‘constrained searches’ where searches are limited to specific areas to help guide the students to appropriate resources.
The tehcnologies being used at Indiana are Unicorn, MuseGlobal, and SFX. At Michigan they use Aleph, MetaLib and SFX. This means the project is determined to get the functionality across different library systems. To acheive this they are using OSID (Open Service Interface Definition) which came out of the MIT OKI.
The key OSID function is the respository query and delivery (OKI Repository OSID). Since this was already implemented in Sakai, it was a logical choice. University of Michigan is using the x-server to access MetaLib functions, using CQL as internal query representation, and OKI Repository OSID for communication with Sakai. Similar work happening with MuseGlobal at Indiana.
Some interesting comments from Michigan regarding the MetaLib X-Server – some XML encoding and validation issues, and the lack of ‘appending merge’ option – to try to allow paging through merged results, even though you don’t retrieve all results at once.
With SFX, they have found it fine, but apparently have found it isn’t possible to customise the menus based on the fact the Source is Sakai – but I’m really suprised, as this should be possible?
The Search and citation management should be ready for testing Q3 2006, and the subject research guide tool in Spring 2007, with Open source release in mid to late 2007.
Some unanswered questions are:
Who will use search within the CMS? Possibility that lecturers won’t, as they have references from other sources already, which is one reason to support import from other areas.
Will metasearching ever be good enough?
Will OpenURL link resolution work consistently enough for full text access?
How will the Sakai development model work in libraries?
Will other institutions step up to tackle other library integration?
Some really good stuff here – and perhaps raising the bar on what we need to look at in terms of integrating citation level information into the VLE – so far we have only discussed integrating service/resource level information (e.g. ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Nature Online) – because this seems easier.
It would also be very interesting to look at how much (if at all) Moodle supports OKI Repository OSID, and whether we can use this for our own integrations. I really liked the way that adding a library resource to the html, was integrated into the html editor – very nice, and perhaps extendable? (it wasn’t clear how this was acheived)
A posting at Loomware just refers to some other work going on between Sakai and Library systems – http://blog.uwinnipeg.ca/loomware/archives/002300.html