Over the weekend I had a few hours to kill :-) so I had a quick play with
the eprints.org software from Southamption, to see how easy or difficult
it would be to use it as the basis for an instituional learning object
repository. (You know *learning objects*... the things behind the bush on
the OSU campus! :-) ).
As some of you may know... the eprints.org software
http://software.eprints.org/
was developed by the University of Southampton to enable universities to
set up their own eprint archives. (Its major 'competitor' in terms of
open source software is DSpace from MIT). As such, the default
configuration of eprints.org is very much centred on eprints (articles,
book chapters, etc.) and the associated metadata is very
bibiographic-focused.
A couple of hours work built me the system at
http://lor.ukoln.ac.uk/
which you are free to experiment with using the username 'guest' and the
password 'guest'. I've configured the metadata fields to use a variation
on the UK LOM Core theme! :-)
Getting this far was relatively straight-forward. I plan to add proper
support for OAI-PMH (LOM records) next - again, I don't expect this to be
difficult. However, you'll note that the system has no inbuilt knowledge
of content packaging (though you can of course deposit a pre-existing
IMS-CP file). My guess is that adding decent support for
bundling/unbundling of content packages would be quite difficult (i.e.
more than playing!) - in part, because the current workflow of the system
only asks for the object at the end of the process (i.e. after you have
entered all the metadata that might well be already contained within the
package that you want to deposit) :-(.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I noted that presenting LOM fields to
end-users in the order they are encoded in the LOM XML record format
doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense. For example
9.1 purpose "educational level"
and
9.1 purpose "educational objective"
are better presented along-side the other educational fields in
5. educational
and
9.1 purpose "discipline"
and
9.1 purpose "idea"
are better presented along-side
1.5 keyword
and
1.6 coverage
Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
ECDL 2004, Bath, UK - 12-17 Sept 2004 - http://www.ecdl2004.org/
|