Metadata and Me

I’ve been invited to speak on Friday at an event in York – The Metadata Forum – Metadata For Complex Objects and will be focussing on our ukoer project Unicycle which utilised a fairly lightweight Application Profile based on programme recommendations from CETIS - http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/

N.B. Worth reviewing these in the context of CETIS’ updated recommendations for phase 2 - http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2010/12/03/oer-2-technical-requirements/ (Resource description)

I’ll also be considering questions of interoperability and a few ideas we are exploring in the context of our ACErep project around the possibility of building value added services on centralised repositories of harvested data.

Slides reviewed below:

Slide 3 – Lightening bio

I’ve included this as my (lack of) professional background in the area strikes me as relevant for good or ill – I’ve only been working with repositories/metadata since October 2007 and everything I have learned has been on the job, so to speak.  I am not a qualified librarian or professional cataloguer (shambrarian at best) and I think this has had both benefits and drawbacks; I am *ahem* unrestricted by formal theory and have also needed to find my way through a great deal of esoteric jargon often to gain some fairly basic understanding   –  ultimately, I think this has necessarily resulted in a pragmatic approach and a willingness to take advice!

Slide 4 - Context – Repository Projects at Leeds Met

Repository projects at Leeds Met, in chronological order, are the Repository Start-up itself, Streamline, PERSoNA, Unicycle, Bibliosight – all funded by JISC – and  our current ACErep project which is funded by HEFCE.

Our repository platform is intraLibrary which uses IEEE LOM metadata.

(click for larger image)

Slide 5 – UKOER project – Unicycle

• Funded under JISC ukoer (phase 1)
• Develop process by which staff able to contribute to and draw upon a central repository of OER
• Very granular approach to OER
• “Resources” rather than “Courseware”
• Simple Application Profile – ukoer guidelines
• Mediated deposit
• Leeds Met repository, Jorum Open and other suitable outlets

Slide 6 – An Application Profile for UKOER

• Discussion coordinated by CETIS  http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/
• Keep it simple
• Mandatory fields
• Recommended fields
• Individual projects should think about their own metadata requirements
• Interoperability

Slide 7 – Mandatory metadata

• Programme tag – ukoer
• Author / owner / contributor
• Date
• URL
• Title
• Technical Information

(Licence info soon became mandatory!)

Slide 7 – Recommended metadata

• Language
• Subject classifications
• Keywords
• Tags
• Comments
• Description

Slide 9 – Example ukoer record

http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2076&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources

Slide 10 – Interoperability?

• Leeds Met – intraLibrary (IEEE LOM)
• JorumOpen – DSpace (Dublin Core)
• Harvest ukoer projects by RSS (link only)
• Bulk upload of IMS Content Package (Resource + imsmanifest.xml)
• Virtual Maths resource in JorumOpen
• Little point in metadata not supported by Jorum (or is there?)

Slide 11 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Search across multiple platforms for ALPS resources
• Download resource from any of the platforms into the working arena of their choice
• Adapt existing resource to suit local use
• Deposit original/adapted resource into one or more of the repositories maintained by CETL partners

Slide 12 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Different software uses different metadata standards/Application Profiles
• ALPS may require different metadata than UKOER
• Explicit priority from user group: resources presented in context of specific learning/assessment outcomes
• Can Jorum accommodate this?

Slide 13 – The solution – Xpert?

• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/
• Distributed repository of e-learning resources
• Harvest by RSS and OAI-PMH
• APIs available – Xpert Labs
• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/labs/

Slide 14 - Harvest OAI-PMH/search using Xpert API

Slide 15 – Possible scenario for SWORD deposit

Slide 16 – SWORD and metadata

• intraLibrary accepts IMSCP by SWORD
• JorumOpen (DSpace) accepts METS by SWORD
• Digirep – no SWORD yet (expect IMSCP)
• LUDOS – no SWORD yet (expect METS)
• Need to package metadata as IMSCP and METS

Repository reports and more on SEO

I’ve been trying to get to grips with what usage data I can generate from our repository – both for research but particularly OER for a small JISC funded follow up to Unicycle.  I don’t really have anything equivalent to IRStats for EPrints – see this report from USIR for the type of data that can be generated from Salford’s EPrints repository – but I do have Google Analytics running on http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/ and intraLibrary’s own reporting tool.

The issue is complicated for us slightly in that we effectively have two repository sites running on two different servers!  There is intraLibrary itself hosted for us by Intrallect and there in the Open Search SRU interface on a Leeds Met server.  From Analytics I can get data on traffic to Open Search including hits on the metadata page for individual records but I cannot identify whether the full text/resource was actually downloaded. However, I CAN get this info from intraLibrary itself.

The dual server set-up also creates issues for SEO and I’ve been trying to ensure that full text, where available, is indexed by Google.  Though we have made some progress, I’m still not sure the issue has been fully resolved…intraLibrary generates a Public URL for each record – if this is not stored in the metadata (as was the case for us) then it is re-generated each time the record  is accessed – interpreted as a dynamic URL by Googlebot and not indexed.  I was able to work with Intrallect to ensure that a Public URL is generated when a record is created and stored in the metadata; Mike embeds this now-consistent URL in the results from Open Search which (hopefully) will now be indexed by Google.

There are currently a total of 250 PDFs in intraLibrary (188 research and 62 OER) and certainly *some* of these are being indexed; searching Google for filetype:pdf site:http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/ returns 53 records (up from 52 earlier in the week so will keep an eye on this) whereas Filetype:pdf site:http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/ does not return any PDFs because the they are not at that address so I don’t think we’ll be able to generate the nice nested – landing page/full text – search results that you see from EPrints repositories, at least while intraLibrary and Open Search are on seperate servers.

It is interesting to consider the implications of some of this on usage reporting, especially in the context of OER which are disseminated more widely than research (via Jorum, Xpert and potentially also the institutional VLE.)

According to Google Analytics, the most viewed OER on Open Search in September was Employability & Career Development: Assessing your Skills, Talents and Attributes which was viewed a total of 26 times – 13 absolute unique visitors – it does not feature in the report from intraLibrary, however, as it’s an external URL and does not utilise the intraLibrary Public URL (need to rectify this – there is a Public URL available that would redirect enabling us to record follow through).

It gets really interesting when you look at the most accessed item according to the intraLibrary report – Numeracy Basics – interactive quiz came in third from GA with the not terribly impressive stat of 19 hits (6 absolute unique) but the Public URL was apparently access a whopping 588 times!  I’m not sure yet where all these hits have come from (think I may be able to get IP info from intraLibrary) but may be someone has linked to it from the VLE – it is also in Xpert and I posted a link to it at http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/xpert-vs-jorum/ but that was 1st October – this particular resource isn’t yet in Jorum (http://open.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/5817 – viewed 290 times on JO – is a hosted version so definitely not linking to the intraLibrary Public URL.)

Also pertinent here, I think, is a twitter discussion I had recently with @glittrgirl (Suzanne Hardy of PORSCHE) and others about managing duplicate OER records and it occurs to me that we are not, in fact, duplicating records at all – Jorum harvests full IMSCP so the record will point at our intraLibrary install (the example above notwithstanding that *is* actually duplicated in JO!) and Xpert harvests our OAI-PMH which, again, will point to the same link…(might be more of a duplication issue with ACErep though…need to think that through.)

Xpert vs Jorum?

Xpert – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/ - at Nottingham University is a “distributed repository of e-learning resources” and contains metadata and resources for almost 70,000 learning objects from over 3000 providers. Recently the project has released some interesting tools in the form of Xpert labs including APIs to return CC licensed OER in a variety of data formats and a basic SDK (Software Development Kit).  There is also a code snippet to add Xpert search to your site like this – http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/xpert.html.

As a manager of an OER repository I am chiefly interested in assembling and preserving a collection of high quality assessment, learning and teaching material from my institution that can be discovered and reused effectively by teachers/lecturers in UK HE (and globally) and have been able to work with @Xpert_project to ensure that an OAI-PMH feed from our repository is harvested by the service – this took a little bit of code-tinkering (thanks to @patlockley) as our metadata incorporates multiple <dc:identifier> fields the first of which holds the OAI ID with the second holding the location URL – the end result from Xpert is a nice record of our ukoer including a properly formatted description, the URL for the CC license and, as I’ve just noticed,  related resources – for instance, the search below returns 4 component parts of a SCORM package that I added yesterday (that, in its complete state, would not run in our VLE – a SCORM 1.2 LMS – as the large number of JavaScript variables exceeds what is possible under version 1.2  resulting in an error after slide 6 – it plays fine in intraLibrary though). I also used this opportunity to experiment with intraLibrary’s “linked resources” functionality which Xpert can display from the XML return:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/scoreresults.php?keywords=leedsmet&search_all.x=69&search_all.y=18&search_all=all&ukoer=on

What is missing, however, is any indication that this resource emanates from Leeds Met – think I’ll need to add a <dc:publisher> field to fix this – currently we only provide <dc:creator> which Xpert maps to author; this also means that our institution does not appear in Advanced Search under Institution…

It’s probably too much to ask Pat to add the link URLs using <lom:identifier></lom:identifier> as I hope to do from Open Search (and Xpert labs does include an API specifically to return related objects using the base url http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ adding a list of comma separated keywords, then a number of results you’d like to return to the end of this URL e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ukoer,5.)

As these are SCORM packages, though, I would like to add a link to download the package itself which could then be imported into a VLE…once again this is functionality that we are yet to incorporate into Open Search and they currently just play directly in the browser or they can be linked directly from Blackboard using our PowerLink but the necessary URL to download the package is in the SRU and OAI-PMH returns:

<package:packageType>scorm</package:packageType>
<package:packageTypeVersion>1.2</package:packageTypeVersion>
<package:packageDownloadLocator>http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary?command=open-package-download&learning_object_key=i06n105033t.zip</package:packageDownloadLocator>

These resources then, made live yesterday afternoon, are already available from Xpert; they will also,  eventually, find their way into Jorum Open but this requires further intervention from me – we’re not using the Jorum RSS harvest for technical reasons but I don’t *think* that facility could perform a daily update harvest in the same way as OAI-PMH. I’m still working on the workflow for regularly packaging my IMSCPs and publishing them as a .zip for the kindly folk at Jorum to harvest from Open Search (there has, in any case, not been much new added since the end of the Unicycle project – http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2845&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources).  When our processes are fully embedded in institutional practice I anticipate putting up an archive say every month; of course this will have the “advantage” of preserving the full IMSCP in JorumOpen rather than just the metadata and the link which is all that is harvested by Xpert but I don’t think this is a particular concern for *me* as I am responsible for my own preservation via our own formal repository platform (this building on the discussion from my last post.)

Xpert grew out of JISC Rapid Innovation funding last year which perhaps goes some way to explaining the (arguably) more agile development compared to Jorum (who I really don’t wish to be disparaging towards – I think the @jorumteam have done a fantastic job in the past 12 months and the national service is really taking shape; they obviously have a more formal remit than Xpert and have responded very positively to a wide array of stakeholders as evidenced in their recently published Road-map – they have also been very helpful to me and Unicycle on a personal/project level and this post is more about bigging-up the small guy than doing down the big-guy!)

JorumOpen currently holds an impressive 10 and a half thousand  OERs catalogued as HE – still a fraction of the size of Xpert (is sheer size actually likely to become an issue when searching for suitable OERs in either service?)  In addition, a large proportion of these records (how many?) are likely to be metadata/link only as they have been harvested by RSS which presents potential issues for preservation (see last post)…in any case, all credit to Xpert who have developed a responsive service that goes a long way to it’s stated aim of “delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources” and providing real value to the (global) HE community to boot!

OER repositories and preservation – the elephant (not in) the room?

Way back at the beginning of the ukoer programme there were discussions around including a link to a resource in JorumOpen rather than the file itself; Gareth Waller emphasised on my post at the time that “having a chain of URLs does not present any technical problems in the sense that the end resource can still be found, the problems only appear when the link chain breaks (either via a bad URL or a server not responding).” He also emphasised that “if the physical resource is submitted into Jorum, we may be able to offer enhanced searching to the end user for that particular item e.g. full text search on a pdf. If a link is submitted, we can only allow the user to search on the metadata associated with the resource.”

The issue has cropped up again recently on the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list where @lescarr makes the point that, of the recently announced six winners in the Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition, which are all discoverable from Jorum, none are actually deposited in the national oer repository – just metadata records with a web link to the location elsewhere on the web.  Les goes on to emphasise that, while this is perfectly useful, “one of the raisons d’etre of repositories is to provide persistent, safe access to valuable material”.

There was a lot of discussion throughout the ukoer programme around the pros and cons of duplicating resources in Jorum as opposed to simply linking to resources held in other repositories/on institutional or third-party websites and also on the development of tools to harvest metadata via RSS and OAI with different projects having different preferences depending on the tools they were using and the types of resources they were releasing (see http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/12/09/oer-rss-and-jorumopen/).  Responding to a clear demand from the ukoer community who understandably did not wish to dual deposit both locally and into the national repository, Jorum therefore developed a tool to harvest metadata via RSS (which I presume is why many records are metadata only).

Our Unicycle project, in fact, as one of the ukoer projects using a formal repository platform that makes it straightforward to export resources as IMS content packages,  is one of the few projects, I think, to actually bulk upload our OERs to Jorum – however, many of the resources in our repository are themselves metadata records only that point to an external resource on leedmet.ac.uk, YouTube, joebloggs.com or wherever which clearly carries implications for preservation…Our OERs are also harvested by the xpert repository at Nottingham using OAI-PMH. Xpert is “a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources…to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use.”  As such, there are no resources in Xpert per se, just links to resources harvested from various feeds – which means, of course, that it cannot have preservation as one of its raisons d’etre (I recently learned during a twitter conversation with the repository itself that xpert use a 404 checker that checks all their links once a week and deletes any that are broken.)

The ukoer programme was necessarily none-proscriptive around technology (apart from mandating “deposit” in Jorum Open) and, as made clear in @kavubob‘s series of posts The use of…in the ukoer programme a wide range of tools and platforms were used including but by no means limited to formal repositories  - Web 2.0 technologies in particular lent themselves to the programme, even for projects like our own that did use a formal repository we were often simply curating resources on external web-sites (Web 2.0 is third party pretty much by definition and a well established source of anxiety for preservationists).  What, then, are the implications for preservation of OERs and is it an elephant that we will struggle to keep in the room?  To what extent does it matter if an individual resource, perhaps poorly curated, disappears from a specific web-location; if it has been “released into the wild” under Creative Commons (and it’s any good) then there is a good chance it has already been reused or duplicated elsewhere – perhaps disaggregated or modified (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)?

Suggested enhancements to JorumOPEN user interface

A very thorough post on the JORUM community bay from the C-change in GEES project - http://c-changeproject.org.uk/ – on suggested enhancements to the JorumOPEN user interface:

http://community.jorum.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98

Unicycle project completed (and some unfinished business)

Our ukoer project Unicycle completed at the end of April 2010 – Simon has now submitted the report to JISC which I shall link to from here when it is published.

The main aim of the project has been to build a ‘unicycle’: a prototype mechanism for the export and import of open educational resources at Leeds Metropolitan University and increase the release of open educational resources (OER) from Leeds Met into the further and higher education communities.

The image below links to a presentation that Simon delivered at OER10 at Clare College Cambridge (22nd – 24th March 2010) (PDF format)

Unicycle, like the JISC ukoer programme as a whole, was very much a pilot project and as Repository Development Officer I was mainly involved with, well, repository development rather than wider institutional policy and process development; technical infrastructure, however, is obviously an integral aspect of ukoer both at an institutional level and, by definition, across the wider information environment so programme and project have certainly informed ongoing repository development here at Leeds Met.

(By no means all ukoer projects use repositories and the variegated technologies across the programme are explored in a series of recent posts by John Robertson of CETIS – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/category/ukoer/.)

…and the unfinished business

It has been particularly interesting working with Jorum – as a national repository service it is a condition of funding that all projects funded under ukoer must also make their resources available via JorumOpen which is an ongoing challenge; it became apparent very early in the programme that folk did not particularly relish the prospect of duplicating their workload by uploading and cataloguing resources in two locations and Jorum has investigated several methods for harvesting institutionally held collections and/or bulk upload of resources.

There are two methods that have so far been implemented:

RSS

RSS was explored quite early in the programme as a potential technology for metadata harvesting and has the benefit that it is relatively simple to implement.   Jorum have incorporated an RSS reader into the modified DSpace repository that is used for JorumOpen and projects are able to submit an RSS feed for harvest as long as that feed meets certain criteria (e.g. Only a RSS version 2 feed is currently supported/the feed should include a UK Eng&Wales v2 CC).

There are also several caveats to harvesting in this way:

• The feed is not continually polled for new content. Normal feed readers, continually poll the feed and any new items are displayed. The current functionality simply reads the feed when it is deposited – if the same feed is submitted again, it will store duplicates.
• The file data of a resource in the feed is not stored in JorumOpen. A link is simply created pointing to the resource as indicated by the RSS feed (the “link” element).
• Items within a feed are not auto classified within Jorum. In other words, every item in a feed is stored within a single collection as chosen by the admin user i.e. a top level JACS or LearnDirect classification. Having individual feed for each classification such as the OpenLearn model would ensure that items are classified correctly as these feeds can be deposited separately.

The default RSS generated by intraLibrary contains just title and description fields and is therefore not suitable for deposit using this method. It may be possible to programmatically generate an appropriate feed containing the required data but bulk upload of IMS content packages represents a much easier method for us that also has the advantage of depositing the resource itself in to JorumOpen rather than just the metadata.

Note:  Some of the issues around using RSS to harvest metadata in this way are explored in more detail in a paper by Jorum Technical manager Gareth Waller

Bulk upload of IMS content packages

It is relatively straightforward in intraLibrary to bulk-export IMS content packages to generate a .zip file up to a maximum of 100MB at a time.  Each .zip in turn contains multiple .zip files for each resource which contains the file (unless it’s a URL) and the IMS manifest with all the metadata, in the format specified by Jorum.

We are not quite home and dry just yet and have run into a few problems associated with the different metadata standards utilised by our own intraLibrary (UK LOM) and Jorum’s DSpace (DC); packages consisting of web resources from intraLibrary are not parsed because the packager implementation expects a web link to be in a certain metadata element in the manifest but intraLibrary places the link in a different element so any web resource exported from intraLibrary will not be ingested successfully (the metadata record will appear in DSpace but the web link is missing.) In addition to this, multiple authors and author VCARD metadata from our packages was not in the format expected by the Jorum packager which can result in resources marked as “Unknown Author”.

All is not lost, however,  and Jorum plan to introduce a code change to programmatically manipulate the packaged metadata before ingest so that the web-link is in the correct field and the author vCARD is in the suitable format for DSpace; Jorum also have an intraLibrary repository from which they may wish to bulk export records in the future.

Other issues and niggles

There are several other issues and niggles that I have become aware of through Unicycle – some relatively easy to fix, others less so.  I’ll just list a few of them here and aim to explore further in future posts:

1. Several formats raise issues for reuse:
   • Flash: we have several Flash resources comprising multiple .swf that can-not easily be linked in intraLibrary so are just uploaded as a zip
   • Respondus: A proprietary WebCT file format that must be exported to WebCT/Blackboard from Respondus software
   • webct.assessment: Another proprietary WebCT file format (as .zip) that simply does not work in WebCT/Blackboard when it is downloaded from intraLibrary (though the original.zip is fine – may be due to a modified imsmanifest.xml)
2. Managing packages:  Currently the majority of our OER are single files; in order to preview SCORM packages etc we may require some major changes to the SRU functionality of Open Search (may want multiple download links for example.)
3. Comments and tags:  IntraLibrary does support user generated tags and comments as well as an Amazon style star rating system; however, it is only possible to access these facilities when logged into the system and not via SRU which means that comments, tags or star-rating cannot be added or retrieved from the Open Search interface.
4. Workflows:  Not terribly satisfactory, especially if we want folk uploading their own OERs rather than the fully mediated process we have followed for Unicycle.  Ideally we would like a very straightforward SWORD tool.

A quick look at JorumOpen

As anyone with even a passing intererest in UKOER will know, JorumOpen went live earlier this week and I, for one, was dying to see just what the good folk at Mimas and Edina have come up with with their customised DSpace installation (and possibly “borrow” one or two ideas for Leeds Met Open Search!).

JorumOpen Home is at http://open.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/ and allows the user to browse OER by FE or HE subject; alternatively there are links to browse by Communities & collections/Issue date/Authors/Titles and Keyword.  There is also a simple search box and a link to an Advanced search form:

The results page comprises different functionality depending on the search – for example, browsing by subject heading displays “Recent Deposits” and allows the user a simple/advanced search, or browse by Titles/Authors/Dates within that subject heading (I like this hierarchical search functionality); also includes an RSS button to subscribe to updates within the collection.

Results themselves comprise a hyperlinked title, author/author affiliation and date of deposit as well as a thumbnail graphic where available:

The record page is worth looking at in detail (this item – http://open.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/567):

Show full item record (link) - Full Dublin Core metadata record

Share (AddThis button) – third part social network service allowing record to be emailed to a friend or posted to various social networking sites.

The simple record comprises:

Title/Author/Description/Keywords/Persistent Link/Date

Then there are three buttons:

“Export resource” that requires a valid email address “As some resources are quite large in size it can take some time to prepare them for download. Due to this we required you to supply a valid email address so that you can be notified when your download is ready.”  Then follows an email from support@jorum.ac.uk that informs that “The item export you requested from the repository is now ready for download.” and includes a link to download the compressed file which comprises all files associated with the resource.*

“Preview content package” which allows the user to quickly view the different files and components of the resource in their browser without downloading (though it doesn’t work for .zip files)

“Download original content package” does exactly what it says on the tin and downloads a compressed file of all files associated with the resource.*

* I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between “export” and “download” – though the exported zip is bigger and contains more files (dublin_core.xml as well as imsmanifest.xml for example) – may be someone can enlighted me?

CC Licence Note – briefly explains implications of CC and links to relevant anchor later in the record.

Files in this item - allows the user to expand a list of files and download them individually (this particular item comprises 16 .zip and 2 .docx)

Creative Commons Licence – Link to relevant CC licence (opens in a nifty little window.)

Terms of service – Link to Jorum terms of service (also opens in a nifty little window)

This item appears in the following collections – linked to appropriate search terms in browse tree

Show full item record (repeated link from top of page) - Full Dublin Core metadata record

This item has been viewed x times – presumably counts visits to the record page

All in all, first impressions are pretty favourable and there are certainly some ideas that I would like to explore for Leeds Met Open Search – I’ve already included the AddThis button on the development server and plan to go live with it as soon as it has been approved by the powers that be (there are one or two issues with user tracking by this third party service – Mike has disabled Flash tracking that the widget injects into the page by default but it will still track each click-through.)

I’m also keen to explore how we may manage packaged content in a similar way to JorumOpen (preview content and download options for individual files) – currently we have very little packaged content in the repository but the default download link is currently just for an individual file – I do know that intraLibrary is able to manage content packages, however, and that a package download link is exposed by SRU so I think we should be able to achieve this.

Browse by date (of deposit) should also be achievable I think but browse by author is a little more problematic by SRU (both for research and OER) as there is no authority file for authors.

I’m not sure about recording page visits – will need to speak to Mike.

Now I just need to figure out the most efficient way of getting our UniCycle resources into JorumOpen – I will look at the deposit process in a later post (depositors can log in from JorumOpen Home via UK Federation) and I think Jorum are still exploring harvesting RSS feeds from ukoer projects though, as discussed in a recent post, our feed is not currrently suitable for this.

A better beta – Open Search Version 2.0

After mounting pressure from the University, we have now added live links to http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php from Library Online and the research web-pages but it is important that folk are aware that it is still very much a beta implementation – I have tried to summarise ongoing development requirements below (both for research material and Open Educational Resources) and I am very keen to receive user feedback to inform ongoing development; I also plan on doing some formal user evaluation in the New Year.

The two main issues we have faced throughout the development process is that intraLibrary is designed as a Learning Object repository requiring user authentication. This means we have needed to develop an appropriate metadata template for research material (mapping UK LOM onto Dublin Core) and develop an external, openly accessible search interface to query that metadata (via SRU) and display results appropriately.  Though there has been consultation throughout development I am still conscious that, *potentially*, there are issues outstanding that need to be more widely considered, especially as we move to establish a workflow involving more staff to populate the repository; obviously any changes to the metadata template will carry a more significant overhead the greater the number of records there are.

For research material, the workflow is currently configured in two stages and the approach we are currently considering would require me/designated administrator to complete the metadata in Table 1 and for trained cataloguers to complete the cataloguing information in Table 2:

---

Table 1 (primary metadata entry)

Metadata element	Comments
Faculty	6 Leeds Met faculties (& Thesis/dissertation)
Title	Article title
LOM identifier	Unique identifier applied automatically by intraLibrary
Digital Object Identifier	(if available) Utilising additional (editable) instance of LOM identifier field
Bibliographic metadata: Source title Journal volume Journal issue Source publication date Start page End page	It may not be necessary to complete all of these field depending on the “Type of resource”; they will all be required for a peer reviewed journal article but a book, for example, might only require “Source publication date” to be completed while a book chapter might require “Source title”; “Source publication date”; “Start page”; “End page” N.B.  A related issue that needs to be considered at this stage is that for records entered so far I have been inputting year only to the “Source publication date” field – however, we will need to differentiate records by census period; this perhaps could be achieved with a more specific date in the “Source pub date” field or we could explore using an additional field to record this information.
ISSN/ISBN*	Description field 1/4 – can’t really be differentiated from other description fields for search by SRU
Abstract*	Description field 2/4 – can’t really be differentiated from other description fields for search by SRU
Published/Not published*	Description field 3/4 – can’t really be differentiated from other description fields for search by SRU
Refereed/not refereed*	Description field 4/4 – can’t really be differentiated from other description fields for search by SRU
Author	System bug meant this could not be independently queried by SRU until recently – issue should now be resolved but not yet integrated with interface
Publisher	System bug meant this could not be independently queried by SRU until recently – issue should now be resolved but not yet integrated with interface
Contribution date	Automatically completed
Technical format	Always PDF for research
Type of resource	Scholarly text/ Book/ Book chapter/ Edited book/ Book review/ Miscellaneous conference item/ Conference contribution/ Journal item/ Electronic journal/ Electronic newspaper article/ Report/ Confidential report/ Submitted journal article/ Thesis or dissertation/ Working or discussion paper/ Lecture transcript NB. It is relatively straightforward to add terms/modify existing terms though there may be work involved modifying records. For example, it has been suggested that the vocabulary term “Journal item” should be changed to “Journal article” and while this is relatively straightforward, there is no way of making a global change without reviewing each record individually – currently 218 items.
Statement of Copyright and Restriction	Where a record is citation only (i.e. no full text available) I am using this field to record information from SHERPA/RoMEO to indicate whether I should pursue the full text (for my reference only – i.e. not displayed in Open Search interface).  When there is a full text available this field will generally record that it has been uploaded in line with the publishers’ terms and conditions and IS displayed in Open Search e.g. http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=696&SearchGroup=research)

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*The only way I have been able to accommodate all of the information required for research (using EPrints software as a template) with the intraLibrary metadata schema (UK LOM) is by using multiple description fields as extensions – though these can be differentiated for display purposes, utilising a template to ensure consistent entry – e.g. http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=696&SearchGroup=research, they cannot easily be differentiated for search purposes.

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Table 2 (cataloguing information to be completed by trained cataloguers)

Metadata element	Comments
Keyword	Controlled vocabulary utilising Library of Congress Authorities
Classification	Against (top two levels) of LCC

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How metadata is related to the functionality of the Open Search interface

The current functionality of http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php is as follows:

Function/field	Comments
Standard search	Comprises a simple search box that will search the entire metadata record – can manage simple Boolean operators (AND/OR) and perform a search to “Match exact text” (Boolean functionality needs reviewing)

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Function/field	Comments
Advanced search (under development)	Comprises several metadata fields that can be cross referenced using simple Boolean logic (AND/OR – OR by default)
- Standard search	Should be self explanatory though early feedback from users suggests that it may not be!
- Title	Searches the “Title” metadata field only.
- ISBN/ISSN	In theory searches ISBN/ISSN – in practice searches all four description fields (see metadata Table 1 above)
- Author	In theory searches only the “Author” metadata (not yet implemented due to system bug – currently performing a standard search)
- Subject	Searches the “Subject” metadata field only.  NB.  Only one field – need to search multiple “Subject” fields.
- Type	Drop down list of vocab terms “Type of resource” (see metadata Table 1 above)
- Description/Abstract	In practice searches all four description fields (see metadata Table 1 above)
- DOI	Searches the “DOI” metadata field only
- Publisher	In theory searches only the “Publisher” metadata (not yet implemented due to system bug – currently performing a standard search)
- Format	Drop down list of all MIME types – in practice this will always be PDF for research – may be more appropriate for OER (see below)

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Function	Comments
Browse	Currently two options to browse repository contents (research only)
Browse by Library of Congress category Browse by Leeds Met Faculty	Currently no way of knowing how many resources are available at a given level – requires further technical development to display “number of resources”

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Open Educational Resources

I have so far been considering just research material but this, of course, is just one of the two main “types” of content that we need to manage with the Leeds Met repository.

Though infrastructure does not come within the remit of the UniCycle project, which is more focussed on the process around reuse of OER, an adequate search interface is something of a prerequisite; we have begun to integrate search functionality specific to OER into http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php and are now able to differentiate between research and Open Educational Resources, for example, (using collection tokens), however, the metadata template for OER is quite different from research so ideally we will need a separate search form to reflect this.  Metadata for OER is currently based on the “old” Jorum template (i.e. not JorumOpen) and comprises the fields in Table 1a below:

Table 1a

Metadata element	Comments
Title	OER title
Description	Single instance only
Keyword	Uncontrolled/author produced keywords in line with ukoer guidelines (must include ukoer as keyword)
Contributor (Author)	System bug meant this could not be independently queried by SRU until recently – issue should now be resolved but not yet integrated with interface.
Contribution date	Automatically completed
Technical format	MIME media type – Comprising 70 technical formats – almost certainly don’t need them all for OER – are currently all exposed as list on advanced search form
Type of resource*	Terms from LOMv1.0: Diagram/ Exam/ Exercise/ Experiment/ Figure/ Graph/ Index/ Narrative Text/ Problem Statement/ Questionnaire/ Self Assessment/ Simulation/ Slide/ Table; Terms we have added to the vocabulary: Podcast/ Not Applicable/ Presentation/ Photograph/ Quiz/ Spreadsheet/ Tutorial/ Video/ Lecture/ Game/ Animation/ Assessment/ Audio/ Case Study/ Database/ Workbook N.B. As with research vocabulary, it is relatively straightforward to add new terms/modify existing terms though there may be work involved modifying records
Statement of Copyright and Restriction	As we are using Creative Commons licensing for OER we can probably dispense with this field – I will need to contact Intrallect to remove it from the template
Categorisation	OER are currently categorised against JACS (Joint Academic Coding System)

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*The advanced search form currently only lists the research vocabulary in “Type” – this is an example of why we may need a separate form for advanced search of OER that displays the relevant vocabulary.

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Display of OER

We also need to think about how OER records are displayed – currently this is a bit rough and ready, adapted from research results.  For example full text/external resource may not be as relevant for OER and  we may wish to display “Type of resource” here instead:

http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/search.php?q=ukoer&SearchSubmit.x=70&SearchSubmit.y=17&SearchSubmit=Search&SearchGroup[]=Open+Educational+Resources

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Browse for OER?

In order to facilitate browse by subject heading (JACS) in the Open Search interface it will be necessary to integrate this functionality into http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php in a similar way as has been implemented for research (same caveat applies in that further technical development is required to show numbers of resources in the browse tree.)

Testing the VLE PowerLink

To be honest, PowerLink is probably overstating it a bit but it is a link that allows us to search intraLibrary from the VLE and it does work. Sort of. But it’s not very powerful.

The main issue is the very basic nature of the search facility – just a simple search box with no way to perform a more advanced search:

So it’s not a great deal of use unless you know what you’re looking for.

The search functionality does support Boolean operators; the term ukoer, for example, will return the 13 items that I currently have identified with that tag in the keyword field:

Whereas ukoer AND decision will return the single record “Decision Making” (ukoer OR decision of course, will still return all 13 records) – there is no automatic Boolean however and ukoer decision will return no results at all rather than, say, doing an OR search by default.

Search is also a little crude in that it will find adjacent words in the metadata but only if they are entered in quotation marks. So decision making without quotes will not return any results though “decision making” does return the expected result:

An additional issue is that, as we are using intralibrary to manage research material as well as learning and teaching material, at the very least we will want to differentiate between these two categories. It is possible to configure the PowerLink to filter by collection and we are currently filtering on Open Educational Resources (and Learning Objects though that collection is not currently searchable externally until we have further developed Leeds Met Open search and configured that interface to differentiate between research & learning and teaching material). It will be useful, however, to also search for full text research papers that may not be available elsewhere but without an advanced search the only way to do this would be to switch off all filtering and allow the PowerLink to return everything….unless we can install two separate instances of the PowerLink in Blackboard and configure them to search different collections. This would be a quick and dirty solution and a bit clunky but, failing technical development of the PowerLink itself, might be the only option – of course, the two instances would need to be clearly named to identify the respective content they would return. We don’t even know if it’s possible yet though and my colleagues in the VLE team are looking in to it as we speak.

So not perhaps a full solution, not as sophisticated as MrCute for Moodle, for example, which, as well as more advanced search functionality also supports searching multiple repositories and depositing from the VLE back into a repository (it was supposed to include Jorum though was disabled last I heard and not sure what the status quo is with ongoing development to JorumOpen).  Limitations notwithstanding, I’ll certainly be testing with teaching staff as is, as something is better than nothing and experience has shown that I’d be ill advised to wait for the perfect solution!

If any of the Keele crowd should pass by these parts I’d be very interested to know if they have done any work refining/extending the functionality of the PowerLink or plan to do so – like us Keele are running intraLibrary 3.0 and Blackboard Vista. I’d also be keen to learn of anybody adapting MrCute for Blackboard.

Link or file in JorumOpen?

At the OER startup meeting back in June there was some discussion around including a link to a resource in JorumOpen rather than the file itself – this obviously makes sense, for example, if the resource is already out there on the web and adding the relevant URL to Jorum will certainly aid appropriate discovery in the context of #ukoer.  I’m not certain, however, if this can apply directly to the Unicycle project which requires us to make resources available via JorumOpen as well as the Leeds Met repository.  I can’t immediately see why not but I’ll have to discuss it further with Simon.

As I mentioned last week I’ve begun uploading learning objects to intraLibrary that have been specifically designated as an OER for the Unicycle project and this morning I’ve also used the Jorum OER Deposit tool – http://deposit.jorum.ac.uk/ – to submit the same resource to JorumOpen (currently in beta and for testing only).  Rather than uploading the file again, it seemed to make sense to submit the public URL generated by intraLibrary instead – this will also, to some extent, account for version control issues as there will only be a single locus at which the original resides rather than two (though of course folk could still modify and resubmit to either JorumOpen or our local repository – or indeed somewhere else).

The only other thing that immediately occurs is that we will also be linking out to URLs from intraLibrary which means there would effectively be a chain of URLs from JorumOpen to the Leeds Met repository, to the resource on the web – I’m not sure whether this would create a problem though.