MSc Dissertation and copyright: Reality bites

Beth is making real progress with her dissertation and her outputs are looking really good.  There is the small matter of copyright however – Beth is quite happy for me to use her material/IPR but a lot of her data is from a questionnaire and in depth interviews with research staff who have given only verbal consent for their responses to be shared.  Rachel, the copyright clearance officer, suggested that we really need explicit written consent before I start posting interview transcripts (anonymous of course) to the blog.  Beth will go back to her subjects to get an autograph – in the meantime here is a spreadsheet of Beth’s that I can share – data on UK IRs

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Show and TEL

Yesterday I spoke to colleagues at the monthly TEL network meeting which, technical problems notwithstanding, was an opportunity to engage, in particular, with learning technologists who should prove invaluable as intermediaries back to their respective faculties.

I wasn’t actually able to show them intraLibrary itself as the network seemed to have developed bahavioural problems but I did show the search interface, described how we had come to this point and what further development work there is still to do on the interface and the associated infrastructure that will surround intraLibrary – a lot of interest in the PowerLink to X-stream.

It was also a chance to plug The Repository Day which is taking place at Old Broadcasting House on November 10th when colleagues are invited to participate in one of 4 workshops that I will be running throughout the day. There will be a software demonstration (I hope!) and folk will have the opportunity to use the system and to inform ongoing development and to try out some new tools produced by our collaborating projects Streamline and PERSoNA. I also hope that people will bring their own material for upload to the repository which can be copies of published research papers or Learning Objects that they have created and would like to share with colleagues.

At the meeting we were also shown the new ALT wiki – I’ve got myself an account and started building a repository page – there’s not much there as yet!

Organisational structure, metadata and resource discovery

In terms of the organisational structure and metadata for our repository we must consider that:

• Resources must be discoverable both internally (i.e. within intraLibrary itself) and, where appropriate, by external systems e.g. search engines

• Visitors to the repository must be able to browse repository content in an intuitive manner.

These requirements are related and can be fully realised by integrating a number of features of the software:

1. Groups/Processes
2. Collections
3. Application profiles (Metadata schema)
4. Taxonomy (or taxonomies)

Groups/Processes

intraLibrary uses IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata); the administrator can define multiple application profiles (metadata schema) and templates which can incorporate subsets of LOM that may be differentially applied to groups and collections based on content type.

We currently have two groups/processes defined (we may well need more):

• ‘Default – Upload and Catalogue’ is for research materials and uses an appropriate application profile  that is based on Dublin Core – though strictly speaking it is a subset of LOM mapped as closely as possible to unqualified DC (plus some bibliographical citation info that Intrallect have included in v3.0) (see below for further info).

• ‘Learning Object Contributors – Upload’ uses a different application profile appropriate to the respective types of resource.

Collections

Collections in intraLibrary serve several purposes:

• It is the means by which the administrator defines whether or not resources are discoverable by external systems or whether they can only be discovered by an authenticated user of the Leeds Met Repository.  The first scenario will be necessary for Open Access research material; the second scenario is likely to be necessary for some Learning Objects (though we may also want some LOs to be searchable and discoverable externally.)

• It was agreed at the last consultancy group meeting that the main organisational structure should not be based on Leeds Met faculties; however, it is still useful to be able to group (and browse) content in this way which can be achieved by the use of collections which can easily be renamed in the event of faculty name change. Moreover, resources can be stored in multiple collections and easily be moved between collections.

A user decides which group/process and which collection (or collections) they want to upload to as part of the workflow:

Collections are currently configured so that resources in the “Learning Object” collection will not be searchable by external systems whereas resources in the faculty collections will (to facilitate Open Acccess)

Metadata for Research material

Based on current practice, the most appropriate metadata schema for Open Access research material is Dublin Core which can be mapped with IEEE LOM.

Dublin Core	IEEE LOM equivalent
Title	Title
Description	Description
Subject	Keyword/Classification
Creator	Contributor
Contributor	Contributor
Publisher	Contributor
Format	Technical Format
Identifier	LOM Identifier/Location of Resource
Type	Type of Resource
Rights	Statement of Copyright and Restrictions
Coverage	Geographic / Time Period Coverage
Relation	Related Resource Description
Date	Date of Contribution
Language	Language of Resource

IEEE LOM permits several fields to be duplicated; this is necessary, for example, to accommodate the Dublin Core fields ‘contributor’; ’publisher’; ’format’ in multiple instances of the LOM field ‘contributor’.

intraLibrary V3.0 also incorporates Bibliographic citation metadata:

Metadata Field

bibliographicCitation

genre

title

volume

issue

date

spage

epage

NB. No field for ISSN – can be accommodated in a duplicate ‘description’ field.

Metadata and the search interface

The search interface is currently configured to return results according to a default template and returns only a subset of available metadata: Title; Description; Creator; Contributor; Publisher; Type; Subject; Copyright:

The metadata that is returned can be extended and we will wish to modify the way in which the information is presented and formatted, as standard Harvard style references for example. Mike T is currently working on this and there are one or two issues with respect to standardising the meta-data template and identifying and formatting the correct fields from the returned XML – as I understand it the SRU is currently configured to pick up dc and Mike is investigating whether it could pick up the lom instead which is more detailed – more on this soon!

NB.  Bib cite metadata is not yet searchable by SRU – Intrallect aim to incorporate this, though not before Summer 2009.

Organisational structure

The organisational structure, of course, is in many ways auxiliary to more powerful methods of resource discovery which utilise the full metadata record. Nevertheless it is still important to establish an intuitive system that enables users to browse and that can be used to easily present repository content for demonstration and promotional purposes.

• Review of other repositories of research content suggests that Library of Congress Classification (LCC) might be appropriate for our needs. The full system is complex with many more levels of specificity than we require and it is proposed that we use the top two levels of the classification only; we will also have the flexibility to extend the classification if necessary.

• The Joint Academic Coding System (JACS) subject hierarchy is generally used by UK institutions to identify the subject matter of programmes and modules which potentially makes it more suitable for Learning Objects – it is the system used by the national Learning Object repository JORUM for example.

• Resources in intraLibrary may be categorised against multiple classifications and we may wish to add other classification systems in the future e.g. Medical Subject Headings (MESH)

Incorporating browse functionality into the search interface

Users will not generally browse the research collection from within intraLibrary itself but from the external search interface. We will want to incorporate browse functionality into the interface to browse by subject or by faculty (the use of faculty ‘collections’ as discussed above easily facilitates this).

This functionality is partially integrated but will require further technical development: