JISC

Overview

The project will enhance two academic and administrative systems, WebLearn (VLE), (based on the Sakai open source platform,) and the University’s library search interface SOLO, (based on Ex-libris Primo,) in order to provide much improved experience for both students and lecturers in the area of reading lists.

The project will enable the SOLO search interface to be invoked from within WebLearn’s reading list tool and used to find items to be sent back to the VLE for inclusion in the reading list. The data will be transferred using the standard OpenURL encoding.

In addition, we augment the reading list with live availability information. 

Aims and objectives 

This project will:

• offer a better experience when creating reading lists in the VLE
• offer more accurate reading lists by the use of Open URL to collect up-to-date metadata directly from the library catalogues
• search all library catalogues from within VLE reading list tool (instead of just searching the e-Journals catalogue)
• offer a simple clean search interface to SOLO (cf Google Scholar)
• display 'full text' and other availability links within web-hosted reading lists
• display links to allow easy purchasing of reading list items (from say, Amazon)
• enhance existing end-user documentation so academics can make full use of the new facilities
• offer a practical response to specific parts of a OUSU (Student Union) motion asking for improvements to SOLO and reading lists
• increase the uptake of the VLE reading list tool by academics
• increase the uptake of the VLE reading list tool by students who will be able to build up reading lists within their own personal VLE space
• provide a platform for future development, eg, allowing the libraries to extract summary data covering all reading lists stored in the VLE
• increase number of reading lists stored in a common format within the VLE
• make the process of finding books and articles a lot quicker for students

Project methodology

The project has been broken down into the following work packages (in no particular order). See later for personnel:

1. Addition of ‘push’ mechanisms to Primo interface (Consultant)
2. Addition of OpenURL parsing to Citation Helper (Sakai Developer)
3. Addition of COiNS to Citation Helper (Sakai Developer)
4. Addition of Availability querying to Citations Helper (Consultant / Sakai Developer)
5. Development of Middleware component (Consultant)
6. Continuous feedback from OUSU, the libraries the VLE user group and other stakeholders (incl. requirements gathering) (Learning Technologist)
7. Benefits Realisation (Dissemination and Community Engagement) (Manager)
8. Project Management (Manager)

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The main outputs which are of interest to the wider community are:

• a fully documented demonstration of the viability and advantages of using open standards (OpenURL, COinS, DLF ILS-DI and possibly others) to loosely couple library systems and other web-based environments (such as online learning environments).
• extensions to the Juice Javascript framework which could be adapted to work with any COinS enabled interface, and any systems supporting standard mechanisms for indicating availability.
• Code enhancements to Sakai Citation Helper (and related documentation) to allow it to parse and create items based on OpenURLs. This code will be supplied to the Sakaibrary community (via the Sakai ‘Jira’) as a patch against Sakai Trunk to allow it to be included in the next scheduled release.
• Code enhancements to Sakai Citation Helper (and related documentation) to add COinS for each item within a Reading List.
• Code and related documentation for Primo interface enhancements to support basic ‘push’ mechanism to Sakai Citation Helper
• Code and related documentation for Primo interface enhancements to support OpenURL ‘push’ mechanism to Sakai Citation Helper
• an open source re-deployable middleware service that accepts requests from Juice and uses appropriate standards to search for availability data returning the results as JSON

Technology / Standards used

• OpenURL framework (NISO Z39.88 [http://www.niso.org/standards/z39-88-2004/])
• ‘COinS’ (ContextObject in Span) [http://ocoins.info/]
• DLF ILS-DI [http://www.diglib.org/architectures/ilsdi/]
• DAIA (Document Availability Information API) [http://purl.org/NET/DAIA]

Plus

• JavaScript Juice framework [http://code.google.com/p/juice-project/] 
• Ex-libris Primo [http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoOverview];
• Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment [http://sakaiproject.org]