November Meeting with Intralibrary

November 29th 2007
The Keele Pathfinder team held a teleconference with Sarah Currier from Intralibrary on November 29th to review the company’s recent development work on the repository client software.

This work focused on the requirements to store, catalogue and extract metadata for the resources placed in the repository digitised under the Copyright Licensing Agency’s (CLA) Trial Blanked licence. The extraction of data is particularly important, as this relates to the potential use of the software to generate the reports required for the CLA. Sarah provided a remote demonstration of the metadata template developed as a result of recent discussions with the Pathfinder team, as well as a tour of the prototype CLA reporting functions. The Keele team were very pleased with the work that had been done, and Intralibrary will now take this forward into the v.3.0 Beta build of the repository software. The metadata template for CLA materials will include a field for course description, and will also include course “presentation” (i.e. a code that identifies exactly when a course is run).

Sarah usefully mentioned the XCRI (eXchanging Course Related Information) JISC project.
This project is working towards development of a standard specification (the “XCRI Course Advertising Profile”) using Extensible Markup Language (XML) to describe courses, and also to allow for this information to be aggregated and searchable. At the moment there’s no standard way to exchange information about university courses, but this project has a number of participants in HE working towards creation of such a standard. A detailed overview of the project is available from http://www.xcri.org/download/overview.pdf. The XCRI project is apparently interested in the Keele Pathfinder group’s activity, and it’s hoped that since Intralibrary is an XML based application, some dovetailing with this developing standard may be possible.

The Keele team anticipate the inclusion of these developments in the next build of the repository software, which is anticipated hopefully just before the end of 2007.

Keywords: CLA, Course, Keele, Metadata, Module, Pathfinder, Template, XML

Posted by Scott McGowan @ Keele Pathfinder Team