Thursday 4 September 2008

Intralibrary v3 – CLA Reporting Function

April 30, 2008

The CLA requires institutions to submit reports on all items digitised under the “blanket licence” (see previous blog entries).

Intralibrary has a new “reports” function within the administration area of the v3 software client. The partly menu-driven reporting function can be used to “generate metadata reports” which scans selected metadata within any repository collection, and output data.

The user selects a variety of fields within the relevant metadata application profile, and any data entered within them can be exported in Excel or CSV (comma separated values or “flat file”) format.

I checked through the v3 application profile created for the “CLA” workflow and identified those fields essential for a CLA report (the code numbers refer to the actual Learning Object Metadata (LOM) reference number for the fields within the Intralibrary product application profile);

LOM Reference

Label

2.4.1

Module Code

2.4.2

Module Title

2.4.3.6

Number of Students

1.3.1

Catalogue Entry (ISBN)

1.2

Title (Keele CLA “order number” and separate entry for “extract title”)

1.3.3.5

Source Publication Date

3.3.2

Metadata Contributor (“extract author”)

1.3.3.6

Extract start page

1.3.3.7

Extract end page

7.2.4.1.1

CLA Code A – “Scanning Source”

7.2.4.2

CLA Code B – “Reason for Scanning”

7.2.4.3

CLA Code C – “Artistic Works Statement”

These fields were selected to form the basis of a report “template”, which can be saved and run again in future. In creating a report you can also select only those repository collection items added between two particular dates (again selected using a calendar wizard). This is definitely useful for CLA return reports which want everything reported within a certain period.

The report function worked fine when tested on the CLA “test” collection created within Intralibrary v3. An excel spreadsheet was successfully created and all the metadata was output into appropriate cells. (This has been added to the file collection on our blog).

Where there were two metadata “entries” at a particular part of the metadata record (for instance at 1.2 above, each record has two “title” entries, one for the CLA order number, the other for the extract titles) this was also properly output by ensuring that the correct field “cardinality” was selected in the report generation template (i.e. we knew there were two entries in the metadata record so we asked the report generator to output both!).

The only glitch noted was that when the report was saved for some reason it “reversed” the order of the fields selected and they came out in the spreadsheet “back to front” (i.e. the desired first column of data came out as the last column!). That means the user would have to edit the spreadsheet by “cutting and pasting” the columns around until they were in the correct order for the CLA report, but this may well be a simple glitch in the beta version of Intralibrary v3.

This looks to be a useful reporting tool for CLA purposes, but any data element within the application profile can be isolated and listed.

However, as it is a “listing” reporting function, it means it can’t yet create a report of repository items based on a typed in search query. The user may want to type in a subject, title or author keyword or phrase, and ask Intralibrary to output an excel report of all items which contain these words somewhere in the metadata.

All that side however, given that this report function was developed in direct response to the CLA report requirement, this beta version looks a working solution.

Keywords: Administration, CLA, Intralibrary, Keele, LOM, Metadata, Pathfinder, Report

Posted by Scott McGowan @ Keele Pathfinder Team

1 comment:

Nick Sheppard said...

Hi Scott

I'm also just trying to get to grips with intraLibrary and CLA and have been experimenting with generating reports in a similar manner to the way you describe here. However, one of the fields on the CLA report is "Course of Study duration (weeks)" which you don't seem to have accounted for in your template? I anticipated using 2.4.3.5 Module duration but it's formatted years\months\days etc rather than weeks...

I've also encountered a similar issue with the report format and Peter suggested it might be an idea to query intraLibrary by SRU to generate reports rather than export to Excel which potentially could give greater control over formatting.

Cheers