Document Status: Initial Draft of User Requirements
Background
This set of requirements derives from the usage scenarios supplied by the participants in the 1-3 March 2006 kickoff meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan (need link to this material).
Assumptions & Definitions
- Each institution wishing to use Sakaibrary will have to configure Sakai to work with their own metasearch tool (e.g., MetaLib, SIRSI SingleSearch). A metasearch tool allows searching across multiple databases.
- A canned search (in this document) is a search where the search terms and other constraints are pre-specified.
- A constrained search (in this document) is a search where some search terms and other constraints are in place, but the user can specify one or more search terms.
Requirements
Requirements are divided into the following categories.
...
- Is built-in support for version control and local modifications (i.e., branching) needed? If not, do we need to provide a way to compare citation lists to identify differences? (Preliminary decision: do not provide version control or sophisticated branching, merging, and diff-ing.)
- Unlike the Open Source Portfolio (OSP) Sakai doesn't seem to have the notion of templates and forms, which would be useful ways to incorporate citations and citation lists into structured documents such as syllabi. Do we need to float some requirements to the rest of Sakai to support this kind of thing?
- What support does/will Sakai provide for "learning objects" and how are they included in the citation list?
- Do we need context-sensitive presentation of citations? What contexts are relevant?
- Is a canned or constrained search a citation? Or is it a different kind of object? Even though it may be able to be represented as a URL, it also needs to be turned back into a set of editable search terms in an advanced search form.