Introduction
The Sakaibrary project has an explicit goal to free library resources from silos within the library and make them available in other contexts – in this case, within the Sakai course management system. Instead of forcing users to interrupt their normal workflow to deal with dedicated library systems, selected sets of information and expertise unique to the library are being wrapped up in such a way that they can be used, seamlessly, within a student's normal course context.
For Sakaibrary as an application to function, it requires institution-independent mechanisms to gather and present library-specific data within Sakai. Once these services are available, it makes sense to explore how we can leverage them to extend the reach of library services even farther. By looking at the functionality inherent in the infrastructure necessary for Sakaibrary to function – collection and normalization of library data and services, OpenURL creation and verification, and collection of citations via metasearch — we can now ask how to effectively repurpose these services outside of the Sakai application environment.
Sakaibrary Research Guide
In trying to understand the opportunities available, we want to explore two concurrent issues:
- How to leverage the Sakaibrary infrastructure in new ways, as described above
- How to provide opportunities for instructor/librarian coordination and collaboration in bringing relevant library resources to students
A common library application that has useful overlap with existing Sakaibrary functionality is the Research Guide. In its starkest form, a research guide (or subject guide or course guide) is simply an annotated list of library resources available for work in a specific subject area or course context. These resource types – books and articles, journals (both print and electronic), online databases, tutorials, and local expertise (e.g., subject-specialists) – are common (in kind) across libraries, and some are already managed by the Sakaibrary application stack.
Additionally, integration with Sakaibrary provides two exciting possibilities. First is to use the existing (and emerging) institution-independent mechanisms used by the Sakaibrary infrastructure to both find (via search or listings) and reference (via OpenURL or other descriptors) library resources for inclusion in the guides. Second is to push the envelope regarding the specialization of library resources already begun in the Sakaibrary project. By allowing teams of instructors and librarians to "personalize" subject guides for a specific course, perhaps even to the point of including canned and constrained searches, we can provide a join locus of control where the faculty member and librarian can both expose their knowledge and expertise to students in an environment shared in common with those students.
Project goals
The goal, starkly stated, is to design an application to easily produce (and later customize) research guides, with an eye toward leveraging as much of the Sakaibrary infrastructure as possible, while allowing such guides to be viewable both within and without the Sakai framework.
Hopefully, by doing so we can create a flexible system that duplicates as little data as possible and has extensive support for creating specific types of content as explained here.
To oversimplify, the goals are:
- Whenever possible, store generic information (ISSN) rather than site-specific information (link to a specific vendor's page for a journal) to facilitate long-lived links that work across semesters, courses, and in some cases institutions, and to avoid "linkrot."
- Have a single instance of each item that appears in a guide. Information that is used to construct a link/citation is static and used by all instances; data such as the title and descriptive text are guide-specific and can be overridden.
- Provide medium-specific editing tools for guide authors that take advantage of external services (from Sakaibrary and elsewhere) to make adding and updating items as painless as possible.
- Pursue a strategy of reuse, making it easy to use items in Sakaibrary, whole or part of another guide, and item descriptions entered elsewhere in the system.
- Provide output in a number of useful formats, including a well-described XML format that can be used by a sophisticated client (such as Sakaibrary) to take full control over the rendering of an SRG.
An overview of the architecture of the Sakaibrary Research Guide (SRG) system
The SRG will consist of four main parts:
- An authoring system, for gathering information about included resources, authorization/authentication of authors, and storage of the guide structures themselves.
- A Sakaibrary servlet, which will provide web-services access to data and resources already gathered and structured as part of the Sakaibrary project
- An optional service that can be used to perform simple transformations of data (e.g., turn an ISBN into a link to the local OPAC)
- A rendering system (tightly coupled with the authoring system) which will produce SRG output in a variety of formats such as HTML, machine-optimized XML, PDF for printing, etc.
An overview of the interaction between the various parts of the SRG
It is intended that in addition to being a crucial part of the authoring process, Sakaibrary will serve as a target for a rendered citation (number 4) as well, taking advantage of other Sakaibrary infrastructure to provide specialized views of some items (e.g., a database could potentially include a Sakaibrary searchbox targeting that database).
How Sakaibrary Research Guide will interact with Sakaibrary
When possible, the SRG will rely on external services to turn generic, guide-neutral information about a resource into a specific, local pointer to that resource. Sakaibrary already collects and generates much of this information, in the form of database information, code needed to generate search boxes, OpenURL generators, etc. The Sakaibrary functionality can be coupled with other (optional) local services to allow the SRG to simply describe the resource (in much the same way a citation is a description of a specific article or book), and turn that description into a valid local pointer/link at the time the guide is viewed.
Data flow during the authoring of an guide that includes a link to a database