Notes

Attendees

Johns Hopkins: Jim Martino
Northwestern: Julie Patton, Frank Cervone
Stanford: Chris Bourg, Lois Brooks
Yale: Jeffrey Barnett
Berkeley: Oliver Heyer
Indiana: Carrie Donovan, Jon Dunn, Steve Smail, Mark Notess
Michigan: Susan Hollar, Jim Eng, Bill Dueber, Gaurav Bhatnagar

Enhancing existing functionality

• Separate/classify results of a search (Jim Martino)
  • maybe something like Amazon's A9 Search
• Have to be able to sort (Jeffrey Barnett)
  • Types: date, most recent, media type, etc...
• Merging versus display by source? (Jon)
  • No one wants to wait (Jeffrey Barnett)
  • Depending on the audience, the tool may be used quite differently (Julie Patton)
  • Who is the audience? (Frank)
  • Google search appliance? (Jim Martino) - will not work on the external, licensed databases
• Advanced search - what kinds of options should be available? (Susan)
  • Some may prefer the "Google box" - just one, catch-all keyword search (Jim Martino)
  • Specifying search sources (Jeffrey Barnett)
• Having direct links to content
  • Will the SFX URL provided be persistent?
    • No - vendor-specific
  • URLs that are found to be persistent can be added to the Citation itself
• Representing Citations/Citation Lists in Sakai
  • Using XML representation would allow rendering/styling by XSL Transforms both inside and outside Sakai. (Jeffrey Barnett)
• Import/Export
  • RLI (IMS Spec) (Jim Martino)
    • Will play a bigger role when automating the import/export process (RefWorks supports RLI) (Oliver Heyer)
• General Improvements
  • Wording - "Citation List" to: Bibliography, Reading List, Works Used/Cited, References, Course Reader, BibMarks
• Management
  • You'd want to consult faculty/students/community of experts (librarians) to manage search sources/sets. (Jeffrey Barnett)
  • If hard-coded, need to have things as modular as possible.
  • Where is information managed, stored?
    • Yale: Many, many different places. (Jeffrey Barnett)
    • Stanford: Data is populated from out of Unicorn (a catalog). (Chris)
    • Northwestern: Data is coming from multiple different databases including catalogs, feeds, metasearch engines, openUrl link resolvers. (Julie/Frank)

New Functionality: mechanisms for getting citations and links into Sakai

• Google Scholar
  • Why be tied to Google Scholar? (Jeffrey Barnett)
    • They are "the standard"
  • Google Scholar can be evaluated against Library Resources
    • How easy? How useful? How reliable? etc...
• Exporting to RefWorks/EndNote in SFX was turned off because the OpenURL metadata wasn't good enough. (Julie Patton)
  • OpenURLs/Export could be "graded" using thresholds of usefulness. (Frank)
• Broswer Plugins
  • Zotero ("Firefox Scholar") - pretty impressive.
  • Open-source projects worth investigating - could be built on.

New Functionality: Research Guides

• Where would a research guide live?
  • Could take a web services approach, "sending" or "getting" the research guide from somewhere outside of Sakai.
    • Would allow research guide development to happen independent of Sakai and fed into Sakai (or other applications).
    • Web services are to be better supported in Sakai 2.4 and onwards.
• Research guide format/template?
  • Could use a content management system.
  • A wiki with templates.
• Current research guide approaches at different institutions
  • Northwestern research guide creation:
    • Free-form XML.
    • Automatically generated into web pages.
  • Indiana research guide use:
    • As part of class pages and online pathfinders.
    • Interactive tutorials.
    • How to's
  • Stanford research guide variety:
    • Niche topic specific - example: a special collections librarian will create a research guide on a very specific, niche topic such as papyrus collections discovered in the 15th century.
    • General topics - example: a reference librarian will make a research/resource guide on art.
    • Specific course - example: a librarian or faculty member will make a research guide with strategies for the course, references book citations and librarian information.
    • Specific how to's - example: how to search for journal articles using the library's online and physical resources.
  • Berkeley
    • an instructional designer from the library is involved in shaping a research guide to suit the specific needs of the library or faculty.
• Librarian Role
  • Yale has a "real" Librarian role within Sakai.
    • The Librarian role is an ordinary role within Sakai with specific permissions in the context of a course.

General Comments

Oliver - This is primarily a faculty tool that will become very popular. Given that, and the fact that it is going to be a part of Resources, the project could come under pressure to be pushed into a certain way (either by Sakai or by Faculty). Would it be better off as it's own tool as opposed to being so tightly integrated with Resources/Sakai?

Jim Martino - There are a lot of different things that can be done with a Citation that you just have. This is even without the search functionality - what kind of support is there for these other Citation operations?

Technical Discussions

• How are we doing Pilots?
• We need to get the code to a state where it can be dropped into Sakai 2.3, which many people are running.
• Just getting our stand-alone Sakaibrary server (a tagged version of the code) checked out, configured and up and running with an existing metasearch engine will be very useful for us.
• Ideas to leverage "social" web paradigms
  • "Other courses that cited this..." (Jeffrey Barnett)
  • Ideas of sharing edited Citations to "match" searched Citations and filling in missing/corrupt metadata. (Jim Martino)

Who's willing to try the software?

• Jim Martino (and Elliot) - definitely willing to give the software a shot and even introduce it to faculty/students experimenting with a Pilot/Test server.
• Jeffrey Barnett also agreed to just put the server up, but cannot guarantee actually doing anything with it.