2002/03/19: Back to MOA2

Still need to write the BC&C piece?

Brandon kindly told me about Demystifying Learning Technology Standards Part I: Development and Evolution in the latest Syllabus Magazine (March 2002). Do I still need to finish my article? I think that there are still unique concerns for this campus audience and that articles such as this provide the detailed "how-to-learn-more" materials for my article.

Thanks for the XML/Frontier pointers

David posted pointers to XML and Frontier related resources. I've been very interested in such tools because of the XSLT I've been writing to do crosswalks among various XML formats (including between MOA2 and IMS)

This lack of a full XML suite in the Frontier community has been a striking, but an understandable, one for me. Isn't Userland at the forefront of all this XML technology? There are books on how to use XML in Java and Python -- but none for Frontier (since there isn't the same variety of tools).

The explanation of the lack is expressed well by Jon Udell in a recent column about scripting languages: "Small armies of developers in each camp toil endlessly to create and maintain the scripted implementations of services, and the bindings to system-level services, so that users of these languages can enjoy rich and complete environments. Because all this work must be repeated on a per-language and per-service basis, I once called this "a full employment act for open-source programmers." The Frontier community is just not as large as the Perl, Python, and Java communities.

Lovely libraries

Saturday afternoon was the first time I stepped into the Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. I was so happy to be inside its doors, walking in the temple of learning. It's moments such as that afternoon that get me to think about how much I miss being in libraries. I was a terribly bookish kid, spending basically every Saturday morning at the public library throughout my childhood and teen years. (BTW, the library reminded me of the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, which I mistakenly thought was designed by I. M. Pei. The Toronto Library was designed by Raymond Moriyama.)

Why link to library catalogs

Thanks, Lynn, for posting definitions of finding aids. Those definitions are helpful to non-library people like me.

(I really like Lynn because she cares enough libraries and books to educate people like me and to remind me of the wonders of the libraries. I'm shocked that someone like myself who owes so much to the library system (having grown up in the depths of northern Ontario without direct access to the larger world, save through books) would forget the libraries as I am wont to in this new networked world...)

Lynn also responded to my post from Friday. Is it just because I blog that I want to link directly to library catalog entries? I like to think that such demand will eventually go beyond webloggers. One scenario I imagine is creating a bibliography for a class of materials from the university Library. Yes, I can certainly go to gladis, compile the results and copy the results over to my own website. But doing so loses out on all the functionality I'd love for me and the students to have from having a live reference to the library catalog. For example, in gladis, I can do a query on the availability of a book. It would be great if someone can click on my link to a gladis entry to instantly query gladis -- rather than copying and pasting information into gladis to generate the same information. Does this make sense?

One more thing: I'm much rather link to the Library of Congress or gladis (if only I could) since in general, I don't necessarily want to send the message to my readers to buy books at amazon. I have mixed feelings about shopping at amazon though I'm not dead-set against doing so. Also, I expect the LoC and UCB to be around much longer than amazon will be....

About amazon images: I actually quite like the thumbnails of book covers on amazon. It's a small compensation and a nice visual cue for the online world.

Relevant Documents to the MOA2/METS/IMS crosswalk

I've been spending the afternoon getting back to my MOA2 to IMS conversion work, specifically how to deal with the metadata (which I have left out in my previous efforts). I'm finding that there are a lot of things to juggle -- and I'm slowly making sense of all the pieces. But let me just list the documents I have before me right now.

the metadata and content packaging specifications from IMS

IMS Specifications: Meta-data. http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/index.html

IMS Meta-Data Information Model http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/imsmdv1p2p1/imsmd_infov1p2p1.html#1169599

IMS Content Packaging Specification. http://www.imsproject.org/content/packaging/cpv1p1p2/imscp_infov1p1p2.html

MOA2 (Making of America II)

CDL Digital Object Document Type Definition Tutorial. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/moa2/papers/dtdtutorial2.htm

METS

METS Overview and Tutorial (Library of Congress). http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/METSOverview.html

GDM (metadata standard being used at UC Berkeley in conjunction with METS; very roughly parallel to the IMS-Metadata specification)

Beaubien, R. GDM: A Descriptive Metadata Extension Schema for the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, 2001. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/mets/gdmSchema.html

AV (metadata for marking up audio-visual metadata for METS)

Revised Plan for Extension Schemas for the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, 2002. http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/avprot/metsmenu2.html

Powerpoint Presentation on METS by R. Beaubien

ftp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/pub/mets/present/

CanCore -- an interesting simplification of the IMS standards (which nevertheless remains IMS-conformant)

Wilson, S. CETIS-CanCore strip down IMS metadata specification for easier implementation, 2001. http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20010827110034/viewArticle

CanCore Schema 1.1: Draft Version, 2002. http://www.cancore.ca/elementset1.1.html

CanCore and SCORM Compared: DRAFT. http://www.cancore.ca/scorm.html

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Feb Apr

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