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Subject: Overcoming the obstacles of harvesting and searching digital
repositories from federated searching toolkits, and embedding them in VLEs
From: "MacLeod, Roderick A"
Date: Thu, June 8, 2006 8:52 pm
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
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The following paper, written by members of the PerX Project, part of the
Digital Repositories Programme, may be of interest to members of this
list.
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006394/
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00006394/
Overcoming the obstacles of harvesting and searching digital
repositories from federated searching toolkits, and embedding them in VLEs
Chumbe, Santiago and MacLeod, Roddy and Barker, Phil and Moffat, Malcolm
and Rist, Roger (2006) 2nd International Conference on Computer Science
and Information Systems, Athens, Greece.
Abstract
This paper addresses two important needs. The first one is the need to
alleviate the resource discovery task across digital repositories by
subject, which includes the ability of searching heterogeneous sources
that apply to a specific audience (e.g. engineering academics) or
purpose (e.g. research, teaching) from one access point. The second need
is to provide toolkits for federated searching which are able to be
embedded in electronic learning environments used by lecturers, students
and researchers. Most of these environments are institutional Virtual
Learning Environments (VLEs) and Portals. Our study will show that the
satisfaction of both needs faces important obstacles. On one side,
standard exchange formats such as Z39.50 or OAI, developed precisely to
facilitate the transfer or sharing of data between computer systems,
present obstacles that make the harvesting and searching of data from
digital repositories a challenging process. On the other side, VLEs are
often restricted in their ability to allow the sharing and re-use of
external e-learning sources discovered by federated searching toolkits. A
solution for these obstacles, based on a service-oriented architecture
approach, is suggested and explored on a pilot system. The aim of our
research is the realisation of the concept of flexible federated
searching. The intention is that the VLE user should be able to use
whatever search tool he/she likes for whatever repositories he/she needs
to search, without concern for how the tool and the repositories manage to
communicate, or how the tool makes search results available to other VLE
components. The pilot system attempts to demonstrate that most of the
flexible federated searching concept can be achieved by making proper use
of current interoperability standards for digital
repositories and e-learning systems.
Roddy MacLeod MA, DipLib, MCILIP
Senior Subject Librarian
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS
Tel (0131) 451 3576 Fax: (0131) 451 3164
R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk mailto:R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html
