RDN-Include: Re-branding Remote Resources

1. RDN-Include: Re-branding Remote Resources www.omni.ac.uk www.sosig.ac.uk SOSIG Home Page Searching using OMNI The subject gateways cover a range of subject areas, such as social sciences (SOSIG) and medicine (OMNI). Subject Gateways in the UK The UK Higher Education community has funded a range of subject gateway, now part of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) which provide access to quality, manually catalogued Web resources. • The Institutional Perspective • Although institutions are appreciative of the services, some feel that: • They have a need to complement the subject gateways with resources catalogued locally, to reflect local needs • There may be local pressures to be active in this area • The branding of interfaces is important An institutional gateway

2. The Solution: RDN-Include • RDN-Include • The need to address institutions’ concerns over branding has led to the development of the RDN-Include software suite which allows institutions to provide user access to the RDN subject gateways without the user leaving the institution’s Web site. Here we see how a fictitious University provides access to RDN gateways while maintaining its own look-and-feel. The results of a search appear to be provided by the institution. CGI and JavaScript Implementations RDN-Include is implemented as a CGI script. This approach, however, requires that the local system administrator installs the CGI script. In some places this may be a barrier: institutions may not be willing to install CGI scripts from third parties. In order to address this problem, a lightweight alternative has been developed using JavaScript. This solution is called RDNI-lite.

3. The RDN-Include Architecture • The RDN-Include Solution • End-user interaction is handled by the RDN-Include script, thus retaining an institutional URL. If the script is not passed any search parameters, it reads a template file held locally. The template file is essentially a normal HTML or XHTML Web page, formatted with a local look-and-feel. RDN content (the search box and browse hierarchy) is added to this template dynamically at run time by including in it XML ‘rdni:tag’ elements of the form: <rdni:tag val="RDN*"/> where * represents a unique service identifier. The RDNI-lite Solution To use RDNi-Lite an author simply has to embed a JavaScript <script> element in a normal HTML page. The‘src’attribute of the script element points to a CGI Perl script running on the RDN server. The CGI script generates a set ofdocument.write()JavaScript statements that, when executed by the Web browser, embed the appropriate RDN content into the Web page. The CGI script takes several optional arguments that provide‘rdni:tag’.

4. Applicability to News Feeds • Need For News Feeds • The RDN wishes to make news available to the user community. It makes use of RSS to provide news channels. RSS-xpress An RSS tool called RSS-xpress has been created which allows RSS channels to be created, modified and parsed. RSS-xpress is available at <http://rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/>. RSS-xpress lite For institutions to incorporate news feeds on their own Web site they will have to install RSS-xpress and configure it to include local branding. As this may be a barrier, a JavaScript version has been developed. This allows RDN (and other) news feeds to be managed by HTML authors. RDN-Include and RSS-xpress are open source. For further information on these tools or on this paper please contact Andy Powell <A.Powell@ukoln.ac.uk>.