Improving access to digital resources: a mandate for order

1. Improving access to digital resources: a mandate for order mandate:managing digital assets in tertiary education craig green, john wheatley college john robertson, centre for digital library research

2. The problem • Fairly typical educational institutional experience • Minutes/ agendas stored in library as single physical copy • No list available to public • Overhead to both college and individual for meeting information requests • Learning materials not consistently available • Materials stored in a range of paper-based and electronic formats • Materials stored in variety of locations • No college-wide strategy for the development, storage, retrieval and preservation of such materials • Strategy at the discretion of individual curriculum managers.

3. The problem • Learning materials only available to learners through teaching staff • No way of browsing or searching information assets • Library staff resource insufficient to process these assets and make them available using traditional means • Insufficient in-house expertise to tackle technical issues at JWC • Hence partnership requirement

4. Critical decisions • College Assets • No external IPR worries • Public Assets • Final versions published; no document tracking problems • Useful assets • What users actually work with i.e. the document, not its components or a collection of documents • Simpler system with reduced number of assets • Allows asset management overhead to be incorporated into current practice (mostly)

5. Metadata requirements • Starting point is College use of system not requirement to conform to any one standard • DC at core, but mix of MARC and LOM fields to support college needs • Balance between what College needs and system interoperability needs • E.g. Unit Codes for College needs; ‘Publisher’ for good quality records in wider environment • Metadata for single records to come from mix of teaching and administrative staff • Educational descriptions from teaching staff

6. The solution • Web-based publishing interface • Customised forms allow both simplified and automated metadata creation and capture • Enabling metadata creation and asset management by administrative staff • Integration of existing college systems eliminates duplication of effort • E.g. course structures from student records system • Authentication through existing Directory Services • Automated metadata export for library system from SQL database

7. The solution • 3 main points of access to digital assets • Website browsing by curriculum grouping (digital assets) • Website searching (digital assets) • Comprehensive search of all information assets held by College • Library management system • Services created for use by whole College

8. Choices and automation • Freeform choice • Keywords • Controlled choices • Date of meeting, committee name, document type, Contributor • Resultant automated metadata • Title, Author, Filename, File Location, Publication Date • Fixed automated metadata • Status, Publisher, Rights, Language, Coverage

9. So what? • Toolkit available to all for use as you wish • Documentation • Choices • Training materials • Etc • Database structures, queries • Web server scripts

10. Partnership • Joint Information Systems Committee • John Wheatley College • Centre for Digital Library Research • with support from • Scottish Library and Information Council • Glasgow City Council • Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council

11. DIGITAL ASSET METADATA