Based on my experience, there are probably two ways to incorporate MyLibrary (reading list) content into a system like Blackboard. The first and probably most straight-forwarward way to is create pages using MyLibrary, have them be associated with URLs, and put those URLs into Blackboard. This is a more brute force method but also probably the quickest.

The second and more elegate solution but also more complicated is to use some sort of application programmer interface (API). For better or worse MyLibrary has a Perl API not a Web Services based API. I believe Blackboard has some sort of Java or C API and not some sort of Web Services API. Give this state of affairs I suppose you could:

• Put content into MyLibray
• Use the MyLibrary Perl API to save content to a file system
• Use the Blackboard Java API to read the content
• Display

Not straight-forward but scalable and would make it easy to keep content up-to-date. A better solution would be communication via Wewb Services on both sides. Alas.

Signed, Mr. Bar.

Thanks for your presentation at Access 2008! I’ve been wanting to incorporate something similar into BlackBoard for a while now and this may be the piece that’s been missing… do or anyone else know about anyone who’s attempted to integrated a mylibrary reading list into the proprietary LMS?

Cheers,\Jane