I recently had published an article in Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) entitled “MyLibrary: A Digital library framework & toolkit” (volume 27, number 3, pages 12-24, September 2008). From the abstract:
This article describes a digital library framework and toolkit called MyLibrary. At its heart, MyLibrary is designed to create relationships between information resources and people. To this end, MyLibrary is made up of essentially four parts: 1) information resources, 2) patrons, 3) librarians, and 4) a set of locally-defined, institution-specific facet/term combinations interconnecting the first three. On another level, MyLibrary is a set of object-oriented Perl modules intended to read and write to a specifically shaped relational database. Used in conjunction with other computer applications and tools, MyLibrary provides a way to create and support digital library collections and services. Librarians and developers can use MyLibrary to create any number of digital library applications: full-text indexes to journal literature, a traditional library catalog complete with circulation, a database-driven website, an institutional repository, an image database, etc. The article describes each of these points in greater detail.
The folks at ITAL are gracious enough to allow authors to distribute their work on the Web as long as the distribution happens after print publication. “Nice policy!”
Many people will remember MyLibrary from more than ten years ago. It is alive and well. It drives a few digital library projects at Notre Dame. It is often associated with customization/personalization, but now it is more about creating relationships between people and information resources through an institution-defined controlled vocabulary — a set of facet/term combinations.
In my opinion, libraries spend too much time describing resources and creating interdependencies between them. Instead, I think libraries should be spending more time creating relationships between resources and people. You can do this in any number of ways, and sets of facet/term combinations are just one. Think up qualities used to describe people. Think up qualities used to describe information resources. Create relationships by bringing resources and people together that share qualities.
Tags: MyLibrary
Hi Eric,
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
Dear Ms. Foo, thank you for the question.
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:
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.