JISC

Start date: 7 September 2004

End date: 31 March 2005

Funding programme: Distributed e-Learning programme

Project website: http://www.reading.ac.uk/Ure/VLMA

JISC theme(s): e-Learning

Links

Software Description

An open-source plug-in portlet, compliant with global standards, that will facilitate design and use of museum (and other) collections data for independent learning.

Aims and Objectives

Aim: 

To investigate and create structures and methods to enable teachers and learners to compare, integrate, and export discrete assemblages of images and text from online resources such as those provided through Museum databases. 

Objectives:

• Adapt an existing open-source Java applet/application -Virtual Lightbox-  to a tool through which learners and teachers may
  • Collect their ‘examples’ from one or more databases.
  • Organise them as desired, with the opportunity to add further content.
  • Export into the desired format (e.g., email, printout, Word, PPT, or Blackboard).

• To implement a modular extensible resource-discovery server, which will
  • Expose services in a modular fashion (on the model of the Jabber server), enabling museums to use plug-in mapping interfaces to expose their data.
  • Develop and document an RDF vocabulary for museum website resources.
  • Make use of current open standards (OAI as well as RDF) to make collection metadata available (thus ensuring that the server-client relationship is not tied to any one particular software implementation).