Start date: 1 May 2003
End date: 31 August 2003
Funding programme: PALS Metadata and Interoperability programme (phase 1)
JISC theme(s): Information environment
The project is carried out by Staffordshire University in partnership with Ebrary, an e-book supplier / aggregator and Emerald, an e-journal provider.
The project aims to integrate searching of e-books and other e-resources into the COSE VLE, a free web-based virtual learning environment developed at Staffordshire University, to provide reusable and searchable objects which draw seamlessly on the referenced resources.
The basis of the project is to enable learners to formulate queries within the COSE search tools and pass them to Emerald or Ebrary. The resulting links would then be displayed in the COSE search tools. The learnr would then access resources using these links and would be able to save selected links and the associated metadata as reference objects within the VLE. This would enable learners and tutors to have collections of reusable reference objects which could be flexibly attached to content in the VLE.
The "reusable reference objects" would also be packageable by COSE using the IMS Content Packaging Specification (the COSE system conforms to the IMS Content Packaging and Metadata specifications), enabling references to resources outside the VLE to be interchanged between VLE's and institutions, along with other content held in the VLE.
An Executive Summary of the project's final report is attached below.