- Scholar's Box Development
- Software Architectures for Gather/Create/Share Services
- Extending the Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox Extensions
- Gather/Create/Share in Office Suites: the Microsoft Office Research Pane and OpenOffice.org
- Highly Reusable Bibliographic and Image Collections
- Lowering the Barriers to Mapping Scholarly Data
Statement of Current and Future Research Plans and Interests
As the quality, quantity, and diversity of scholarly information grow, scholars long for end-users tools to access and manage this bewildering array of information. I aim to fundamentally improve how scholars conduct research by creating an ideal scholarly information environment that would give researchers seamless access to any digital content source, handle any content type, and apply any software service to this scholarly content. Such an environment would free researchers to focus on higher-order acts of synthesis and interpretation and thereby improve the quality of their research.
Accordingly, my research interests include:
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the application of XML and XML web services to promote real-world interoperability among digital libraries, educational technology, personal information spaces, and social software
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the reuse of digital library content for scholarly and educational purposes
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the architecture of library services that meet demands for flexible reuse of library content by end-user tools
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interactions among personal digital libraries and institutional digital libraries
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the interoperability of metadata standards from differing scholarly disciplines
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the creation of multilayered, compound, hypertextual scholarly documents that can themselves be easily deconstructed and repurposed by software
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the connecting of personal knowledge publishing (e.g., weblogs and wikis) with the evolving infrastructure for scholarly work and communication
Scholar's Box Development
I will continue to develop the architecture and software behind the Scholar's Box. The Scholar's Box is a tool that gives users "gather/create/share" functionality, enabling them to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. The Scholar's Box can currently perform the following functions:
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Gather: From California Digital Library, amazon.com, google.com, NSDL, RSS feeds, METS (digital library), WWW, CDL’s metasearch system, and the local file system.
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Create: Data and metadata gathered, annotated, and organized into personal collections via drag and drop
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Share: IMS-CP, OpenOffice.org Presentation or Text document, PDF, HTML, a METS document, a set of Endnote references, Chandler Parcel, or sent to a weblog via the Blogger API
I will continue to build out the Scholar's Box as a prototyping system to demonstrate technical interoperability for our various other projects (e.g., the creation of reusable collections of images and bibliographic metadata; testing the metasearch API from CDL). We at the Interactive University are in process of releasing the Scholar's Box as an open source project so that others can benefit from the overall architectural framework as well as any concrete implementations of services (e.g., creation of OpenOffice.org presentations from collections).
Software Architectures for Gather/Create/Share Services
I would like to enable scholars to gather, create, and share digital contents flexibly with the tools of their choosing, not necessarily the Scholar’s Box. To that end, I have been generalizing and documenting the architecture of the Scholar’s Box so that the functionality contained in the Scholar’s Box can be implemented in other platforms and tools.
Extending the Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox Extensions
The web browser is a natural integration point for gather/create/share services. The Mozilla Firefox web browser is a promising platform for experimenting and implementing ideas for augmenting current browser functionality. My colleague Tom Schirmer and I have built 1) a Firefox extension to access the Paracite SOAP service to parse citations and 2) another extension to enable some basic sending of data from Firefox to the Scholar's Box. I will deepen the second extension so that a user can perform simple versions of Scholar’s Box functionality without the Scholar’s Box itself.
Gather/Create/Share in Office Suites: the Microsoft Office Research Pane and OpenOffice.org
The underlying XML file formats and web services functionality now included in Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org suite provide many avenues for tighter integration between the writing/calculating environments of the office-suites and institutional digital content repositories. My colleague and SIMS student Annie Yeh and I have been building and testing a Microsoft Office Research Pane service that enables end-users to search and integrate results from the Melvyl union catalog system (and ultimately the entire California Digital Library collection) into Microsoft Office 2003. We are planning to build similar extensions into the open source OpenOffice.org suite. We will assess the utility of tightly integrating office suites with digital libraries.
Highly Reusable Bibliographic and Image Collections
The long-term goal of the Scholar’s Box is to facilitate the authoring of compound, multimedia scholarly documents. In the short term, we focus first on the creation of single-content type digital collections of bibliographic citations and images. We are attempting to maximize reusability of the collections so that the collections can move fluidly among library catalogues, bibliographic data managers, learning management systems, weblogs, and office suites. We will answer the questions: How reusable can one make these collections? Will the benefits of the collections be worth the effort?
Lowering the Barriers to Mapping Scholarly Data
The extensibility of widely available mapping services such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, and Yahoo Maps provides many possibilities for scholars to combine their data with mapping services. We are prototyping such points of integration, including that between image repositories and maps.
