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).
We are writing specification documents for the Scholar's Box, which we break into three parts:
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/StrategicIssues, which lays out the organizational issues around Scholar's Box development, including project plans and the rationale behind this work
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/FunctionalSpecification, which describes how the Scholar's Box will work entirely from the user's perspective.
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/TechnicalSpecification, which describes the internal workings of the Scholar's Box.
Note that some of the most active description of the ScholarsBox in my wiki is to be found in An Occasional Essay Series about the Scholar's Box.
