The other panelists (including me) are now covering work at their instiutions (so excuse any sudden cut off as I have to speak!)
Firstly, Peter van Boheemen (Wageningen University, NL). They use Blackboard and Sharepoint. They have developed a function to allow the building of ‘course libraries’ in the library system. When the tutor links from the course to the library system, they are automatically logged in as the owning ‘course’ rather than a personal login. This sounds a bit like the work done at Westminster a few years ago, where MetaLib e-shelves were setup for each course…
Secondly, Kingsley Boulton (York, UK). They are using Sentient ‘Discover’ product for reading lists, and Blackboard for a VLE (apparently the Sentient product is now being acquired by another company, and will be called just ‘Discover’). They are only adding reading lists for those courses that have a Blackboard presence. They have a ‘e-learning librarian’ to do this work. They went live in January this year, and used a Blackboard ‘building block’ (developed by Sentient) to integrate. The reading lists are completely controlled by the academics. The idea is that library staff will rely very much on the lists in Discover to get details of what academics need purchasing, moving to short loan etc. User feedback at York has been generally positive. York are also looking at a building block to integrate MetaLib with Blackboard using a ‘Building block’ and the x-server. The aim is to have single sign-on between Blackboard and MetaLib, and be able to present specific MetaLib resources based on the student enrolments.
Thirdly, Bob Gerrity (Boston College, USA) is going to talk about using DigiTool with the University environment. At Boston College there is a IDETS (Instructional Design/e-Teaching Services) who work along side library staff to deliver services for e-learning. Bob’s got an interesting list of strengths for the library team, and IDETS team – something they try to keep in mind as they work together.
Boston College have already done hooks to library resources (from WebCT) – search forms, deep linking, links to subject specialists – this sounds very similar to what we have done at RHUL so far.
However, they are now starting to use DigiTool to provide a platform for faculty members to create digital object repositories, which they can then use, and reuse, in their teaching. Bob is showing an example of pictures relating to Rome created by a fine arts students. An interesting aspect here is that the IDETS team provide a ‘rationale’ to the library to start the creation of such a collection, and the integration into learning objects.
This ‘Rome’ project is 461 images in DigiTool (in different versions), built a UI in Flash, which interacts with DigiTool with web-servercies API, php and the DigiTool PID, with supplementary material from Grove dictionary of art – a prototype seems to be available at Some impressive stuff, here, and our recent online picture gallery could have been done using exactly this technique – if we had DigiTool. Bob, said that they could probably develop several such resources per year, but in comparisson to the number of faculty and courses, this is just a drop in the ocean…
My talk seemed to go down well, and I’ll try to blog to detail later.