Fedora
The electronic archive was constructed using the Fedora Digital Repository Archive platform following a systematic review of available software platforms. This open source platform allows a flexible and extensible collection structure with multiple metadata streams and complex relationships between items. It also allows the generation of an Open Archive Initiative (OAI) metadata feed so that the contents and metadata can be selectively exposed and 'harvested'.
Fedora allows the construction of complex 'webs' of resources with 'collections' in fact being simply special kinds of resource containing references to others. As many collections as are required can be established; so for example, the collections which correspond to individual evaluations in this project can be supplemented by others which might bring together examples relevant to specific methodologies or approaches, issues or problems, contexts, or individual researchers.
Resources can also be linked by a range of 'assertions' to other resources within and beyond the archive itself. In this way relationships such as the influence of a particular evaluation upon subsequent work can be represented.
The Fedora distribution includes a number of interfaces and API's which allow the ingress and management of resources togther with various means of accessing archive metadata and resources. Within this project we have made most use of the Resource Index Search Service (RISearch) which is a web service that exposes the contents of a repository's Resource Index (held in an RDF Triplestore) for outside use.
Sakai
The archive is currently housed within the CamTools Virtual Collaboration Environment hosted at CARET. This provides an access-controlled environment within which the Archive and a range of collaboration tools (email archive, discussion, chat and wiki) are co-located. CamTools is based on the Sakai platform for Virtual Learning and Research Environments. CARET is currently evaluating the platform as a basis for collaborative research in Social Sciences.
The project has developed a Sakai Proxy Tool which allows seamless access to the Fedora Archive from within the CamTools environment (see screenshots below).
Screenshots
- Screenshot showing Project List Viewer
- Screenshot showing Project Resources Viewer and PDF document in Document View Window
Metadata
One of the most important tasks we have undertaken as part of this project is the development of a constrained vocabulary to describe the wide range of materials which we have been describing, digitising and adding to the archive.
Over a period of about six months, we developed a 'grounded' list of descriptive terms based on a assessment of one major educational evaluation, and then iteratively developed this list as we worked on two further evaluations, which we selected specifically because of their range and scope. Three full 'versions' of the list were produced prior to a version in which we had confidence being converted into SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System). This vocabulary is now used as the basis both of the ingress processes for adding to the archive, and the SKOS version is used to build the search interface within it.
Ingress Processes
With large numbers of documents to be ingressed into the archive, it was necessary to develop automated ingress processes. As much of the process of resource selection and description occurred 'offline', an ingress spreadsheet was developed in Microsoft Excel. Once this is completed, a custom Perl script transforms the metadata collected into Fedora's own Dublin Core based metadata records. This process also generates outline relational data expressed in RDF.
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