Cross-Integration of LONCAPA and the NSDL

The SMETE Open Federation (SOF), headquartered at UC Berkeley under the direction of Prof. Alice M. Agogino, has established a solid and comprehensive research program in the area of digital libraries for K-12 and higher education. Since the mid-1990's the SMETE Open Federation participants have collectively cataloged well over 25,000 high-quality, web-accessible resources for STE&M education.

There are approximately 21,000 additional cataloged physical resources associated with STE&M education (e.g., video tapes, workbooks, lesson plans, etc.). By leveraging the work of the SOF partners, who maintain high standards in their collections development policies, we have been able to rapidly assemble a strong base of high-quality, educationally relevant resources.

To support the LearningOnlineNetwork with CAPA (LON-CAPA; ITR project) cross-integration with the National STEME Digital Library (NSDL), we will:

- Collaborate with the technical staff at LON-CAPA to develop a means to transform LON-CAPA item-level metadata into IMS/IEEE Learning Object Metadata format.

- Catalog representative resources in LON-CAPA into the digital library at www.smete.org.

- Create a re-direction service to direct users from the www.smete.org digital library to LON-CAPA when the user requests to download a LON-CAPA resource cataloged at www.smete.org.

- Develop a prototype OAI data provider as a means for harvesting metadata from LON-CAPA into the digital library at www.smete.org and vice-versa.

- Develop a prototype federated search service at a LON-CAPA gateway server to allow LON-CAPA users to search and retrieve learning resources cataloged by the SOF and vice-versa.

Pursuant to these deliverables, we have requested funds in the amount of $40,000 (including overhead) over six weeks as a sub-contract to LONCAPA. Professor Alice Agogino will be the Principal Investigator. The funds will provide: salary for the sub-contract award for Mr. Brandon Muramatsu and Mr. Eric Fixler for software design, architecture and coding and for Dr. Andy Dong for systems architecture design.