The Challenge of Building Complex Objects from Digital Repositories

Mark Korhbluh
Director of MATRIX
Michigan State University

Dean Rehberger
Associate Director of MATRIX
Michigan State University

Michael Fegan
Senior Project Manager of MATRIX
Michigan State University

The recent emergence of online digital archives has brought educators a major step closer to bringing original, reusable digital objects into undergraduate classrooms. Yet having to search multiple archives through mind-numbing search-and-browse routines can make it difficult for educators to use the repositories successfully in their curriculum. The Spoken Word Project, a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), proposes to create complex digital objects by reducing the search for relevance, expanding the metadata with user-specific annotation, and tying the libraries’ content directly to course materials. The key to creating these resources will be to build distributed networks of users and repositories.

Cost containment often severely limits the amount of descriptive metadata that can be catalogued. Students and instructors will create topical annotated bibliographies or lists of media clips (or segments of media clips) and “publish” these for class, work group, or more general use. Allowing teachers and students to annotate and segment media as well as build their own galleries greatly enhances the educational value of digital objects by augmenting the minimal descriptive metadata and facilitating the building of complex digital objects tailored to the needs of specific education standards and curricula. The project uses a METS XML schema that provides an encoding format for administrative, descriptive, and structural metadata that is fully compliant with OAIS, and Cocoon applications to facilitate ingestion and delivery.