| Mark Lawrence Kornbluh 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 |
Building on seven years of research in the creation, storage, management, and delivery of digital objects with funding from the National Science Foundation, MATRIX, a Humanities Computing Research Center at Michigan State University, has constructed an open source digital repository, Project Builder, which provides the full functionality of a rich content management system. Designed for long-term preservation and access, Project Builder is a flexible web-based content management system that allows for the development of complex, multimedia learning objects. Digital objects in the repository can be easily repurposed and reused for other projects. Utilizing a modular programming, Project Builder, is designed to facilitate both digital preservation and on-line publication by individuals and communities. Project Builder is interoperable with DSpace and Fedora repositories. The program can ingest materials from any standardized repository and can output METS XML that can be harvested by these repositories. Nonetheless, neither programming skills, nor library science expertise is required to utilize Project Builder. Indeed, it was created with the goal of helping smaller cultural institutions and individual faculty members create rich, multimedia digital archives and websites that can be easily maintained, augmented, and repurposed. Michigan State University is in the final stage of releasing Project Builder as an open source program for educational use. As Project Builder is a robust digital archive application that allows developers to focus as much on presentation of complex learning environments as it does the storage, management and preservation of digital objects, it meets a significant need of the educational community.
Handout (MS Word)