| Project Curl:
A Curricular Resource Library |
Nercomp March 1999
Sturbridge, MA
Michael Roy
Director of Academic Computing Services
Wesleyan University
mroy@wesleyan.edu
Outline
What is CuRL?
Why CuRL?
Project Participants
Workflow for Collection
Curricular Uses
Infrastructure/Technology
Related Projects
Next Steps
What is CuRL?
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CuRL stands for Curricular Resource Library.
It is a database of links to web resources for use in the curriculum, collaboratively
developed by librarians, faculty, and computer services at five New England
schools.
... more
Why CuRL?
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curricular uses of the
web
Of the various ways that the web is used in the curriculum, Project
CuRL seeks to provide an improved method for the manner in which faculty
generate links to external resources from their course pages.
Links
on class-related pages
There exists a fundamental problem with the way that links to pedagogically
useful resources are presently collected, managed, and displayed.
Project
Participants
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actual
names here
Workflow
for Collection
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1) Faculty member searches for sites/ read sites
2) Creates record for site, including keywords
3) Librarian adds Subject Headings
4) Record now available for public
demo (requires password)
Curricular
Uses
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example
one: faculty uses to collect materials that she then links in to her
course (requires password)
example
two: faculty requires students to use database to inform class discussion
by bringing quotes, summaries, and new ideas culled from the database in
as required reading summaries.
example three: point
to the database and refer to it as resource for the course
demo of reader module
Infrastructure/Technology
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Oracle Database on a Sun server
Database
Design five inter-related tables
Linkbot
a method for tracking the status of links.
Related
Projects
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IMS
Instructional Management System. In particular, its metadata
specification.
Project
Isacc A research project from the people who publish the Internet
Scout Report.
Dublin Core OCLC's
efforts to promote a standard for describing the contents of web resources.
( Of particular interest is the Dublin
Core projects page. )
Gateway to Educational
Materials An effort to collect meta-data about educational materials,
which are then published at The Gateway.
University
of Michigan Library Digital Registry
Next
Steps
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Add more disciplines
Add more links within each discipline
Refine notions of discipline
User-defined storable subsets
Better define how the database can be used
in teaching
Assessment
Curl
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