A technical course and stakeholder workshop on Federation of Learning Repositories for Agriculture, Food and Environment and Stakeholder Workshop were held in Budapest, Hungary, 2-6 November. The course was an activity under the Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force.
The workshop was essentially about how to make online libraries interoperable with one another, so that people can search across digital library collections owned by different organisations simultaneously and automatically. The course focused on metadata standards and protocols for automating data exchange, using examples drawn from existing federated systems including the European Schoolnet project, which is attempting to facilitate sharing and access to digital educational materials across the EU, ARIADNE, CGIAR and others.
The training course included hands-on implementation sessions during which participants set up a Simple Query Interface target, and an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Handling (OAI-PMH) target, and also tools to run queries and harvest metadata against those targets. The course also covered metadata standards such as the Dublin Core, Learning Object Metadata and the construction of custom XML application profiles.
The workshop included two demonstration sessions where participants displayed their digital library systems to others. This provided a good opportunity get some feedback on a new software module in development for the publications section of the NACA website. This will provide improved indexing and presentation of publications, not only in PDF format (as now) but will also offer streaming audio, embeddable video, plain text records and presentation of images as well. The module will permit its records to be harvested via an OAI-PMH web service, allowing the NACA website to interconnect with distributed digital library networks worldwide. The Agricultural Learning Repositories Task Force aims to pilot a globally federated network of digital libraries over the next year or so.
The training course was organised by the ASPECT Best Practices Network, Organic.Edunet and FAO. It was sponsored by the United Nations University, CGIAR, Rural Inclusion Project, iQTool Project, Organic Mednet and the European Foundation of Information Technology in Agriculture. NACA would like to thank all involved for a very useful workshop and for sponsoring the participation of NACA’s Communications Manager at the workshop. |
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