Achieving the necessary level of interoperability between library and educational/instructional evironments to enable such high level of interactive access to content is a challenge that the library and educational technology communities are only beginning to jointly address. [cite MacLean/Lynch white paper] Among the many barriers impeding interoperability between libraries and educational tools is the difference in specifications commonly used for the exchange of digital objects and metadata. XML interoperability specifications proposed within the library/digital repository community (e.g., METS) and within the educational technology domain (IMS, SCORM) are geared to the exchange of content within that specific community. By themselves, these standards do not address the need for cross-community transmission of data.
METS, which is maintained in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress and is being developed as an initiative of the Digital Library Federation, attempts to provide an encoding format for managing digital materials within a digital library, for exchanging materials between digital libraries, and for disseminating the digital content and associated metadata to the end user.
The IMS Content Packaging (IMS-CP) specification, one of several XML based specifications created under the auspices of the IMS to facilitate interoperability among educational environments, plays a parallel role in the educational technology community. "The IMS Content Packaging (CP) Information Model describes data structures that are used to provide interoperability of Internet based content with content creation tools, learning management systems (LMS), and run time environments. The objective of the IMS CP Information Model is to define a standardized set of structures that can be used to exchange content. These structures provide the basis for standardized data bindings that allow software developers and implementers to create instructional materials that interoperate across authoring tools, LMSs, and run time environments that have been developed independently by various software developers." (http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/cpv1p1p3/imscp_infov1p1p3.html#1519896)
Of the range of scenarios that would have be to accounted for in full interoperability between library and educational tools, we consider, in this paper, the case study of absorbing METS objects representing library resources into an IMS-CP learning package. The adoption of METS by a significant number of libraries, musuems, and archives -- not an unlikely prospect -- to mark up their content would result in many thousands of interesting, high quality corpus of METS objects ready for incorporation into learning tools. IMS-CP is the leading contender for a standard file format among learning content (if any should completely dominate). [This might be too strong of a claim.]
[I might want to strengthen the introduction through adding concrete scenarios. The collections hosted by libraries are a silo of sort; how about if we want to grab some material and use it elsewhere? Journal articles already paid for by the libraries that ed tech people might end up paying again.... Image collections for the looking -- but what if I want to comment it for my students....Resources List Interop....]
In this paper, we describe how METS-encoded library content, can be converted into digital objects for IMS-compliant systems through XSLT-based crosswalks. We compare the conceptual models behind METS and IMS-CP. We document the design and limitations of an XSLT-based translation, and relate the crosswalks to other techniques to enhance interoperability.
