Apologies in advance for the acronyms.
I dropped into the OR2012 conference in Edinburgh on Monday for Kathi Fletcher’s workshop on OERPub, an initiative to transform popular document types into a common format for deposit into a repository.
Kathi’s team have developed a standalone tool for submitting Word docs, Google docs and web pages to the Connexions repository. When these content types are submitted, they are converted into html and xml and deposited in the repository via the SWORD protocol.
Interestingly, the team has extended SWORD v2 to:
- include information to distinguish between a versioned item and a copy derived from it;
- add default metadata where it hasn’t been fully set by the client;
- support minor merges, such as changing the titles of submitted items.
These give some hints as to the possible deficiencies of SWORD as it exists at the moment.
The ultimate goal is to have a repository with remixable content, which is modular, uses a shareable license, and has a useful API. This is an ambitious project, and they have done some really useful work, which is available for others to use – e.g. the transform code.
From an art and design perspective I’m interested in the preservation of formatting as well as content. (Though I believe this is also an issue with text, for example, where the formatting of a book or article is an important part of the reading experience – something you will be aware of if you have tried to view a poorly formatted book on a Kindle or tablet device.) This may become more feasible in future if there is standardisation on HTML5 as a format for repository content, which is the direction that Connexions is headed in.
