Remixing Content an unAPI
Feb 16th, 2006 by Karen
I spent time today and Code4Lib listening to Dan Chudnov talk about unAPI both in a formal presentation and in a breakout session where people talked about and created a draft specification for it. Before coming here I really didn’t know much about the unAPI idea. I’d kind of been following what Dan had been writing about it on his blog, but really didn’t get it. After yesterday I have a must better sense of the why of unAPI and how it dove-tails with problems I’ve been kicking around in my head. The impetus behind unAPI is allowing users to repurpose content. Dan does a much better job of explaining it, but my simplified explanation is that unAPI is trying to lay the foundation for creating a smarter cut and paste of objects on the web.
How this fits in with what I’ve been doing some preliminary research on, is that I want to make it easier for librarians to be easily able to repurpose content from article databases and the catalog and use it on our website. Right now this is a cumbersome process and the librarians have to know too much about the technical aspects of the tools in order to effectively repurpose content. And if the barrier is too high for librarians to do this effectively then it is almost impossibly high for library users. So my idea is to build a tool/framework that that would allow users (librarians included) to search library resources and add them to a webpage. The ideal would be that the tool could be incorporated into many different systems.
In technical terms I’ve been thinking about how to write a plugin for TinyMCE that does this. The plugin would need to talk to the XML API for the catalog, and in the future the metasearch tool to return articles. User search and add items to their page using the plugin. The plugin would create the persistent link and add COinS. The potential benefits of doing it this way is that anywhere there was a WYSIWYG being driven by TinyMCE this functionality could be added. Many of the content management and blogging systems that I’ve looked at use TinyMCE to provided WYSIWYG functionality which is a plus. My big concern is the campus course management system and how to get this functionality into it so that faculty can add library resources to their course pages easily. If unAPI already existed and was in place in web tools then this would be a lot easier to do because the structure for cutting and pasting would be there already. Since it isn’t this is one potential route libraries can take to solve the problem.
