Wesleyan University Press and ITS
Jul. 6, 2006 by ravishan
Mike Roy has been talking to Suzanna Tamminen about possible collaboration between the Learning Objects program and the Wesleyan University Press. During those conversations, some other issues surrounding the WesPress website surfaced and Suzanna and her team (Leslie Starr and Stephanie Elliott) met with Justin and Jen Carlstrom from University Communications and Pat, Mary and me from ITS. It was a very productive and interesting meeting and I thought I would share with you some of what we discussed at the meeting.
WesPress would like to cater more to the needs of their clientele and they raised some valid points as to why the current Wesleyan template on which their site is wrapped doesn’t lend itslef to doing this. For example, the Search and Directories links in the top navbar refer to the entire Wesleyan Unviersity and not necessarily to WesPress. Someone coming to their site may be interested in searching their titles and may assume that the search at the top really meant that. So, we all agreed that they can redesign the top according to their need and there wil lbe some link back to the Wesleyan website. There were a couple of other minor things related to the content management that we believe we can help resolve pretty quickly.
But the two most important issues that were discussed were Search and Shopping Cart. Mary built them a search interface that was based on a software she wrote for the academic department library collections. Whereas this does a great job for the department collections, it became apparent that the needs for WesPress may require us to think differently. All of the WesPress publications are currently registered with UPNE (University Press of New England) and they already have a Google search interface. The only problem is how to make this search interface put out ONLY WesPress publications and not everything in their database. We have some ideas and we think we can make this happen. The advantage of this is that since all the data are already registered with UPNE, we can avoid maintaining the data in two places and the search is the best that is out there and hard to beat – Google!!! If WesPress at some point decides not to go with UPNE, we have to rethink this whole strategy…
The other piece is a shopping cart – WesPress would like to implement one on their site… Apparently most of the University Presses including UPNE use one developed at (I am not sure about this) University of Chicago. But it seems to have a lot of problems. I believe where we left this off was to look around for some solutions…
WesPress staff articulated very well what the future needs are and how the search and shopping cart tie in with the new technologies to satisfy these needs. They are talking about using Digital Rights Management to control access to their electronic content – which may be the electronic version of a book, an audio piece that is a companion to a book or even a “component”. Component refers here to some subset of the entire content. In case of a book, a chapter is a component; if it is a music CD, a single song is a component.
So the future is where one comes to the WesPress site and does a search and the results are presented from the collection of WesPress publications and then the user keeps adding the books or DRM controlled components or other electronic contents to a shopping cart, which will presumably calculate the total cost properly and then charge the user’s credit card….
We will be looking at all these as possible areas of collaboration. The most exciting collaboration is in the area of Learning Objects. Mike and his group are talking to WesPress about a possible LO companion for a book on Dance. They are in the process of working out the details including seeking some grant funds to implement it. I will ask Mike to explain this in more detail when he is ready….