Microviews
The OneShare family of projects has grown again, this time through the Microviews project, one of the new JISC Raid Innovation Projects.
The Microviews project aims to develop a JavaScript library that is capable of rendering a preview of an EPrint page that can be used as a tooltip and also as a specialised interface for mobile devices. The preview will show selected EPrints fields with the aim of providing enough information for users to choose whether to follow the link to the full EPrint page.
The library will include a simple JavaScript hook that can be included on any page containing links to an EPrint. The hook will display the preview as a graphical tooltip when users hover over the link. The JavaScript will also detect mobile devices and rather than a tooltip will insert a mobile-friendly gateway page when users select the link.
Microviews will be useable without modifying the EPrints installations themselves, and the scripts will be referenced from a central Microviews server for easy maintainability.
The project will run for the rest of this year, and we’ll post updates on this blog under the Microviews category.
OneShare begins
Welcome to the OneShare blog. OneShare is the follow on project to both EdShare and Faroes (the Language Box), these were JISC projects to try and reinvent teaching and learning repositories for both institutional and community use. OneShare inherits both repositories, and one of our priorities over the next 18 months is to support both systems and make sure that they continue to develop and evolve.
We are also involved in new institutional repositories at both the OU (called LORO) and Worcester (called the Worcester Learning Box), that will be based on the software developed in EdShare and Faroes. The LLAS are also in the process of developing a sister repository to the Language Box called the HumBox that will be in the humanties space and will host new OER content that they are developing.
The last part of OneShare is to investigate how to integrate these different repository systems (at the institutional and community level) with VLEs and commercial sharing sites like iTunesU and YouTube Edu. Our aim is to establish a deposit once methodology, where users deposit at any one of these levels and then that resource is shared up and down the systems as appropriate.
There’s a lot going on, but you can follow our progress by looking at the developments on the Language Box and EdShare websites.