Sharedresource Module: Adding a sharedresource in the library
You can add a new entry to central library at the time you want to publish a new document to a course and when guessing this document was not yet in the document pool.
As documents are referenced such is the new Moodle file stirage by a unique identifier, the central shared library knows if the document is already there.
Usually, when publishing a document, you may first use the library search engine to determine that what you want to publish is actually not in the pool.
Step 1 : Choose to add a new entry
First put your course in edition mode, and activate the "Add an activity or a resource" from a course section.
Click on "Shared Resource" radio button.
When choosing the add a "Shared Resource", you will be presented the choice to "Add a sharedresource" or "Search in library" for exising.
In this scenario you will click on "Add a sharedresource", that will register a new resource in the library, then give you final hand to publish it immediately in course.
In this form you can use the filepicker to choose a file wherever it is located, or upload a new file. Basically, all type of exiting file in Moodle could be registered to sharedresource, with the benefit of:
- Making this file available to use from any teacher in any course (or eventually in any course of the registered category)
- Making this file indexed in full LOM or derivated index
- Making this file being searchable using rich featured search engine.
- Making this file information published through OAI-PMH to external harvesters.
After having defined the resource, you may eventually choose a context for publishing. When chooseing a course category as context, the presence of the resource will be limitated on results obtained from a course context belonging to the category (or its descendants). Thus the context allows to isolate category bound sub libraries.
First you will be required for two mandatory and essential information about the resource:
- the resource title
- a short description
Just below the description, you may choose the publishing context, that defaults to the entire site. Here you can choose to restrict the availability of the resource to a subtree of Moodle's course category tree. In that case, such a resource will NOT:
- Be apparent on OAI-PMH indexes
- Be able to roam to another MNET library (provider)
Then finally you can choose to either upload or designate a file in Moodle, or give an external URL to index:
Step 3: Index and Inform About the Resource
Clicking on "Fill in metadata about this shared resource", you will continue the registration by giving essential information about the resource. Depending on your role in the course, you may be presented more or less metadata attributes to fill in. The site administrator has made a choice of which metadata was valuable in your teaching environment.
Feeding accurate information is essential for the whole library being efficiant and consistant to search in. Choosing which attributes to activate is a tight discussion and debate between library accuracy and author effort at resource creation time. there is no true receipe that works for all institutions an context. So we made it fully configurable (For a deeper informatino about metadata implementation, see Sharedresource Metadata).
The first screen reminds you the metadata standard that is in use, with a short description of its application range.
The upper links/tabs set allow acceeding to the metadata sections that are open to you depending on your profile. Links entries will depend on the metadata standard used for your Moodle instance. Usually, LOM based formats will offer:
- General: main identification and resource type
- Life cycle: People that contributed to the resource and dates of the contributions
- Metadata schema: Formal information about the standard that is used to describe the resource
- Technical information: Information about technical attributes of the resource, file, software or information volume that represents it
- Educationnal: Information about pedagogic aspects of the resource
- Rights: Informatino about property and capability or authrisations to use the resource
- Relation: Links to other resources that may be in relation to this resource
- Annotation: Additional notes
- Classification: Taxonomic indexation into one or more classification trees
Let's continue with a sample of the form. Below will be shown how the "General" section is presented. Attributes can be textual, open content, some date formats, or can be restricted to a set of standard values (vocabulary). The metadata engine will propose adecuate form widgets for each type.
Some attributes are unique values, but some other are lists of undetermined amount of items. For all iterative attributes, a button will allow adding more instances of values to an attribute. You'll see below for example that the keyword attribute has been added once more to accept a second keyword. Also content-Type was added once to mark the resource as containing text and/or image content.
Step 4: Recording the Resource Entry and Selecting it for the Course
Once all information has been input into the form, you will "Validate" at the end of the form, which will have as effect to store the file (if file), register all metadata in database, and pre-select the new entry as candidate to publish in a course.
Now you just have to "choose" the pre-selected resource entry, to create a new sharedresource instance that will publish it in the course. In case you do not want to publish it, or want to publish it using a standard resource (this is also possible using the sharedresource repository), you may just terminate the process here by quitting this screen and returning to the course.
Step 5: Defining Publication Attributes
This is finally the last step: Now we know this is the resource entry we want to publis, we just need say "how" we publish it in the course. This last step deals with the way the shared resource will appear in the course, the link label, the introduction text to the resource, and some windowing aspects of the resource.
At this last stage you can also continue changing to another entry.
