Otevřená výuková a výzkumná prostředí

Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.

In the most recent issue of Respons, Peter Josephson writes about the university crisis right after the turn of the century in 1800. Developments in information technology had kept anenormous pace: the printing costs had fallen, and an increasing amount of teaching material was available in books. This had created a crisis for teachers at universities. As far as anybody could remember, they had held lectures where they had read aloud from some book or manuscript of their own, where students had had to pay a small admissions fee to the lectures. But apparently, disrespectful students had started to skip those lectures – they would sit down in libraries to read instead.

What to do about it?

Naturally, the university teachers tried to convince the students that they would learn much better by going to the teachers’ readings-aloud, than by reading a textbook from the most pedagogic teacher on their own. The success in this approach was not remarkable.

Apparently, force was needed against this misconduct. The philologist Johann David Michaeles, of Göttingen, demanded that students would be allowed to spend a maximum of two hours daily in the library.

Older teachers were warning their younger colleagues from issuing books in their fields. They would never be able to make money teaching, if they gave their students books to study instead.

But reason prevailed.

The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte explained to colleagues and authorities that the arrival of the book made the old read-aloud lectures unnecessary. Get rid of them. Instead, introduce classes about knowledge as such and its basis, that is, how we can know what’s in the books. Introduce seminars where students and teachers discuss the books together. Introduce researching teachers, who can tell students about new findings, that haven’t yet made it into the books.

Fichte’s ideas were taken up by Wilhelm von Humboldt, linguist and department manager at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, in founding the first university where all teachers were assumed to be researching in parallel with teaching. It took a couple of decades, but the read-aloud sessions disappeared from universities, and were replaced with activities that made teaching more effective, all while raising the intellectual bar.

Let’s hope that the current ongoing technology shift will, in time enough, be managed just as well.

CollectiveAccess (původním názvem OpenCollection) vznikl v roce 2003 na základě zjištění americké firmy Whirl-i-Gig (která spolupracuje s různými institucemi v USA i Evropě), že je prakticky nemožné najít dostupný, otevřený a rozšiřitelný katalogizační software.

CollectiveAccess supports a number of Metadata Standards created and used by library and information professionals. These include Dublin Core, PBCore, SPECTRUM, VRACore, CDWA, CCO, DACS, DarwinCore, MARC, and more.

The Configuration Library allows you to preview and download installation profiles that were developed for partner institutions with specialized collections management needs. These were designed to meet the functional requirements of real-world projects and go beyond the scope of traditional metadata standards. Choose from special configurations for art collections, historical societies, institutional archives, mixed collections, time-based media and natural history collections.

Cataloging features allow you go beyond basic cataloging information, with subjects and keywords, attached media and georeferencing. Create your own controlled vocabularies, authorities, or use Library of Congress Subject Headings. CollectiveAccess also supports multi-lingual cataloging, allowing you to create and publish your records multiple languages simultaneously.

CollectiveAccess includes many administrative features for managing your collection. You can catalog intake information for acquisitions, purchases and loans by creating Object Lots. Use the Storage Locations hierarchy tool to track the locations of all of the Objects in your collection. The fully customizable display allows you to specify locations beginning from a campus or facility, all the way down to a single drawer. You can also track conservation information, provenance and condition reports with fields that precisely suit your requirements.

Publish your collection to the web using Pawtucket, our full-featured web presentation and access module. Access levels allow you to choose what parts of your collection to share, and which to keep private. Custom display tools allow you to choose exactly what information is published for each object. Any changes you make are instantly posted to the web without needing to maintain a separate website or upload additional data. As with all CollectiveAccess products, Pawtucket is freely available under the open-source GNU Public License.

Woonsocket and Pascoag (currently in development) will make CollectiveAccess fully accessable to iPhone and iPad users, and support touch-screen gallery kiosk displays. As with other CollectiveAccess products they applications will be freely available under the open-source GNU Public License.

This image shows datasets that have been published in Linked Data format, by contributors to the Linking Open Data community project and other individuals and organisations. It is based on metadata collected and curated by contributors to the CKAN directory. Clicking the image will take you to an image map, where each dataset is a hyperlink to its homepage.

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