Collecting information about educational materials

[Brian McMahon]

(1) Note the existence of this web page:
http://www.iucr.org/education/resources

(2) Now please look at http://www.iycr2013.org/educational-materials/add
Feel free to fill in this form one or more times.

(3) Look again at the link in (1); or at
http://www.iycr2013.org/educational-materials

Explanation. The page (1) has existed for a very long time on the IUCr web server. It's derived from the page Howard Flack maintained on Crystallography World Wide since the mid 1990s. As you see, it's not very up to date; but I did get Amanda Berry to check through it recently and remove dead links.

The page at (3) is exactly the same page, but linked in under the IYCr website. It shows that we can share content across the websites if we choose to host both at Chester. Page (2) is a facility allowing anyone to add new content. There is already such a facility on the IUCr site, but it needs password access and is restricted at the moment to in-house staff.

The idea is that there is no point in duplicating effort. Already the IUCr site has a valuable (but quite small) set of resources. We could just build on it. You will notice that the form that needs to be filled in is already quite long. To capture all the information Elena suggests, it would need to be longer still. This will make it quite unattractive for people to complete.

However, we could make this form rather shorter - just the minimum of information needed - and allow anyone (i.e. the general public) to complete it. When each suggestion were received, it would create an entry on the IUCr site that needed to be approved. I suggest that that approval would be done by an "expert": it might be Elena, it might be a set of volunteers from the Teaching (and/or other) Commission(s). Part of the approval process would involve checking that it was a real and a valuable resource, and completing a fuller version of the form, with extra metadata that would make the information more valuable in the longer term.

If this sounds like a good idea, we could work out exactly what metadata (i.e. form fields) to fill in. We would need to explore different ways of organising the representation of the information collected. The existing page (1) is not going to be very efficient if we have thousands of entries; and we would want to provide different ways of viewing it - i.e. separate lists by subject area, by educational level etc. etc.

We could probably have this set up as a working system within a week or two. Then Elena could send her invitation to the Commissions etc., just pointing them to the page (2), and we could begin to collect people's suggestions directly as new content. Later we can make it available to the general public, perhaps as a "Suggest a new teaching aid" feature on the live IYCr website during the International Year.

[sinelarsen]

It think that it will be an execellent and very timesaving if we can use this template, but would like to hear from the other members of the committee

Sine

[evboldyreva]

I agree that this is a very helpful form, but can it be used for materials which are not in the electronic format and not published papers? Can we suggest a universal form, or shoul we have two different forms for electronic / non electronic, published / non-published materials?

Elena