Vocabulary for author roles for learning resources?

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Anna Lindfors

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Apr 22, 2021, 5:39:42 AM4/22/21
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Hello,

we've implemented LRMI in our OER service and have recently started thinking about needing author roles. Although not present in LRMI, schema has a type (role) and property (roleName) for this, but no recommended vocabularies. This has come up especially with cases where the OERs are made by a larger team – in these cases it is important to distinguish who is the illustrator, who is the editor, who is responsible for the writing, who is the translator and so on. There are several vocabularies for roles, such as NISO Credit (http://credit.niso.org) and MARC’s relator (https://www.loc.gov/marc/relators/relaterm.html), but none of the ones I know about really fit learning resources. Do you know of a suitable vocabulary to use? Could this be an addition to LRMI?


All the best,

Anna Lindfors

Steffen Rörtgen

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Apr 22, 2021, 6:09:59 AM4/22/21
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Hello Anna,

I think this is a great idea.
In my project we were also recently discussing this topic.
What do you think about opening up a document and collecting some ideas and implementations from other standards and then maybe talking about it at next LRMI meeting?

I just made a very quick and dirty draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CYzuB7n5j7LNbwJWxAlOOB1A7SIL5yVa92LWqmejE1Y/edit?usp=sharing

Right now I just added some roles from LOM, but maybe we will find some others and can discuss about useful roles. Maybe you can add some of your requirements from your project there.

All the best
Steffen Rörtgen
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Hugh Paterson III

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Apr 22, 2021, 7:51:01 AM4/22/21
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Anna,

I'm a little confused by the assertion about MARC relator roles not being sufficient. It covers all the roles you mentioned. Which ones are you looking for?

MARC does contain:

illustrator  Illustrator [ill]
editor Editor [edt]
Author— the who is responsible for the writing Author [aut]
translator Translator [trl]
publisher: Publisher [pbl]
cartographer Cartographer [ctg]
from Seffen's list: subject matter expert: Expert [exp] 

Steffen, I moved the LOM roles listed in the document you shared into a table so they could be aligned with other schemas. I listed the MARC relator roles that I know of which would align with the obvious matches in LOM. I am not familiar with some of the other LOM Roles so maybe after some clarifying discussion we might discover that some more MARC relator roles are equivalent.

I find that MARC is fairly broad and comprehensive. However, the DataCite roles are another vocabulary focused on repository management roles, and it is not clear how some of those roles do or don't overlap. If we find that the MARC roles are insufficient I would be in favor of presenting the use cases and suggested roles to the MARC committee for inclusion. Their annual meeting is in January.

all the best,
- Hugh



Anna Lindfors

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Apr 22, 2021, 8:19:20 AM4/22/21
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Hello Steffen and Hugh,

thank you for such quick responses. I think the document is a great idea, I'll add a few notes later on to it. 

And as for MARC, I didn't phrase myself very well. MARC's relator is very broad, for our use maybe too broad. I would be interested in finding the roles that are relevant for learning resources. Maybe it would be possible to make a suggested list of roles based on for example MARC roles? So for MARC's relator the issue is not it not having the roles needed, but that it has too much going on. Credit is missing needed roles, but also the way they are defined makes it hard to use it for learning resources.

All the best, Anna

Stuart Sutton

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Apr 22, 2021, 8:51:47 AM4/22/21
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First, I would suggest that were an LRMI concept scheme be developed, that it be a profile that reuses concepts from these existing concept schemes and then qualifies each concept to make it suitable for learning resources (i.e., that narrows (not changes) their definitions to meet Anna desire for more precision).  So long as the qualifications to the existing concepts simply narrow the terms' applicability, these would be legitimate reuses.   

Phil Barker

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Apr 22, 2021, 9:08:20 AM4/22/21
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Hello all, great to see this developing. I would be happy to make time to discuss it in our monthly LRMI Task Group calls.

I agree with Stuart that if we develop an LRMI concept scheme for role we should reuse established terms wherever possible and only create new ones for roles that are education-specific; such is the LRMI way :)

Anna, I would be really interested in know more about what you are using LRMI for. Do you have anything you could link to?

Regards, Phil

(chair LRMI Task Group)

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Anna Lindfors

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Apr 22, 2021, 9:54:52 AM4/22/21
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Hello Phil,

yes of course! We use LRMI for open learning resources' metadata in our service Library of Open Educational Resources aoe.fi. We use it with the LRMI concept schemes and Finnish vocabularies and ontologies to match the learning resources to different learning contexts in Finland (For example to the national curricula in the basic and vocational education https://eperusteet.opintopolku.fi/#/fi). Through our OAI-PMH-api we also provide our data transformed into XML to the Finnish national service for libraries, museums and archives Finna.fi. We have made our implementation with the LRMI 1.1 version.

If you have any questions about our service, I'm happy to answer :)

And regarding the main subject of the conversation: I too agree with Stuart.

Regarads, Anna  

Hugh Paterson III

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Sep 24, 2022, 11:28:24 PM9/24/22
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Greetings All, 

I am following up on this "long dead" thread because I am looking ar Roles again. I wanted to know if anyone did implement any sort of vocabulary related to Roles attached to educational resources. In my case I am looking at roles related to resource creation and roles related to resource use (audience). 
The google doc mentioned in the thread is still out there and open to be edited.

I'm specifically interested in roles in the language-learning classroom and roles in the classroom where linguistics is instructed.

If we have some consensus on the use cases and needs for roles not included in MARC I am willing to write the proposal for adding the roles to the MARC list.


all the best,
Hugh

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