Image resources in the LR

[Jerome E Grimmer]

Hi all,

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but lately there have been a rash of resources coming in to the LR that are just images.  Now, I can understand that some images *might* be legitimate resources (for example, Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” is an iconic image, however, such an image would likely be accompanied by text or it would really be a video or something like that).  Our import, while somewhat “smart,” isn’t so smart that it can distinguish an iconic image from an ordinary image that was likely published in error.

 

For example: http://node01.public.learningregistry.net/harvest/getrecord?request_ID=a9d77ee3fb9f41ce8e8fcd570f09794d&by_doc_ID=true, in our opinion, was published with the wrong resource_locator and @id.  The resource appears to come from Edmodo Spotlight, and the description seems to indicate that it’s a set of videos useful for getting students up and moving in class, with an end result of delivering physical activity instruction outside the normal P.E. class.  However, the resource as it is isn’t very useful, because it is a link to a screenshot of the web site, not a link to a video or a web page with videos or other things on it.

 

Publishers need to know that they need to publish *useful* resources with *correct* URLs.  The way this resource is published, it looks like it could be a valuable resource to a teacher, however the resource points to an image which is *not useful* based upon the description provided.  Quality! Quality! Quality!  About the only thing I could do with the import to sort these types of things out is for it to simply reject all resources which are still images, but I’m not so sure that would be the appropriate course of action, as an image could very well be an infographic, with all sorts of useful information on it (never mind that it’s not accessible to screen readers).

 

Sorry if this sounded like a rant, but things like this tend to pollute the LR and make it less useful, and we all want the LR to be useful.  I will be contacting the submitter of the above resource directly; it appears they may have used EZPublish or node signing, as this resource was signed by LR Admin.

 

Jerome Grimmer

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

2450 Foundation Drive Suite 100

Springfield, IL

Phone: 217-786-3010 ext. 5857

Toll-free: 1-800-252-4822 ext. 5857

Email: jgri...@siu.edu

This email sent using 100% recycled electrons.

 

[James Collins]

Jerome - Totally agree on this. 

We typically talk in terms of learning resources vs. primary sources. A primary source, such as an image, should have some sort of educational 'value add' to turn it into a learning resource that is appropriate for publishing. The alternative (accepting all primary sources) would make LR into something more like DPLA which is not in scope for LR.

At the Smithsonian, we often found educators struggling to tag primary sources with learning resource metadata. What standard or learning domain would you tag Abe Lincoln's hat with for example? History standards might be a good guess, but what about the inventive math teacher that is using the photo to teach about the volume of cylinders? Hard to know.

Smooshing these two things together (learning resources and primary sources) just results in all kinds of trouble.

James

[Steve Midgley]

Looks like the publisher was kind enough to provide an email contact, so I'm looping in Viraj to this this thread (Viraj - you'll need to join the learningreg-dev google group in order to respond to the whole group).

I agree that a link to a screenshot as the *primary* resource is unproductive. A link to the website that is depicted by the screenshot is probably very useful, and including a thumbnail or other screenshot image as supplemental metadata in the envelope would be similarly helpful.

Best,

Steve

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[viraj.par...@edmodo.com]

Hi Steve,

I had a separate quick conversation with Jerome before you had responded. On our side, we are looking at the problem with image URLs. It is not intentional and the resources are supposed to be created with the actual links to the resources. I'll update everyone here once the problem is resolved.

For now, with the change of auth from Persona to other services, I am having trouble accessing the account, so I'm sending a separate query on the group about that. We will be able to fix this once I regain access.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Thanks,

Best regards,

Viraj