Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

Professionals, 2nd edn. London: Aslib.
103

---

1
105
Technical standards, specifications
and access management
Introduction
Since the first computer-based library systems in the 1960s, librarians
have had to work increasingly closely with technologists and computer
scientists. Systems librarians often have an extensive knowledge of
technical issues; however, this book is not aimed at the technologically
savvy librarian. It is aimed at the regular information professional who
wants to keep up with the times and be able to hold their own in a fast-
changing world.
An ever-increasing amount of jargon exists in the world of digital
libraries and virtual learning environments. This chapter attempts to cut
through the jargon, to define the key terms that you really need to know
about and to give you a working knowledge of other terms that you
might hear. It is written in plain English and should enable you to hold
your own in most conversations with technical staff. It is worth
remembering that learning technology is a relatively new field and staff
in this area love acronyms and jargon. Most of these terms are really just
long words for very simple concepts. So don’t be put off, and don’t
forget, if you can learn the Dewey Decimal Classification and MARC
then you are well on your way! This chapter is designed to be a quick
reference guide to cover most of the technological language associated
with virtual learning environments and electronic resources. General
standards and specifications are first discussed. The chapter then goes on
to examine standards in the library professions and standards and
specifications in the e-learning sector.
5

---

Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
What are standards and why are they
important?
Technical standards are important because of the rapid pace of
technological change. In the library world, the use of standards in all
sorts of areas is well established and their importance widely recognised.
However, in the e-learning sphere, standards are only beginning to be
established. The key word here is interoperability. Without standards,
information can become ‘locked’ into proprietary solutions. This means
that your data can only be retrieved or transformed with difficulty.
Proprietary solutions are everywhere; for example, in libraries we rely on
commercial vendors to supply many library management systems.
However, it is important that these solutions conform to recognised
standards, so that we are not tied to one library management system
forever. The same is true with e-learning systems and many of the
associated technologies.
The World Wide Web: from HTML to XML
It seems hard to believe that the World Wide Web is only a little over
ten years old. It was invented in 1991 by a computer scientist called Tim
Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee created the first web page using HyperText
Mark-up Language (HTML) and put it online in August of that year. In
1994 Berners Lee went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in the US. The
Consortium establishes standards for the World Wide Web. In 2003,
they decided that all standards must contain royalty-free technology, so
they can be easily adopted by anyone.
Some librarians have become familiar with HTML, although
knowledge of this language is not essential to create web pages. Most
modern web browsers now come with HTML composition tools that
allow users to create web pages with little or no knowledge of this
language. These tools use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and
examples of such packages are Microsoft FrontPage or Netscape
Composer. For more sophisticated web page creation the Macromedia
package, Dreamweaver, has greater potential for the more experienced
designer, but can also be used in a relatively simplistic way with minimal
training.
In the real world, computer systems and databases frequently contain
data in incompatible formats. One of the most time-consuming
106

---

Standards, specifications and access management
challenges for developers has been to exchange data between such
systems over the Internet. XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) is a
language that is being increasingly used for web publishing and has been
a recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C: