MERLOT Technologies

Essential components of MERLOT are its underlying technologies. MERLOT works with its partner communities to continue to improve and evolve these infrastructure components and make them available in various ways to the MERLOT partners and others. For more information on how to participate with us in our technology initiatives, please contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org. Below are descriptions of the different MERLOT Technology initiatives current in production.

• Importing Materials to the MERLOT Collection
• RSS Feeds
• Federated Search
• MERLOT Mobile Search
• MERLOT Web Service
  • To request use of MERLOT Web Services (license key)
  • Web Services fee structure
• MERLOT Integration with LMS's
• MERLOT Building Block integration with Blackboard
• MERLOT Integration into Moodle 2.0

To see the latest MERLOT upgrades, visit http://taste.merlot.org/MERLOTEnhancements.html.

Importing Materials to MERLOT Collection
MERLOT supports batch processes for members who wish to contribute large numbers of materials to our collection.  The minimum number of materials in a spreadsheet is 100. This batch import allow you to add metadata about your digital library into the MERLOT collection and enable people to discover your materials through MERLOT.  To do this you must identify, in a MERLOT-provided spreadsheet, all the metadata fields in your collection that correspond to the exact required information and format needed to transfer the information to our database. The metadata includes all the fields normally required when contributing an individual material to MERLOT.  The metadata are then imported to the MERLOT collection. After you have signed off on the import, your collection is added to the production database of MERLOT.  For more detailed information about the process and to obtain the spreadsheet, contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org

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RSS Feeds
RSS allows current MERLOT content to be displayed on anyone's web site with our RSS feeds. The MERLOT RSS feeds have been created to allow distributed access to MERLOT data for display on websites beyond MERLOT. The format is designed to make it easy to incorporate MERLOT content into a large number of websites, portals, and applications that otherwise would not be able to display MERLOT content (or would have a much more difficult time doing so). The content is displayed using the RSS format (a standards-based XML format that has been widely accepted for the syndication of frequently changing content such as news). Additionally, any material or member search conducted in MERLOT can be turned in to an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS button at the bottom right of the page and you can add that feed to your reader! MERLOT also has over 75 'canned' RSS feeds that can be found at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/rss.htm. Just select a discipline and then a material or member feed to get a feed.

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Federated Search
With MERLOT's Federated Search technology, users are able to search 25 partner collections and digital libraries (including MERLOT) all at once. Federated search can be thought of as one giant search engine, searching across many collections at once, and returning results from all the collections in one list. The MERLOT Federated Search can be found at http://fedsearch.merlot.org/fedsearch/fedsearch.jsp, as well as clicking "Search other libraries" at the top of any MERLOT page.

By using the MERLOT Federated Search, users are able to get results from many collections at once instead of going to each individually. Currently our Federated Search includes: NSDL: National Science Digital Library, Connexions, MIT Open Courseware, Open Courseware Consortium (OCW), OER Commons, Orange Grove, Wikipedia, World Images (an educational image repository), Scribd, Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, ARIADNE, LORNET, OUJ Open University of Japan, comPADRE, MERLOT Physics, MERLOT Information Technology, MERLOT Faculty Development, UNC Professional Development Portal, and IEEE Computer Society.

When searching more than one library at once, the results are presented in order of relevance, the relevance ranking being defined by the search service provider. Any collections' results can be viewed separately by clicking the colleciton at the top of the search results page. To access MERLOT’s Federated Search, go to the federated search page to conduct a search.

. MERLOT Mobile Search
MERLOT has partnered with Research in Motion to develop an application to search MERLOT from your Blackberry smartphone. We know you are on the go and can’t always get to information you need. The MERLOT Mobile Search will allow you to search MERLOT Learning materials virtually anywhere you take your mobile phone.  You can open the browser on your smartphone and view a material or email it to yourself to view at a later time. For more information and to download the application, go to http://mobile.merlot.org.

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MERLOT Web Services
Underlying federated search is MERLOT's Web Services software. Our Web Services can be incorporated into Web-based applications by software developers to provide direct search capability into the MERLOT collection from a Web-based application. MERLOT currently offers a “basic simple search ” Web Service available to any MERLOT members, subject to the terms below as well as the conditions of our Web Services and related Software Agreement found at http://taste.merlot.org/wsrs.html.  

MERLOT also offers a suite of web services for partners as part of the Partnership MOU. These include the MERLOT Advanced Web Services for Materials and Members, a "Contribute Materials" web service as well as a number of other utility web services for registering and adding material comments. The latest addition is the Personal Collection web service to add and edit Personal Collections. The conditions of their use can be found in the table below. For more information, contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org, and they will connect you to the right development person.

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Web Services Fee Structure
All Partner fees shown in this chart are one-time and include continuing support. If a Partner terminates their partnership with MERLOT, deployed Web Services will be permitted to operate for 6 months following the termination date. Thereafter, Non-Partner fees will immediately apply. Former Partners will have 30 additional days to fund the continued use of the Web Service(s). If the fees are not paid within 30 days, the Web Service(s) will be shut down on the 31st day. If you wish to be a partner with MERLOT to utilize the web services, please send an email to the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org and they will direct you to the right person to discuss a partnership agreement for our technologies.

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To request use of MERLOT Web Services
If you are a MERLOT Web Service developer or a System Administrator wishing to deploy the new MERLOT Web Service, you must obtain our existing Web Service code and request a license key to "unlock" the MERLOT Web service code in your application.  The code and its related documentation will be sent once a license key is requested.  You can initiate a key request at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/signWebServicesForm.htm.  Documentation on requesting and implementing our webservicescan be found here. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org.

Once you fill in the form with information about your institution and your intended use of the Web Service, MERLOT will send you an email containing the key to unlock the Web Service for use within your application. This process takes up to 3 days from the time you request the key to it being sent to you. MERLOT has defined new licensing requirements regarding the display of metadata returned by our Web Services.  All information can be found in our Web Services and Related Software Agreement.   

MERLOT Integration with LMS's
Desire2Learn and ANGEL LEARNING are among those that have incorporated a MERLOT search into their products by using our web service.  If you have either of these products and do not have the ability to search MERLOT, please contact support for assistance (ANGEL users - support is through your support portal; Desire2Learn users - contact your account manager or system administrator for upgrade information). For more information on MERLOT and the use of our webservice with LMS's, go to http://taste.merlot.org/lms.html.

MERLOT Building Block integration with Blackboard
MERLOT has developed a building block to allow Blackboard users to search MERLOT via a Blackboard Building Blocks. For more information and to download the building block, go to http://www.blackboard.com/Partnerships/Extensions.aspx.

MERLOT Integration into Moodle 2.0
Moodle 2.0 has integrated a mechanism to allow searching MERLOT. System administrators have the ability to enable “MERLOT search” for MERLOT learning object metadata.  When this capability is enabled, Moodle 2.0 instructors can directly search the MERLOT collection, from within Moodle and insert learning materials. Please note that the MERLOT plugin for Moodle was not created by MERLOT, and MERLOT does not provide technical support for the plugin.  MERLOT has provided a set of instructions for information purposes only, and are subject to change at any time. Click here to download the information guide.

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All our technology initiatives rely on a strong collection of learning materials. Since MERLOT only stores materials created with their Content Builder, we strive to maintain valid links to all materials in the MERLOT database. To do this, we conduct a series of link checking activities on a monthly basis. Questions about MERLOT Technologies should be directed to Barbra Bied Sperling, Manager of Technical Development at bsperling@calstate.edu.