RDNInclude: Rebranding Remote Resources

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RDN-Include Re-branding Remote Resources

• Subject Gateways in the UK
• The UK Higher Education community has funded a
  range of subject gateway, now part of the RDN
  (Resource Discovery Network) which provide access
  to quality, manually catalogued Web resources.

www.omni.ac.uk
www.sosig.ac.uk
SOSIG Home Page
Searching using OMNI
The subject gateways cover a range of subject
areas, such as social sciences (SOSIG) and
medicine (OMNI).

• The Institutional Perspective
• Although institutions are appreciative of the
  services, some feel that
• They have a need to complement the subject
  gateways with resources catalogued locally, to
  reflect local needs
• There may be local pressures to be active in
  this area
• The branding of interfaces is important

An institutional gateway
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The Solution RDN-Include

• RDN-Include
• The need to address institutions concerns over
  branding has led to the development of the
  RDN-Include software suite which allows
  institutions to provide user access to the RDN
  subject gateways without the user leaving the
  institutions Web site.

Here we see how a fictitious University provides
access to RDN gateways while maintaining its own
look-and-feel.
The results of a search appear to be provided by
the institution.
CGI and JavaScript Implementations RDN-Include is
implemented as a CGI script. This approach,
however, requires that the local system
administrator installs the CGI script. In some
places this may be a barrier institutions may
not be willing to install CGI scripts from third
parties. In order to address this problem, a
lightweight alternative has been developed using
JavaScript. This solution is called RDNI-lite.
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The RDN-Include Architecture

• The RDN-Include Solution
• End-user interaction is handled by the
  RDN-Include script, thus retaining an
  institutional URL. If the script is not passed
  any search parameters, it reads a template file
  held locally.

The template file is essentially a normal HTML or
XHTML Web page, formatted with a local
look-and-feel.
RDN content (the search box and browse
hierarchy) is added to this template dynamically
at run time by including in it XML rdnitag
elements of the form ltrdnitag
val"RDN"/gt where represents a unique service
identifier.
The RDNI-lite Solution To use RDNi-Lite an author
simply has to embed a JavaScript ltscriptgt
element in a normal HTML page. The src
attribute of the script element points to a CGI
Perl script running on the RDN server.
The CGI script generates a set of
document.write() JavaScript statements that, when
executed by the Web browser, embed the
appropriate RDN content into the Web page. The
CGI script takes several optional arguments that
provide rdnitag.
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Applicability to News Feeds

• Need For News Feeds
• The RDN wishes to make news available to the user
  community. It makes use of RSS to provide news
  channels.

RSS-xpress An RSS tool called RSS-xpress has been
created which allows RSS channels to be created,
modified and parsed. RSS-xpress is available at
lthttp//rssxpress.ukoln.ac.uk/gt.
RSS-xpress lite For institutions to incorporate
news feeds on their own Web site they will have
to install RSS-xpress and configure it to include
local branding. As this may be a barrier, a
JavaScript version has been developed. This
allows RDN (and other) news feeds to be managed
by HTML authors.
RDN-Include and RSS-xpress are open source. For
further information on these tools or on this
paper please contact Andy Powell
ltA.Powell_at_ukoln.ac.ukgt.