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 initiative, please contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org..

Importing Materials to Collection

MERLOT has begun a process to help members contribute a large number of materials at once through our new importing functionality.  We have developed a procedure to allow you to move your metadata from your digital library or large collection into our database and create the unique materials in MERLOT.  It requires 2 steps, the first of which is for you to clearly identified all the corresponding metadata fields with the exact information and format needed for this process to be completed. This includes all the required fields when currently contributing a material to MERLOT. The MERLOT Development team then runs this information against our database and each material is assigned a unique ID number. Once that entire process is complete and you have signed off on the import, the material records are transferred to the main MERLOT site.  For more detailed information about the process and obtaining the files needed to populate with your metadata, contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org

RSS Feeds

RSS allows current MERLOT content to be displayed on anyone's web site. With RSS, the content updates automatically given additions to the MERLOT materials collection.
The MERLOT RSS functionality has been created to allow controlled, 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).  Any material search completed 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!

Federated Search

MERLOT’s federated search technology framework allows users to search a number of partner collections and digital libraries (including MERLOT) at one time. Federated Search can be thought of as one giant search engine, searching across many collections at once. This allows the user to get results from many collections at once instead of going to each individually. Thus, the time it takes to find and evaluate material can be significantly reduced.  Federated Search hides the complexity of the system by presenting one search tool to the user to perform the search. The results are combined together into one list and sorted by relevance, title, or originating collection.   All results are presented in order of relevance; the relevance ranking being the responsibility of the search service provider.

Web Services

Underlying federated search is MERLOT’s Web Services technologies. Our Web Services may also be used by MERLOT partners to search the MERLOT collection from a partner’s web-based application. MERLOT’s Web Services are available to MERLOT partners as part of the terms of memoranda of understanding that define each negotiated partner relationship.  MERLOT can also be searched via the MERLOT/Blackboard Building Block.  For more information on the availablity and , go to http://www.blackboard.com/corp/objects/inc/B2Details.asp?ExtensionID=10072

We are currently in the process of upgrading our Federated Search and Web services to include additional libraries and search functionality. 

Any questions about MERLOT Technologies should be directed to Barbra Bied Sperling, Manager of Technical Development at bsperling@calstate.edu.