Citation
(2004), "Software for online STEM resource collections", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2004.26322dab.014
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Software for online STEM resource collections
Software for online STEM resource collections
The Internet Scout Project, a research centre at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has recently released version 1.1.1 of its free open source software package Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS). CWIS is software to assemble, organise, and share collections of data about resources, like Yahoo or Google Directory but conforming to international and academic standards for metadata. It was specifically created to help build collections of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) resources and connect them into NSF’s National Science Digital Library, but can be (and is being) used for a wide variety of other purposes.
Features of CWIS (http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/CWIS) include:
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prepackaged taxonomies;
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user-definable metadata schema;
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recommender system;
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keyword and fielded search engine;
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OAI and RSS export; and
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resource annotations and ratings.
CWIS requires a Web server that supports PHP and MySQL. The software is designed for a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) platform, but is also being run on OS X, Solaris and FreeBSD. In a compatible environment, it normally takes less than ten minutes to get CWIS installed and running.