Checking Out: Download and Digital Library Exchange for Complex Objects

摘要

Digital resources are becoming increasingly complex and are being used in diverse ways. For example, educational resources may be cataloged in digital libraries, used offline by educators and students, or used in a learning management system. In this paper we present the notion of "checking out" complex resources from a digital library for offline download or exchange with another digital library or learning management system. We present a mechanism that enables the customization, download and exchange of complex resources. We show how the mechanism also supports digital library and learning management system exchange formats in a generic fashion with minimal overhead. We also show how checkouts grow linearly with respect to the complexity of the resources.