The Evergreen State College

2000 - 2001
Part-Time Program

Community Information Systems
Fall, 2000 Case Study

Collaborative Bibliography

http://www.scn.org/edu/tesc-ds/2000-2001/fall/case_study.html

Updated: October 2, 2000

The objective of this case study is to create a useful web application for the network, a CPSR working group dedicated to community networks and other forms of democratic technology. The working group is informal and does most of its work online. It has about 150 people on the list from about 30 countries.

We will be using the same set of tools for the case study as we'll be using during the rest of the quarter. This is a real, though somewhat scaled-down, application. It is intended to be used and useful. It is also a focused prelude for what we're going to be doing in terms of software development for the rest of the quarter. (The only thing missing -- albeit a critical component -- is that the teams won't be engaging with a community for feedback and guidance and ideas during the course of the case study.)

Working in groups of four, students will develop a collaborative bibliography web application. The important thing to remember is that your team should actually deliver a working application. This will often mean sacrificing something that you'd like to include.

Each application will be put on the web. Each team will send the URL for the application to Doug or Randy who will put the link on the CIS web site. This will enable network members to comment on the look and feel, ease of use, and overall usefulness. (Doug and Randy may devise some online feedback / voting / eval form to make it easier to get feedback from the network. )

Each application will be developed using HTML, CGI, Perl, and MySQL.

There will be a page that displays the citations in a standard way. The citation should be listed alphabetical order by last name. This page should have a link to the input new citation page.

Examples

Holtzblat, K. and Jones, S. (1993). Contextual Inquiry: A Participatory Technique for Systems Design. In Schuler, D. and Namioka, A. (eds.), Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (two authors in a book edited by two editors)

Muller, M. and Kuhn, S. (eds.) (1993). Special Issue on Participatory Design. CACM, 36.4 (June). (two editors, entire journal issue)

Schuler, D. (1996). New Community Networks: Wired for Change. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (one author, book)

Schuler, D. and Groves, R. (2000). Community Information Systems -- Case Study. "Fall, 2000 Case Study: Collaborative Bibliography" http://www.scn.org/edu/tesc-ds/2000-2001/fall/case_study.html (October 2). The material in quotes is the title of the actual page you have cited. The unquoted title is the title of the web page of the material (from the TITLE tage in the HTML) you are citing. The date is whatever date cited in the document (often listed as "last update"). The author of the page is usually listed at the bottom of each web page as the person to contact. The url should be "live" unless you know it to be not available.

Strong, G. (1995). New Directions in HCI Education, Research and Practice. interactions, 2.1. (January). (article in journal)

Webster, F. and Robins, K. (1989). Towards a Cultural History of the Information Society. Theory and Society no. 18. (article in journal, two authors)

The team can optionally decide to add other types of information. Web sites are a great -- and natural -- type to add. If your team decides to do this, they'll probably want. to make the url into a hyperlink.

Other Information

There will be a page (or other method) with which to enter the necessary bibliographic information for a new entry using HTML forms and CGI. The form should collect all the necessary information about the citation including key words and comments about the citation (event though they may not be printed). Perl and MySQL will be used. How the application looks is up to your team. You may choose to allow multiple citations per page, for example.

The minimum bibliographic types include books, journal articles, and chapters in edited books. (You can optionally include other types.)

Don't worry about security on this one unless you really want to and your team is convinced that it's do-able in the allotted time.

Each team will also need to decide how to check for incomplete or inaccurate information. You must also be able to justify the approach your team took towards addressing that concern. You may also want to have certain default values.

Each team member must do approximately the same amount of work. Although it's fine -- even recommended -- to specialize, each team member is expected to become proficient in each of the technical skills that is used.

Teams can modify -- or disregard -- any of these requirements as long as there is sufficient rationale and team consensus.

More advanced options include an administration screen (password protected) for editing the citations or a search capability.

Schedule


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