SubDocuments in Digital Libraries and Learning Tools Dave Archer, Lois M. L. Delcambre, Jeremy Steinhauer Portland State University Portland, Oregon USA

Observation Educators cite and import subdocuments in new works far more often than whole documents Current copy-and-paste approach to incorporating subdocs prevents re-finding of original source Work invested in finding useful subdocs cannot be leveraged by other users seeking similar material

Idea Provide tools in existing authoring and browsing tools to create subdocuments from source documents Make subdocuments first-class objects in digital libraries, and define relationships between subdocument and parent document library objects Enable authoring tools to import subdocuments and annotate them with origin metadata

Proof-of-Concept, 1 Subdocuments in Fedora MS Word modified to allow subdoc export Fedora ingest client modified to create subdocs as first-class library objects, with multiple representation datastreams Fedora modified to support parent-child relations for subdocs and parent docs Fedora browser modified to display parents and children in browse results

Proof-of-Concept, 2 Subdocuments in Walden’s Paths Firefox plug-in allows clipping and markup of subdocs from web pages (and inclusion of links to original URL) Modified Fedora ingest client used to import clips as first-class library objects Resulting library objects imported to Waldens’ Paths

Conclusions Current authoring and digital library tools sufficient to demonstrate concepts Initial “wish list” of features identified to improve subdocument capabilities in authoring and digital library software