MURIEL

MUltimedia Education System for Librarians Introducing Remote Interactive Processing of ELectronic Documents

Jens Koblin gives an overview of the now completed MURIEL project.

Objectives

The MURIEL project aimed to create, demonstrate and evaluate a multimedia interactive training and education system for librarians and information professionals. It produced a multimedia book suitable both for lecturers and students of librarianship as well as for information professionals already working in the field. The subjects "Information Ethics" and "Libraries and the Internet" had been chosen for the initial courseware but, in the long term, MURIEL may host a whole collection of courseware added by libraries and information research institutions according to their own needs. MURIEL demonstrated and evaluated the practical applications of innovative telematic services and systems in on-line-education, training and resource-sharing environments for information professionals.

The System Architecture

MURIEL was an electronic education system with remote document processing facilities. The libraries and information research institutes used their LANs (Local Area Networks) or stand alone systems to integrate MURIEL courseware user and developer workstations, as well as a Courseware Data Server. This server provided an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) gateway to import courseware to and export from other MURIEL Courseware Data Servers.

ISDN had been chosen for its availability, cost effectiveness, suitability for multimedia information transmission (such as text, images, graphics, sound and video) and the wide range of other ISDN services available for information professionals such as remote joint processing of electronic documents.

Figure 1: System Architecture of the MURIEL Prototype

The Courseware

Courseware models and specifications were developed taking into account the latest electronic training technologies, such as multimedia courseware, hyperlinks between lessons, interactivity, remote access through ISDN and user-friendly interfaces. MURIEL offered its users remote consultation of the multimedia courseware located on the Courseware Server and for the courseware developers the possibility to integrate and modify the content of the MURIEL courseware.

The MURIEL system offered off-line help and "learning by doing" facilities as well as incorporating exercises, questions and answers, and also access to third party services such as the Internet, thus creating a very realistic learning situation.

The project also designed and implemented a joint-processing tool, which course developers used to elaborate in common electronic documents. These were integrated into the multimedia courseware.

Copyright

The copyright concept of MURIEL was that use of the content is free. The courseware was produced by the partners or provided for free by third parties. Therefore, in MURIEL only copyright free material was used.

Features

The MURIEL system offered various features for librarians and information specialists as well as for students. The most important were:

• Handling of Multimedia Documents
• Possibility of Uniform Curriculum for various trainers
• Multimedia Information through central course data base with access to the WWW
• Distance Training over ISDN Network with knowledge control, lesson flow control and powerful functionality
• Content Quality guaranteed by means of controlled access to the course for trainer and trainee
• Easy to Use: Graphic User Interface, On-line Help, etc.
• Easy to Integrate Multimedia Documents
• Easy to Manage Course Material
• Interactivity between the involved entities (Tool for Communication between trainer and trainee)

Field Trials

The international field trials took place in real end-user work environments of libraries and universities, where for the duration of about one semester the MURIEL prototype was used to support daily education processes, i.e. creating lessons and studying. During this time, quantitative as well as qualitative data on user requirements and usability of the system were collected.

Duration

The project finished in October 1997.

Project Partners

The following partners participated in the MURIEL project:

• Teles AG, Berlin (Project Leader)
• The British Library, Boston Spa
• Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome (National Research Council of Italy)
• Euromédia Formation, Cannes
• Fachhochschule Stuttgart - Hochschule für Bibliotheks- und Informationswesen (University of Library and Information Studies)
• Hogeschool Maastricht (School for Library and Information Studies)

Reader Response

If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).

Author Details

Jens Koblin
MURIEL Project Manager
Teles AG
Berlin, Germany

Telephone: +49.30.39928.243
Fax: +49.30.39928.01
Email: koblin@teles.de
URL: <http://www.teles.de/de/eu/muriel.html>

Jens Koblin is the MURIEL Project Manager, Teles AG., Berlin

For citation purposes:
Jens Koblin, "MURIEL: Multimedia Education System for Librarians Introducing Remote Interactive Processing of Electronic Documents", Exploit Interactive, issue 2, 20 July 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue2/muriel/>

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