How to Create On-line University Courses in Electronic Archiving: Part 9 - Units

In Part 8 I looked at how to repackage traditional lectures, tutorials and labs for flexible learning. Now I am thinking about what are the 12 units for Electronic Document Management. What I have to start with are six one hour lectures, two one hour tutorial/labs and several assignment questions. In fact the lecture notes do not divide up neatly into the six notional lecture slots, but are in eight units:

1. Introduction
   • Searching
   • Getting there
   • Steps for SMEs
   • Documents or databases?
   • XML
   • The Law
2. Metadata
   • Politics
   • Dublin Core
   • AGLS
3. Standards for eCommerce
   • UN/EDIFACT
   • XML/EDI
   • XML E-commerce
4. E-commerce Examples
   • Web Services
   • GST Tax Form
   • Google Advertising
5. Electronic Document Management
   • Introduction
   • Requirements
   • Design Issues
   • Design Responses
   • Records Management
   • VERS
6. Digital Library
   • Dangerous
   • Accessibility
   • Library
   • MARC Format
7. Publishing
   • Petition
   • Markup
   • E-Publishing at ACS
   • ACM Digital Library
   • Xpub
8. Future Use

In addition, the National Archives of Australia recently changed their web site, with a simplified description of records management, similar to the style introduced by AGIMO with their Web Publishing Guide. With this approach there is a short web page with a few key points in non-technical direct language.

Records management

• Check-up tool
  
• Create, capture & describe
• Keep, destroy or transfer
• Secure, store & preserve
• Access
• Publications

The reader is then directed to the detailed technical guides. These guides appear to have been changed from the previous HTML versions to PDF and Microsoft Word documents, which is unfortunate. The HTML documents were easy to read and refer to online. The PDF and DOC versions are a step backwards to a much harder to read and use format.

This change happened just as I was preparing to present the material to ANU students. As a stopgap measure I changed links in the notes to refer to an archived version of the material at the Internet Archive. But I now need to redo all the links to the new version. It is not clear how I am going to point to material which is now somewhere in the middle of hundreds of pages of PDF.