MERLOT Technologies

Essential components of MERLOT are its underlying technologies. MERLOT works with its partner communities to continue to improve and evolve these infrastructure components and make them available in various ways to the MERLOT partners and others. For more information on how to participate with us in our technology initiative, please contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org..

MERLOT Mobile Search

MERLOT has partnered with BlackBerry to develop an application to search MERLOT from your smartphone. We know you are on the go and can’t always get to information you need. The MERLOT Mobile Search will allow you to search MERLOT virtually anywhere you take your mobile phone.  For more information and to download the application, go to http://mobile.merlot.org

Importing Materials to Collection

MERLOT supports batch processes for members who wish to contribute large numbers of materials to our collection.  These processes allow you to add metadata about your digital library into the MERLOT collection and enable people to discover your materials through MERLOT, as well as your existing strategies.  To do this you must first you must identify, in a MERLOT-provided spreadsheet, all the metadata fields in your collection that correspond to the exact information and format needed to transer the information to our database. The metadata includes all the fields normally required when contributing an individual material to MERLOT.  The metadata are then imported to the MERLOT collection on a "temporary" basis. We then ask you to verify that the material has been successfully imported to our test server. After you have signed off the uploading was successful, your collection is added to the production version of MERLOT.  For more detailed information about the process and obtaining the spreadsheet needed to populate with your metadata, contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org

RSS Feeds

RSS allows current MERLOT content to be displayed on anyone's web site. With RSS, the content updates automatically given additions to the MERLOT materials collection.
The MERLOT RSS functionality has been created to allow controlled, distributed access to MERLOT data for display on websites beyond MERLOT. The format is designed to make it easy to incorporate MERLOT content into a large number of websites, portals, and applications that otherwise would not be able to display MERLOT content (or would have a much more difficult time doing so). The content is displayed using the RSS format (a standards-based XML format that has been widely accepted for the syndication of frequently changing content such as news).  Any material search completed in MERLOT can be turned in to an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS button at the bottom right of the page and you can add that feed to your reader!

Federated Search

MERLOT's federated search technology allows users to search a number of partner collections and digital libraries (including MERLOT) at one time. These other digital libraries include NSDL, EdNA Online, ARIADNE Foundation, NIME, ComPADRE, University of North Carolina Professional Development Portal and the IEEE Computer Society.  Federated search can be thought of as one giant search engine, searching across many collections at once, and returning results from all the collections in one list. This allows users to get results from many collections at once instead of going to each individually. Thus, the time it takes to find and evaluate material can be significantly reduced.  Search results are combined into one hit list and sorted by relevance, title, or originating collection.   All results are presented in order of relevance, the relevance ranking being defined by the search service provider. To access MERLOT’s Federated Search, go to federated search technology page to conduct a search. .

Web Services

Underlying federated search is MERLOT's Web Services software. Our Web Services may be incorporated into Web-based applications by software developers to provide direct search capability into the MERLOT collection from a Web-based application. MERLOT currently offers a “basic” Web Service available to any MERLOT members, subject to the terms and conditions of our Web Services and related Software Agreement found at http://taste.merlot.org/wsrs.html.  An “advanced” Web Service will be deployed sometime early 2009 and will be available to MERLOT Partners as part of the Partnership Memorandum of Understanding.

MERLOT has defined new licensing requirements regarding the display of metadata returned by our Web Services.  All information can be found in our Web Services and Related Software Agreement.   Details of the MERLOT Web Services can be found by downloading the documentation. 

To access our Web Services                 

If you are a MERLOT Web Service developer and wish to deploy the new MERLOT Web Service, you must obtain our existing Web Service code (as of 10/06/08).  The code and its related documentation can be found at the link above.

If you are a System Administrator and wish to install an application that contains the MERLOT Web Service, you must obtain a new license key to “unlock” the MERLOT Web Service code in your application.  You can initiate a key request at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/signWebServicesForm.htm.  Once you fill in the form with information about your institution and your intended use of the Web Service, MERLOT will send you an email containing the key to unlock the Web Service for use within your application. When the Web Service is operational, your users will notice improved performance and functionality. 

MERLOT can also be searched via MERLOT/Blackboard Building Blocks.   For more information on the availability go to http://www.blackboard.com/corp/objects/inc/B2Details.asp?ExtensionID=10072. 

Questions about MERLOT Technologies should be directed to Barbra Bied Sperling, Manager of Technical Development at bsperling@calstate.edu.