Jerome is a system which is modular by design. It comprises of a variety of distinct modules which handle data collection, formatting, output, search, indexing, recommendation and more. It’s also fairly unique (as far as I can tell) in that different types of resource also occupy a modular ‘slot’ rather than being interwoven with Jerome itself – it has no differentiation at the code level between books, ebooks, dissertations, papers, journals, journal entries, websites or any other ‘resource’ which people may want to feed it.
As a result of this approach we can use Jerome as a true multi-channel resource discovery tool. All that’s required for anybody to add resources to Jerome and immediately make them searchable and recommendable is for a ‘collection’ to be created and for them to write a bit of code which can make the following API calls as necessary:
- Create a new resource as part of the collection, telling us as much about it as they can.
- Update an existing resource when it changes.
- Delete a resource which is no longer available.
- Optionally record a use of a resource against a user’s account to help build our recommendations dataset.
That’s it. Got a collection of awesome lecture slides you want to feed into Jerome and instantly make known as a resource? You can do that.
We’ll have your API documentation up soon.
