Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. What is Drupal?
Answer: Drupal is an open source software package that allows users to publish and manage website content.
Q. What is a Pathway Project?
Answer: Pathways projects represent a strategy for building the NSDL in a manner that best supports efficient resource discovery for broad categories of users. Each project is centered on a particular community of users and provide audience-specific views of the NSDL's materials. The Ensemble pathway represents the broad community of areas interested in computing.
Q. Why is there a “dc.title” in the search results?
Answer: Ensemble uses OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) to gather content from a wide range of computing communities. As a content provider, the communities use the Dublin Core standard which has 15 metadata elements, one of which is the ‘title’. Thus “dc.title” holds the data on the Ensemble site from the field labeled ‘title’ by the content provider.
Q. How do I join a group?
Answer: The CS1 group is open for everyone to join; just click on the Join link. The ACM group is closed and is by invitation only. The other groups require that you request membership.
Q. Why is there a Facebook login option? What does it do?
Answer: Users can connect to Ensemble site with their Facebook account. First, click on Connect to Facebook link and enter your Facebook user ID and Password. If you are a new user to our site, click on "Register new user"; otherwise click on "I already have an account," which directs you to enter your existing user ID and Password for the Ensemble site. This creates a link between your Facebook account and the Ensemble site. Atter this initial process you can login into Ensemble site with your Facebook account details .
By connecting Ensemble with Facebook, you can directly download your profile picture, and your personal details like full name, etc. from facebook to Ensemble site. Also your friends in facebook can find that you are connected to Ensemble: A Digital Library for Computing Education.
Q. Why are there two results window for a search - one labeled “Results from Drupal” and the other labeled “Results from Collections”?
Answer: To give flexibility to the user and allow them to search through a number of different catalogs we allow two different types of searching. The first is the simple search option, which searches through the content we have harvested from participating content providers. The results appear in the “Results from Drupal” box.
The other option searches through remotely-located resources--those are not collected or stored locally in the Ensemble site. This search looks through other sites to extend the search beyond our content. This result is shown in the “Results from Collections” box.