Category Archives: RRT

Recent developments in the repository ecology work

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A brief update on the progress of the repository ecology work. We’ll be revising the draft report shortly but here’s an overview of what else is going on with this work.

ECDL2007 Workshop

We held a workshop in conjunction with this year’s ECDL conference (workshop home page http://tinyurl.com/27jses ). I’ll return to some of the presentations and outcomes of the workshop in another post but, in summary, the workshop went really well. The participants understood the ideas being presented and I think that everyone (whether or not they agreed with the ideas presented) had a thought-provoking day. Thank you to all of the speakers and other participants.

There were some useful critiques of particular aspects of the approach, including: a concern that the distinctions between entities and species were unclear (particularly when mentally translated into other languages); an observation that the approach could complement (rather than conflict) with newer approaches to the development of architectures; and a call to provide some more structured guidance about how to represent ecological views or models.

The workshop affirmed that there is something in this approach and it’s emphasis on articulating messy particularity that isn’t currently being covered by other efforts. It reinforced our feeling that this is more of a communication, planning, and management approach than a more formal (mathematical/systems) modeling approach.

JISCCETIS Conference

Next week, we’re going to be holding a workshop on the repository ecology work at the JISCCETIS conference. The session, being organized by Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell, will complement the ECDL workshop, and further shape the development of this work. http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/Learning_Resources_in_the_Ecology_of_Repositories

Spanish Repository Working Group: La ecología de los repositorios institucionales: Interacción entre sociedad, producción científica y acceso a la información

In December, I’ll be presenting at the Spanish Repository Working Group’s conference. They’ve chosen the theme of ecological approaches for their annual meeting this year. I’m not sure how much of the conference I’ll be able to follow at the time, but am looking forward to the opportunity. http://redsicura.iata.csic.es/xarxa/ocs/index.php?cf=6

Repository ecology

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The introductory report is finally done (well the draft anyway).

I’ll post some more around the topic of an ecological approach to repository and service interaction but in the meantime.

the draft report is here: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Ecology

The following blogs have commented on the report (I’ll try to keep this current )

Repositories Research Team

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The short introduction to my job is that I’m the JISCCETIS representative on JISC’s Repositories Research Team (RRT).

Within the team I have a focus on e-learning and provide a degree of support for the e-learning projects in the DRP Programme. As this programme comes to an end and we begin to work more with the Repositories and Preservation strand projects the team’s focus will shift to more research and synthesis and we will have fewer direct support commitments. In the ongoing research of the team I provide a perspective from the JISCCETIS community and will also be focusing on liasing with the eframework.
The team’s self-description from the RRT wiki is:

Repositories Research Team
As part of the Digital Repositories Programme, JISC have established the Repositories Research Team. The remit for the work of the research team is quite wide and includes helping projects find and exploit synergies across the programme and beyond, gathering scenarios and use cases from projects, liaising with other national and international repositories activities, including liaison with the e-Framework, synthesizing project and programme outcomes, and engaging with interoperability standards activity and repository architectures.

The Repositories Research Team is a collaboration between UKOLN and CETIS. UKOLN have worked previously on repositories in a number of contexts including ePrints UK, the Open Archives Forum and Delos, and CETIS, the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards, has considerable experience in supporting the development of digital repositories for e-learning.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/JISC_Digital_Repository_Wiki