We’ve had a convergence of concerns into the repository domain, and your list of the shared concerns (“the basics”) is very useful.

There have been very strong drivers to have Institutional Repositories of Open Access Research Papers, a very strong coupling of IRs with OAs, with the intention of making the message to researchers as simple as possible. “Put your paper here” and all these benefits will accrue.

In the meantime, with the rise of user-generated content, those of us in the area of sharing learning resources have seen a huge growth of activity, with the emphasis on diversity: lots of different places to share, lots of types of stuff to share.

The two “domains” (research, L&T) might not be logically seperate, but the language is definitely different. And often for good reason: if we go too generic then people don’t recognise we’re talking to them. We’ve always aimed at a core of good practice, re-contextualised for particular contexts. The thing is, that core of good practice in the basics is turning out to be quite hard to identify.

You’re right that the question of who owns the space can have an effect on how its handled, and yes, this has been true for JISC sometimes (just as it is for institutions) but we’ve actually done quite a bit between eLearning and IE behind the scenes.

I suspect that often good things happen regardless of funding streams, there’s certainly lots of good stuff out there to build on.

So what next?

I hope you’ll be at the OER session at the CETIS conference to participate in a discussion about how best to approach this whole area …

I felt MASSIVELY frustrated reading about this. As you know, during the set-up and running of the JISC Repositories Programme Mark I, I sat on the RPAG and was also there when the JISC-Repositories list was started. I (and several other people) argued on that list in the early days for people to stop conflating the idea of “Institutional Repositories” or even just “Repositories” with scholarly-works-specific repositories. That argument ran on for a short while, was overtaken by other concerns; to this day the scholarly works repositories community (admittedly a sizeable majority) still acts as though they have dibs on the term “Institutional Repositories”, and just “Repositories”, while occasionally paying lip-service to supporting t&l materials.

During the first JISC Repositories Programme, there was acknowledgement of the separate need for study and development specifically on t&l repositories, and JISC included a proportion of funding in the programme for this purpose; a small number of high quality projects resulted (CD-LOR, PROWE, TrustDR and UKCDR, as well as cross-over project RepoMMan). During this period another JISC programme (can’t recall which) funded WM-Share- another excellent t&l repositories project that shared closely with the afore-mentioned ones.

The second Repositories Programme came along, and suddenly we were back to conflating the two kinds of repository; the “minority interest” one (as far as JISC IE interests go) getting lost in the shuffle. I argued on the RPAG for at least a full-time, or even 0.5FTE t&l repositories specialist to be on the Repositories Support Project; never happened.

What’s frustrating to me is that all this is having to be argued out yet again- those with an interest in repositories for t&l materials are having to somehow state their case as if this is a novel idea- in spite of the fact that there is a community out there of people carrying on with collecting and sharing t&l materials in repositories (cf IRISS, IVIMEDS, various Canadian and European projects, various regional sharing projects in England for schools, GLOW in Scotland, plus a number of institutions working on institutional repositories for their t&l materials, e.g. Newcastle Uni, Leeds Met Uni, Derby Uni, Southampton, Oxford Brookes, Nottingham Trent (not just Intrallect customers believe me!), etc. etc.). My personal feeling is that if this issue had not fallen into the crack between the JISC IE and the JISC E-Learning programmes we might be seeing a lot more progress and development in this area already. I’m not sure the current amphasis on OER is a total panacea- we also need further work on the basics- understanding user and insitutional needs; creating user-friendly systems that integrate with or provide Web 2.0-style tools for community support; new ways of dealing with the IPR constraints; ways of embedding insitutionally, etc. It’s no surprise to me that EdShare is one of the best new t&l repositories projects, because it actually emerges from the scholarly works repositories community that get the lion’s share of support, but is being developed by people who are open to the idea that t&l repositories need their own approaches. It’s tapping into the lessons learned from earlier JISC t&l repositories projects. Let’s see more work like this!

So that’s my whinge- and I know it’s all past history; I’m so glad to see such a lot of strong voices arguing for this within JISC again. My plea is to not let it fall between the cracks again and to offer some excellent JISC-style support to those folks out there who want to get on with providing research, support and services in this area.