Comments on: JISC Persistent Identifiers Meeting: Teaching and Learning Materials

By: Lorna

Lorna — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:36:34 +0000

True. That’s a valid point Sheila. I suppose we need to assess and balance the resource required to manage teaching and learning materials with the potential gains that could result.

By: Sheila

Sheila — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:04:46 +0000

Interesting post Lorna. To answer you final question I think in a lot of cases it actually doesn’t matter if “resources are scattered all over the place with poor to nonexistent metadata”. Being devils advocate – it will only matter if there is a real impact on practice and tbh if a teacher can’t find the exact “thing” they used before, they’ll probably just use something else they can find or recreate something themselves. And I know that in some ways that response screams out for “well that’s the whole point of metadata” . . . but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done around illustrating effectiveness and impact of storing/sharing/tagging resources.

By: Lorna

Lorna — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:47:38 +0000

Chris, I absolutely agree with your comments, especially regarding vles. I think we need to accept that resources, and particularly teaching and learning materials, are increasingly going to be scattered all over web and that we need _realistic_ strategies to deal with this. Staff have shown some reluctance to depositing teaching and learning materials in institutional repositories so I think we need strategies to try to manage those resources where they are being used on a day to day basis.

By: Chris Rusbridge

Chris Rusbridge — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:57:29 +0000

Lorna, I didn’t get that “repository” feel quite so strongly; in fact throughout I was concerned with resources that are useful, but that simply sit on “web sites”. I certainly do think that resources on individual web sites (eg of staff members) are much more at risk of being moved and therefore losing their identifier’s validity (if that makes sense). And for that reason I’m keen on individuals who have valuable resources making a decision to transfer them to custodianship of some group that itself has a greater persistence than the individual. That could be a repository (eg JORUM); maybe it could be a VLE (although I have heard what amount to horror stories on persistence in VLEs). It could be a department or faculty web site. I don’t really care; but if it’s valuable enough for others to use, and it IS used by others, then some thought on what, how, where would be a darn good thing!