My colleague Malcolm and I have had our position paper for the ECDL 2007 workshop “Towards an European repository ecology” accepted, so I’ll be giving a presentation with the above title in Budapest on Sept 21st. We will use the ecology metaphor to describe and explore issues raised through a project that developed a pilot service providing resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and teaching communities. We’ll also describe the ecological habitat within which the pilot service that PerX created sat and sketch the ecological niche, that is the role of the service and its interactions with other entities. In doing so we hope to show that, while a technical architecture is at the heart of this description, the ecology approach highlights crucial interactions that are out of the scope of a technical architecture.
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“Repository Ecology” is a term we’re using for some new work in the repository domain and while it is difficult to explain what exactly Repository Ecology I thought I would start by explaining why I like the metaphor.
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