I came across this article/post more or less at random the other week. I don’t know anything about the author, Kevin Boone, but the sections on “teaching” and “preperation is everything”, while nothing new, got me thinking. They relate something I think is important when we consider what learning materials are worth sharing and/or preserving, that is the quality of resources available to learners and the role of repositories in improving this.
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Category Archives: repositories
OAI-ORE European Rollout
Last week I went to Southampton for the European rollout of the OAI-ORE specification (now in alpha version 0.3). If you need a quick catch-up on what ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange) is about, try this article and presentation from last summer. Here’s a tidied-up mind-map of what I gathered from Southampton:
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SFC Digital Repositories Seminar
A few weeks ago Lorna and I went to a Scottish Funding Council meeting organized to discuss the experiences of those SFC funded eLearning transformation projects that had used repositories. Lorna’s account of the meeting is on her blog. Now the SFC have published their own record of the meeting (it’s about half way down the page, under “Digital Repositories”).
Congratulations to the CeLLS project for negotiating the IPR issues in such a way is allowing them to make nearly all their material available through the Jorum. It’s a shame the other projects couldn’t manage this.
Progress with OAI-ORE?
There seems to be some progress towards an implementable draft spec for OAI-ORE. Perhaps the best available description of what the ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange) spec is trying achieve is an article published by Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze, which comes with a screencastdemonstration of a prototype system. It will be interesting when the full details of ORE are available to compare it to the IMS Content Packaging approach to reuse and exchange. ORE seems to benefit from being thoroughly in tune with and building on the web architecture. Is there anything important that IMS CP supports that ORE doesn’t? For example, is it possible in ORE to define how the contents are to be organized or structured? It’s not really possible to say much more without actually seeing a draft of the actual spec, and those are being kept secret. It seems that details will not be available until an open meeting on March 3rd to launch the first beta release [update: I was mistaken, the alpha spec was released in December, see Pete’s comment below]. Earlier versions of the spec exist, but are not available to anyone outside the ORE team, a situation I find curious and frustrating.
A short update on Repository specs
The end of summer, with people coming back from their holidays, seems a reasonable time for a quick update on where various specification and standardization activities have got to. I’ll deal with specifications for interacting with repositories in this post; there’ll be another post soon covering metadata specifications and standards.
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The “repository ecology” approach to describing cross-search aggregation service management
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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Digital deluge eLearning strand
Last week (5 & 6 June) I was in Manchester for the JISC “Digital repositories: dealing with the digital deluge” conference. Most of my time was spent as rapporteur in the Sharing digital materials for eLearning strand, so that’s what I’ll cover here. Continue reading
Exploring the repository “ecology” metaphor
“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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