SFC Digital Repositories Seminar

Posted on by

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?

Posted on by

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.

Learning Material Application Profile scoping study

Posted on by

A while back the JISC asked us to investigate the creation of a learning materials application profile, let’s call it LMAP for short. Well, there’s already the UK LOM Core, which is usable despite the latest (and best) version being an incomplete draft. But, as I discussed in my previous post, there have been other developments in metadata for educational resources since then. There are also considerations arising from areas such as assessment, learning design and packaging complex objects that need to be taken into account. So marching on down the UK LOM Core road wasn’t necessarily going to be the right thing to do, accordingly we (Lorna and I) decided to take a more circumspect approach.
Continue reading →

A short update on Metadata specs

Posted on by

As promised when I wrote the short update on repository specs, here is the complementary information about what’s been happening over the last few months with education metadata specs. Brief version: some minor changes to the IEEE LOM have been agreed; closer harmony between the LOM and Dublin Core is in the offing; and if you think that DC comprises 15 elements you need to look at it again.

Continue reading →

The “repository ecology” approach to describing cross-search aggregation service management

Posted on by

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.
Continue reading →