Repositories and the Web

Andy Powell has been looking at how a couple of example repositories work in terms of putting stuff on the web. There two posts, both looking the “jump-off” pages for journal articles; one from a Dspace repository at Edinburgh University the other from an ePrints repository at Southampton (though he points out that he has chosen these repositories purely as illustrative examples, there’s nothing specific about the institutions and it’s not clear what if anything is specific to the software). He looks for points such as whether the HTML page title is relevant, is the URL “cool”, is the page linked where relevant (e.g. are the author names linked to something useful), is there any metadata in the HTML page (in the header, as microformats, or as links to machine readable records), how prominent is the link to the actual paper itself, etc.

The discussion fascinating, if you run a repository of any type of material I’ld suggest you take a look and think about your own repository. As Andy concludes:

My point is that I don’t see the issues around “eprint repositories as a part of the Web” featuring high up the agenda of our discussions as a community (and I suggest the same is true of learning object repositories), in part because we have allowed ourselves to get sidetracked by discussion of community-specific ‘interoperability’ solutions that we then tend to treat as some kind of magic bullet, rolling them out whenever someone questions one approach or another.

Identifiers for UK OER “works”

Would it be useful and feasible to have a single identifier to link together all the instances of a learning resource? To be more specific, consider a lecture that has been videoed. The video is available on YouTube, in a national repository, and from the website of the institution where it was delivered (also bear in mind that there might be an audio-only recording and written transcripts of the same lecture). Should there be an HTTP URI that relates (indirectly) to all of these versions of the same lecture?

The reason I’m asking is because we are trying to define what should be the technical and metadata requirements for materials produced through the HEFCE/JISC/HE Academy OER funding. I’m suggesting a short URI that can be used to refer to any version of a work; as I envisage this it would resolve to a list of all the known versions. I think this is important for accessibility (in its widest sense), sustainability, and for collating information about a resource that may be available all over the place. The problems centre on the difficulty of understanding the concepts involved, and are especially acute because the implementation cannot be done just by the people who currently understand the issues involved.
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TILE: Libraries, usage data and recommendation

Tesco know how old my children are. They know this because, through tracking what we buy online or using a loyalty card, they know when we started to buy nappies and baby talc. They have used this information to send us special offer vouchers for baby foods etc. The library at my home institution have similar information about students’ borrowing habits and in principle have access to information about what courses the students were enrolled on and what they access through the VLE. This information was described as a goldmine, but libraries don’t use it. This workshop was about how they might use it, with the related questions of should they and could they.
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The learning content management repository virtual environment system 2.0 and its future, summarized

As I explained earlier, at this year’s JISC CETIS conference I was in charge of running a session comparing content management, virtual learning and repository systems. I’ve just finished updating the session page on the wiki with links to all the presentations and commentaries available from the day. Here are my own summary and reflections on the session.
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