Tag Archives: CETISROW

Repositories and the Open Web: report

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The CETISROW event took place at Birkbeck college, London, on the 19 April 2010, and I have to say it wasn’t really much of a row. There seemed to me to be more agreement on common themes than disagreement, so I’ll try to pull those together in this report, and if anyone disagrees with them there’s a “comment” form at the bottom of this page :-)

Focus on our aims not the means and by “means” I mean repositories. The sort of aims I have in mind are hosting, disseminating (or sharing), organising, and managing resources, facilitating social interaction around resources, and facilitating resource discovery. I was struck by how the Sheen Sharing project (about which Sarah Currier reported) had started by building what their community of users actually wanted and could use at that time, and not working with early adopters in the hope that they could somehow persuade the mainstream and laggards to follow. Roger Greenhalgh illustrated how wider aims such as social cohesion and knowledge transfer could be fostered through sites focussed on meeting community needs.

One of the participants mentioned at the end how pleased she was that we had progressed to talking in these terms rather than hitting people over the head with all the requirements that come from running a repository. I hope this would please Rachel Heery who, reflecting on various JISC Repositories programmes, made the point a while back that we might get better value from a focus on strategic objectives rather than a specific technology supposed to achieve those objectives.

So, what’s to do if we want to progress with this? We need to be clear about what the requirements are, so there is work to do building on and extending the survey on what people look for when they search online for learning resources from the MeDeV Organising OERs project presented by David Davies, and more work on getting systems to fit with needs–what the EdShare participants call cognitive ergonomics.

There was also a broad theme of working with what is already there, which I think this came through in a couple of sub themes of about web-scale systems and web-wide standards.

Firstly there were several accounts of working with existing services to provide hosting or community. Sheen Sharing (see above) did this, as did the Materials and Engineering subject centres’ OER projects that Lisa J Rogers reported on. Joss Winn also reported on using existing tools and communities saying

I don’t think it’s worth developing social features for repositories when there is already an abundance of social software available. It’s a waste of time and effort and the repository scene will never be able to trump the features that the social web scene offers and that people increasingly expect to use.

Perhaps this where we get closest to disagreement, since the EdShare team have been developing social features for ePrints that mirror those found on Web 2.0 sites. (The comment form is at the bottom…)

Related to this was the second theme of working with the technologies and specifications of web 2.0 sites, most notably RSS/ATOM syndication feeds. Patrick Lockley’s presentation on the Xpert repository was entirely about this, and Lisa Rogers and Sarah Currier both emphasised the importance of RSS (and in Lisa’s case easily-implemented APIs in general) in getting what they had done to work.

So, again, what do we need to do to continue this? Firstly there was a call to do more to synthesise and disseminate information about what approaches people are trying and what is working, so that other projects can follow the successful pioneers. Secondly there is potentially work to be done in smoothing over path that is taken, for example the Xpert project has found many complexities and irregularities in syndication feeds that could perhaps be avoided if we could provide some norms and guidelines for how to use them.

A theme that didn’t quite get discussed, but is nonetheless interesting was around openness. Joss Winn made a very valid distinction between the open web and the social web, one which I had blurred in the build up to the event. So facebook is part of the social web but is by no means open. There was some discussion about whether openness is important in achieving the goals of, e.g., disseminating learning resources. For example, iTunesU is used successfully by many to disseminate pod- and videocasts of lectures, and arguably the vertical integration offered by Apple’s ownership/control of all the levels leads to a better user experience than is the case for some of the alternatives.

All in all, I think we found ourselves broadly in agreement with the outcomes of the ADL Repository and Registries summit, as summarised by Dan Rehak, especially in: the increase in interest in social media and web 2.0 rather than conventional, formal repositories; the focus on understanding what we are really trying to do and finding out what users really want; and in not wanting new standards, especially not new repository-specific standards.

Finally, thanks to Roger Greenhalgh, I now know that there is a world carrot museum online.

Repositories and the Open Web

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On the 19 April, in London CETIS are holding a meeting in London on Repositories and the Open Web. The theme of the meeting is how repositories and social sharing / web 2.0 web sites compare as hosts for learning materials: how well does each facilitate the tasks of resource discovery and resource management; what approaches to resource description do the different approaches take; and are there any lessons that users of one approach can draw from the other?

Both the title of the event (does the ‘and’ imply a distinction? why not repositories on the open web?) and the tag CETISROW may be taken as slightly provocative. Well, the tag is meant lightheartedly, of course, and yes there is a rich vein of work on how repositories can work as part of the web. Just looking back are previous CETIS events I would like to highlight these contributions to previous meetings:

  • Lara Whitelaw presented on the PROWE Project, about using wikis and blogs as shared repositories to support part-time distance tutors in June 2006.
  • David Davies spoke about RSS, Yahoo! Pipes and mashups in June 2007.
  • Roger Greenhalgh, talking about the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, in the May 2008 meeting. And many of us remember his “what’s hot in pigs” intervention in an earlier meeting.
  • Richard Davis talking about SNEEP (social network extensions for ePrints) at the same meeting

Most recently we’ve seen a natural intersection between the aims of Open Educational Resources initiatives and the use of hosting on web 2 and social sharing sites, so, for example, the technical requirements suggested for the UKOER programme said this under delivery platforms:

Projects are free to use any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web. However all projects must also deposit their content in JorumOpen. In addition projects should use platforms that are capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds, particularly for collections of resources e.g. YouTube channels. Although this programme is not about technical development projects are encouraged to make the most of the functionality provided by their chosen delivery platforms.

We have followed this up with some work looking at the use of distribution platforms for UKOER resources which treats web 2 platforms and repository software as equally useful for that task.

So, there’s a longstanding recognition that repositories live on the open web, and that formal repositories aren’t the only platform suitable for the management and dissemination of learning materials. But I would missing something I think important if I left it at that. For some time I’ve had misgivings about the direction that conceptualising your resource management and dissemination as a repository leads. A while back a colleague noticed that a description of some proposed specification work, which originated from repository vendors, developers and project managers, talked about content being “hidden inside repositories”, which we thought revealing. Similarly, I’ve written before that repository-think leads to talk of interoperability between repositories and repository-related services (I’m sure I’ve written that before). Pretty soon one ends up with a focus on repositories and repository-specific standards per se and not on the original problem of resource management and dissemination. A better solution, if you want to disseminate your resource widely, is not to “hide them in repositories” in the first place. Also, in repository-world the focus is on metadata, rather than resource description: the encoding of descriptive data into fields can be great for machines, but I don’t think that we’ve done a great job of getting that encoding right for educational characteristics of resources, and that this has been at the expense of providing suitable information for people.

Of course not every educational resource is open, and so the open web isn’t an appropriate place for all collections. Also, once you start using some of the web 2.0 social sharing sites for resource management you begin to hit some problems (no option for creative commons licensing, assumptions that the uploader created/owns the resource, limitations on export formats, etc.)–though there are some exceptions. It is, however, my belief that all repository software could benefit from the examples shown by the best of the social sharing websites, and my hope that we will see that in action during this meeting.

Detail about the meeting (agenda, location, etc.) will be posted on the CETIS wiki.

Registration is open, through the CETIS events system.