Tag: repository

ECL – eduSource Communications Layer connector software

http://www.edusplash.net/technical/ecl/index.html and
http://edusource.licef.teluq.uquebec.ca/ese/en/index.jsp

I’m sure there’s some good reason for working on software for a few years, releasing it into the public domain, and then not telling anyone about it, right? In any case, with amazingly little fanfare the impressive ECL connector software is available for download. Billed as one of the first implementations of the IMS DRI specification, it will allow repositories to share search results, gather records, alter each other to new materials and submit new materials in other repositories. You’ll likely see the ECL show up in some format or another in a number of future initiatives as a way to interconnect repositories and other stores of learning materials, and we hope to have it implemented in the repository we deploy here in B.C. by September. – SWL

Academic Use of Digital Resources: Disciplinary Differences and the Issue of Progression

http://www.shef.ac.uk/nlc2004/Proceedings/Symposia/
Symposium9/Jones_et_al.htm

Paper by Chris Jones, Maria Zenios and Jill Griffiths which looks at the differences between disciplines in their uptake of digital technologies in a UK post-secondary setting. The paper is part of the proceeedings of the recent Networked Learning Conference 2004 held at Lancaster University.

This is important for those of us involved in institution-wide (or multi-institution-wide, as it were) initiatives to remember. In my own practice, it was actually looking at DSpace and a number of the other repository-like packages that work on the metaphor of discipline-specific ‘collections’ that made me include the ability of the repository software to also serve individual disciplines as one requirement in our ongoing BCcampus LOR project. – SWL

LORNET Website

http://www.lornet.org/eng/index.htm

While this project was announced last fall, it seems to be up an running now and has this website. For those who missed the announcement last October, this is the NSERC-funded $7.5 million/5 year project that, as far as I know, represents the largest ongoing learning object repository research initiative in Canada.

The project has 6 themes and stretches across 6 Canadian research Universities. I don’t know if it is fair to call this ‘edusource II’ as the aims of the project seem farther reaching, but it does involve some of the same principals from Canada’s last ‘nation-wide’ learning object repository research project. – SWL

FEDORA Wiki – FedoraImplementations

http://www.fedora.info/wiki/bin/
view/Fedora/FedoraImplementations

According to this list on the Fedora Wiki site, last updated October 26, 2003, there were only 2 known FEDORA installations. FEDORA’s own website lists around a dozen ‘registered deployment partners’ which would seem to indicate more actual deployments, but I was hard pressed to find URLs for working ones when going through that list. If anyone knows of a more complete list of working FEDORA implementations I’d be interested to hear about it. – SWL

More RSS feeds from Repositories

It seems like the idea of using RSS as a means to syndicate new items in learning object repositories is steadily catching on. The page I’ve set up to aggregate a number of these feeds now has three more, two of them thanks to Ian Winship from Northumbria University.

The new feeds are:
– latest additions to the EEVL repository, a UK-based guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing
– latest additions to the Learning and Teaching Support Network Centre for Economics’ collection of resources
– a ‘by subject’ feed from Chalkface, a UK-based publisher of K-12 online courses and photocopy-master lesson plans

RSS Feeds from Repository Projects

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?
folder=621267&since=9&Display=Display

Note what I mean here are the LOR projects (not the repositories themselves, which you can find over here) that are producing RSS feeds as a way to communicate about their projects or otherwise coordinate their efforts. These include:

– D’Arcy Norman’s Learning Commons Weblog (for the CAREO/APOLLO projects)
– The Resource Pool, a Eduspecs-funded test pilot of a CAREO implmentation
– R2R: Learning Design – a new initiative out of University of Calgary to implement a Learning Design tool

– APOLLO-DEV, the proper technical blog for the Apollo project at U of Calgary
– Stòr Cùram, a blog from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on their LOR initiative, apparently employing Intrallect’s Intralibrary

I haven’t listed CogDogBlog in here, as Alan posts on so many other things beside the Maricopa Learning Exchange, but it’s certainly not because it doesn’t deserve attention. I expect I missed other’s as well, or maybe have you filed somewhere else in Bloglines but still cover your feed. If you are working on an LOR implementation or development project and running a blog, I’d love to hear about it, include it on this list and follow along.

And what, you ask, about my own project… embarassingly, I am so swamped trying to meet our initial project requirements phase deadlines that we haven’t created anything public to date, except this space here, which is not an official ‘organ’ of the project. Stay tuned for more news, though… – SWL

Joint IMS/CNI Whitepaper on interoperation between different types of ‘repositories’

http://www.imsglobal.org/
DLims_white_paper_publicdraft_1.pdf

I can only assume that the only reason someone didn’t point this paper out to me during my recent thrashing about concerning the difference between ‘institutional’ repositories and ‘learning object’ repositories is that, like me, they had never seen it before (or maybe you’re all just sadists and like to watch me flail about in public!)

Well in any case, hallelujah! This draft paper by Neil McLean and Clifford Lynch from June 28, 2003 is in my mind a model of clarity on the reasons for why these beasts are different (for one, the ‘transient’ versus ‘archival’ nature of their contents) but also why and how they need to interoperate.

Which is where I’ve landed on this topic – we need distinct types of repository software because they fill distinct end-user needs. But by implementing both common open protocols and using structured markup languages that can be mapped, we keep open the possibility of interoperating if and when this make sense. And I stress that last ‘if’ – the next piece in the puzzle I am waiting to see are convincing use cases, or even better yet convincing demonstrations, of search interfaces across catalogues of heterogeneous materials (e.g. records for books, ‘eprints’ and learning objects all at once) that don’t just confuse the matter entirely. – SWL

Pathfinder Research on Web-based Repositories – FINAL REPORT

Extremely Long URL

(My ISP connection dropped on my first attempt to post this, so here is a much briefer summary.)

Useful report from Mark Ware for the Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) group in the U.K. which surveys the current field of ‘institutional repositories.’ It’s nice to see that Ware doesn’t hedge at all in defining his target:

“An institutional repository (IR) is defined to be a web-based database (repository) of scholarly material which is institutionally defined (as opposed to a subject-based repository); cumulative and perpetual (a collection of record); open and interoperable (e.g. using OAI-compliant software); and thus collects, stores and disseminates (is part of the process of scholarly communication). In addition, most would include long-term preservation of digital materials as a key function of IRs.”

The report gives good summaries of the available software, some numbers to fill out the picture of the current state of adoption, and section 4 has a good overview of the issues facing institutional repository projects. – SWL

The Gateway to Educational Materials: An Evaluation Study (Year 4)

http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf

Before there were ‘learning object repositories,’ educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in ‘subject-based catalogues’ or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There’s nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it’s a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. – SWL

Learning Object Repository *Software*

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EdTechPost/
LearningObjectRepositorySoftware

There’s a lot of lists of learning object repositories around – to name but a few good ones, there’s

The problem, for me, with many of these lists is that these typically don’t make any distinction between instances of existing repositories that are hosted by specific institutions or consortia (‘collections’ if you will) and repository software projects – software that one can download and install in one’s own environment, and integrate with one’s own systems if that’s important to you.

Well it’s important to me for a variety of reasons – within the context of the BCcampus lor project we are definitely looking for software that we will run and host in BC, and in the context of the Edutools team we are looking at doing some work that will allow people to do a comparative analysis of this kind of software.

So to that end, the above URL points to an evolving list of packages one might consider if you had to implement a learning object repository. A few final notes on this list and my approach:

  • for the purposes of initially identifying as much as possible, I have included not only software that is specifically identified as LOR software, but also more commercial LCMS software, institutional repository software coming out of the library/archives world, and CMS software that implements either a repository or LCMS component
  • I have not made a huge distinction between learning object metadata repositories and learning object content repositories though I recognize there are crucial differences.

It’s a wiki page so feel free to add to it. It isn’t exhaustive when it comes to LCMS or institutional repositories, but I think there are strong cases to be made that these are different beasts, and that while either can be made to fill the LOR role, there may be good reasons not to do this. – SWL