repository – Page 4

Intellectual Property Rights Issues Facing Self-archiving: Key Findings of the RoMEO Project

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/
gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f

This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What’s interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schemaa prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, “Rights metadata for open archiving.” – SWL

Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/portole/index.htm

Site for the “Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments (PORTOLE)” project, which ended July 2003. This UK-based project aimed to help incorporate more library resources and tools into ‘virtual learning environments.’ Of particular interest to me was the CROSsearch prototype, which provides a single search interface to a number of library catalogues, learning object repositories AND, optionally, Google. Is this the way forward? I don’t know, but it is invaluable to have prototypes like this to examine in more depth and take this out of the abstract realm.

Additionally, you can read the project’s final report, and the latest issue of ARIADNE (out today) contains an article summarizing some of the project’s key findings. – SWL

Academic ADL Co-Lab’s Database of Repositories

http://projects.aadlcolab.org/repository-directory/

New from the Academic ADL Co-Lab is this searchable database of existing learning object repositories. Most of these are not software you could download to run your ‘own’ repository but instead existing institutional or subject-based repositories in which you *might* be able to participate (which raises the entirely sticky issue of ‘how many repositories do we actually need?’ but that’s for another post!)

In particular pay attention to the ‘Advanced Search’ feature – it seems to confirm the same set of repositories that support RSS as I have previously discovered, but also lets you do some neat things like find out which repository projects support the OAI Harvesting Protocol, or which ones support Global Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). – SWL

‘Institutional Digital Repositories’ and ‘Learning Object Repositories’ – What’s the Difference?

The title of this post is a question, and I’m actually interested to hear a few different things from people out there:

not only what you think the difference between ‘digital repository’ software (e.g. DSpace) and ‘learning object repository’ software (e.g. CAREO) actually is, but also
are any differences you think exist there because these types of systems really are trying to accomplish different functions, or are dealing with heterogeneous resource types, or are they different simply because they originated in different camps within educational institutions (libraries and archivists versus educators or educational technologists)? Other reasons?
should institutions adopt a single institutional repository system for both archiving research publications and their learning objects? Do you work at, or do you know of, an institution that is adopting a single repository software solution for all of there needs?

more…
Continue reading “‘Institutional Digital Repositories’ and ‘Learning Object Repositories’ – What’s the Difference?”

Presentations from Library conference on “Metadata and Institutional Repositories”

http://www.rlg.org/events/haveandhold2003/index.html

Nice follow up to the Research Library Group’s sessions back in May this year. I would highlight both the “Mixing and matching” sessions which deal with implementing multiple metadata standards and multiple repository systems, as well as the presentations dedicated to selecting and implementing the open source Fedora system as worth a read. – SWL

DARE Report ‘Specifications for a Networked Repository for Dutch Universities

http://www.surf.nl/en/publicaties/index2.php?oid=21

This report is from the Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) program at SURF, a Dutch research consortium for network services and information and communications technology. It describes the decisions that are being taken in that country so as to enable interoperability of the different types of institutional repository systems and to keep in line with international standards. While quite a bit is enabled by the specific context of education within the Netherlands, there is lots here to learn from. – SWL

Guide to Institutional Repository Software

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

Really helpful report from George Soros’ Open Society Institute that looks at the currently available open source institutional repository systems that comply with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocols. (Note these aren’t ‘learning object’ repositories per se – these are typically more focused on archiving scholarly publishing and other institutional materials, though through things like z39.50 and the IMS digital repositories interoperability spec it may end up that your searches go against these repositories and more.)

You’ll have seen this already over at OLDaily (you do read Stephen already, don’t you?) – this post was more a personal note as this was one of those ‘just in time’ nuggets that float through the blogosphere and land on your desktop seconds before you knew you needed them. Hurray!. – SWL

LESTER: Learning Science and Technology Repository

http://lester.rice.edu/DesktopDefault.aspx

New to me, this directory out of Rice University provides “an online community and database focused on innovations in learning science and technology (LST), [and] profiles innovative research projects and researchers.” To jump start the project, LESTER has actively collected records for over 250 projects, 260 researchers, and 130 research organizations, and invites new users (you have to sign up for a free account) to contribute resources. Vast. – SWL