Repositories for Learning at JISC DepoST
by James Ballard
'There have been many nights when I have ventured down corridors and polished staircases without encountering a single librarian' - Borges
I attended the JISC DepoST show and tell workshop yesterday at ULU. The event was a chance for various projects to share what they have been up to with the hope of informing future project programs. It was also a chance to explore collaboration where projects overlapped.
My colleague Richard Davis and I were there to show some of the work we have been doing with e-Prints and Moodle to support better management of CLA licensed materials. It was also an opportunity for me to learn something about the repository world.
Having seen a plethora of technologies to deposit content into repositories, auto-generate metadata and identify available repositories based on your institution I was left wondering what the purpose was. My experience suggests that people don’t use technologies because they don’t perceive a value not because they need more technologies.
Fortunately a few repository enthusiasts were happy to explain the details. A major output of Universities is research based on which they will be judged and funded. This creates a need to make sure that publications are stored, preserved and cataloged for which digital repositories are the new tool of choice. It also means that a single publication may need to exist in multiple institutions where there has been collaboration. The researchers themselves will also want to promote their work and will also be judged to some degree on their output.
I’m not sure the process meets expectations in a digitial world. It would make sense that each institution kept a paper copy in its library for people to access in person but online is this really necessary. There also seems to be a scenario where only metadata is stored and not the full-text so when you find the paper you want in a repository there is still a task to obtain a copy of it from elsewhere. It certainly doesn’t seem to fit models of learner activity we are still coming to terms with in e-learning – learners, as future researchers, may find the output as odd as I did form the outside.
Of more interest however was the breakout discussion on what a learning object repository may look like. This included representatives from CETIS, Xerte, OU OpenLearn, Welsh Repositories Network, and our own CLASM project. This was a fascinating discussion and raised some key points for educational content producers.
The main difference between a learning repository and a publications respository is that a publication is ‘finished’ whereas learning objects should be reuasble. There is a complex life-cycle to portable learning objects. The second difference is that the components of a learning package may have value in their own right in different contexts. So while we want to share a complete package each image, video, text, acitvity or case study could be re-used independently of the original package.
Tasked with coming upwith the main features for a ‘deposit’ tool for learning objects, we found contextualisation to be the over-riding theme. This led to the following ideas:
- Profile of use: If we are producing open learning content there is an intrinsic value to know who has used this and how many derivatives exist so that we can make a judegement on quality and effectiveness.
- Profile of context: Knowing the different contexts allow recommendations and content networking in a new way. For example ‘people who used this resource also used this resource’, ‘people studying this used this’ etc.
- Profile of access: While there needs to be a move to more Creative Commons style licensing in education, not all resources can fall into this category (e.g. CLA licenses or confidential data sets). Licensing learning objects at point of deposit would be a key function.
- Aggregration verus Centralisation: Should a national repository centralise storage of learning objects or aggregrate information from multiple repositories using an ATOM based approach. The latter seems more appealing but needs standard APIs and interoperability specifications.
There was a general feeling that a new SWORD style deposit tool is required, and the technologies used to share research data could be adapted and built on to support learning object repositories. Using exsiting tools and concepts would be preferable to inventing new repository types.