Repository standards
Tore Hoel tweeted: The most successful repository initiatives do not engage with LT standards EDRENE report concludes #icoper pointing me to what looks like a very interesting report which also concludes Important needs expressed by content users include: Minimize number of repositories necessary to access … Of these, the first bullet point clearly relates to interoperability of repositories, and indicates the importance of focusing

Tracking the Use of Open Educational Resources
“As far as is possible projects will need to track the volume and use of the resources they make available” At least that is what the call for projects for this programme said; the aim of this session is to help projects with this requirement. The rationale for tracking use from the funder’s perspective is clear: they want to know whether the resources being released with their money are useful to anyone apart from those who created them. Of course, as any who has tried to work with access statistics for a web site knows, we have to be cautious in interpreting such data. For example, how do we compare a simple “viewing” of a r

Feeding a repository
There has been some discussion recently about mechanisms for remote or bulk deposit in repositories and similar services. David Flanders ran a very thought provoking and lively show and tell meeting a couple of weeks ago looking at deposit. In part this is familiar territory; looking at and tweaking the work that the creators of the SWORD profile have done based on APP; or looking again at webDav. But there is also a newly emerging approach of using RSS or Atom feeds to populate repositories, a sort of feed-deposit. Coincidentally we also received a query at CETIS from a repository which

Resource description requirements for a UKOER project
CETIS have provided information on what we think are the metadata requirements for the UK OER programme, but we have also said that individual projects should think about their own metadata requirements in addition to these. As an example of what I mean by this, here is what I produced for the Engineering Subject Centre’s OER project. Like it says on the front page it’s an attempt to define what information about a resource should be provided, why, for whom, and in what format, where: “Who” includes project funders (HEFCE + JISC and Academy as their agen

Distribution platforms for OERs
One of the workpackages for CETIS’s support of the UKOER programme is: Technical Guidelines–Services and Applications Inventory and Guidance: Checklist and notes to support projects in selecting appropriate publication/distribution applications and services with some worked examples (or recommendations). Output: set of wiki pages based on content type and identifying relevant platforms, formats, standards, ipr issues, etc. I’ve made a start on this here, in a way which I hope will combine the three elements ment