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IR and eLearning

 

« IR and Document Management | Question and Answer Session | IR and Research Reports »

Question:

Chuck [Henry] has actually answered some of this question, he’s actually asked the question. It’s really about a definition of institutional repositories, so in this forum we were really focused on self publishing and distributing research output, but within many of our institutions there are also e-learning initiatives and funding for things around learning object repositories. Also been a little bit of contradiction between the need to keep institutional repositories as being quite closely defined as related to research output and expanding them to cover all these other needs in an institution.

So I guess the question is: Are we talking about the same repository or are we talking about a number of distinctly different repositories? Is there value in pulling everything together or separating the concerns off as has been suggested as well?

Response:

CHR — Perhaps you should answer this as you asked the question Chuck [Henry]. We define research output as the theses, patents, all that kind of stuff, and we’ve also defined a category of research resources which is the digital image collection, sound collection, video collections, that kind of thing. Today you’ve seen a lot of use of repositories in both those categories, research output and research resources. We have embargoed the learning objects end of it because none of our universities involved in the Arrow project have articulated a business case for the kind of effort that is required to lodge the material into a repository that is warranted for a research output or a research resource.

However the X-ray images that University of NSW is putting up for its medical faculty will be used as a learning resource and there are projects on the edges. But as to the issue of retaining and discarding material, many learning objects only have a 12 month life, sometimes they only have a one semester life, so I don’t want to lead into investing that amount of resource into something the university is not clear about how long it wants to retain it for. So I think that until I’m satisfied that there’s a sustainable case for managing learning resources I am not prepared to power down that kind of path. Texas has done some of it.

Follow up:

If you did manage them would they be in this repository?

Response:

CHR — No.

CH — I guess at my institution we take a much more encompassing definition of institutional repositories. Plural. I don’t know where that slippery semantic slope begins or ends. Part of it is using DSpace as a content manager for preprints and faculty articles and such and then more broadly employing it for locally held faculty resources. The faculty literally had an attic in the library, with materials that were just sitting there, locked up and we put these into … a DSpace ebucket, it was more than that, we began to use a project application called Connections which is a robust and sophisticated presentation layer.

It’s a little more than that though, we use that term, to bring these assets together to be able to reconstitute them in ways that different courses could be taught using them differently. To me there’s the boundaries between an IR if you look at it as faculty publications, preprints as one thing, I am much more comfortable in looking at it in a much more broad way, and these institutional repositories slide in and out of what might be called digital library initiatives as well, that’s not a bad thing. This concerns me, that to me we need to see these institutional repositories as aspects, elements, pieces of much larger digital activities. They contribute to the digital environment broadly defined, information not just faculty articles and preprints but much research data that supports articles, publications, data that can corroborate or not certain hypotheses, scientific experiments, those data have been put in IRs and again that’s perhaps a different perspective.

That’s what I’m happy to be challenged on, the more we see this activity as part and parcel to a much larger more complex contributions to eventually international digital library context.

KB — I think any object that lives in a repository can become a learning object, can slide in and out of being used for various purposes. The important thing is that when that object is in a repository it should be able to be located easily, extracted from it, broken apart from its component pieces and repurposed, that’s the whole point of having an institutional repository.

AS — I think as a computer scientist if you give advice to someone at the current state of the art … you look at what the purpose of the pepository, what’s the audience (I don’t like using the word audience but I don’t know what other word to use). People that look at screens, what’s the audience for the data you have and what’s its function? I am absolutely sure that a lot of the research related stuff, and we’ve talked about theses and research articles which in Australia generally are in separate repositories; they shouldn’t be.

My institution is a lead institution in Australia in a new initiative to collect all the raw data sets relating to marine science; that belongs in the same sort of repository, because it’s the same sort of people that want to look at it, it has the same sort of lifetime, it has the same sort of security constraints, and so on.

But I think at the moment I would encourage, like you to think of a digital library just like a real library which has lots of books on all sorts of subjects. But at the moment it’s a good idea to segment issues, segment teaching and learning objects off, you might actually use the same software, for example have two copies of DSpace one of which is running under a different environment, and gets wiped every year or whatever, that’s quite feasible.