Metadata and Digital Repositories

use of educational metadata in UK HE and FE

case studies in implementing educational metadata standards

Editors: Phil Barker and Ed Barker,
CETIS Metadata SIG.

In order to provide more depth to the information gathered from the questionnaire we have interviewed key representatives of some of the projects and services who filed questionnaire returns. From these interviews we are producing case studies which document their experience with implementing metadata standards.

The aim of producing these case studies is to raise awareness of how people are implementing educational metadata specs, for what purpose and also provide some reflection on what problems were encountered and what worked well. We hope that these will stimulate discussion among those who already involved in metadata implementations, and will provide useful support for those who are just starting. We hope there will be enough information in these case studies for people to decide which to follow-up in more depth. When we have a few of them completed we will make a collection of them along with a summary of any commonality we can draw from them and the survey results (we will also include links to any other similar work).

The following case study is available in draft form, we would welcome comments on how they might be improved. (Files are in pdf format.)

• Ferl. An information service supporting the use of C&IT for teaching and learning.
• RESL. The Open University's Re-usable Educational Software Library.
• HLSI. The Higher Lever Skills for Industry repository of learning materials for universities, colleges and local companies.
• SearchLT. A catalogue of electronic learning materials for engineering, with a resource description schema which maps to the IEEE's LOM.

Quality assurance for digital learning object repositories: issues for the metadata creation process

Currier, S., Barton, J., O'Beirne, R., Ryan, B. (2004). Pre-print: to appear in ALT-J : Research in Learning Technology, Vol. 12, issue 1 (Jan 2004).

Not entirely work by the Metadata SIG, but Sarah worked for CETIS and this paper is about metadata, so it seems appropriate to include it here. This paper questions the assumption that metadata creation is straightforward and examines the consequences for digital repositories of poor quality metadata.

This paper builds on the work presented at ALT-C 2003 as "quality assurance for digital learning object repositories: how should metadata be created?" (Sarah Currier and Jane Barton)

MS Word file of pre-print.

survey by questionnaire

The CETIS metadata and digital repository SIG has conducted a survey of learning resource metadata usage in the UK.

Information has been gathered using an online questionnaire. This questionnaire focuses on the use of IMS/IEEE style metadata schemas in UK HE and FE, but we are also interested reasons why people choose not to use this type if metadata schema.

A pdf document giving a summary of the results up to August 2002 is available for download.