The hunting of the OER. Resource discovery revisited... ...revisited for me that is!
Last week I attended an invite-only meeting at the JISC offices in London, notionally entitled a "JISC IE Technical Review" but in reality a kind of technical advisory group for the JISC and RLUK Resource Discovery Taskforce Vision [PDF], about which the background blurb says: The JISC and RLUK Resource Discovery Taskforce was formed to focus on defining the requirements for the provision of a shared UK resource discovery infrastructure to support research and learning, to which libraries, archives, museums and other resource providers can contribute open metadata for access and reuse. The morning session felt slightly weird (to me), a strange time-warp back to the kinds of discussions we had a lot of as the UK moved from the eLib Programme, thru the DNER (briefly) into what became known (in the UK) as the JISC Information Environment - discussions about collections and aggregations and metadata harvesting and ... well, you get the idea.
Xpert labs. Xpert contains metadata and resources for almost 150,000 learning objects from over 8000 providers.
This data is not only of benefit when running the xpert system, but also to other users and service providers. As part of the "Open Nottingham" strategy (a combination of the Xpert, Xpert Media Search and Attribution, BERLiN, U-Now, Xerte, iTunesU, Youtube EDU and Second Life) we have devised, the Xpert Team have taken steps to start to provide data and services to other repositories and interested parties. Some of the services we have developed are listed below. We are keen to liaise with people regarding how they would like to use Xpert and what data / services they would find useful. These service are recently developed and so should be considered in beta. DiscoverEd: