At the JISC CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories and Educational Content SIG meeting at the University of Strathclyde yesterday we heard about a number of interesting projects, but it was project SWORD and Julie Allinson’s very clear presentation that restored my faith in educational technology and the ability of educational technologists to work with and build upon existing dare I even say ‘main stream’ technology rather than to reinvent it or make it overly complex.

“SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) will take forward the Deposit protocol developed by a small working group as part of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme by implementing it as a lightweight web-service in four major repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary.”

The project looked at a range of existing publishing protocols and evaluated these against the project’s aims. And do you know what they concluded? They concluded the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol was the best fit for the project’s requirements. True, there will be some proposed extensions to the protocol but each repository that adopts the APP as part of the project will accept native APP requests to deposit materials.

This is great news and a smart move I think. There are millions of APP devices in people’s pockets able to capture and create content since Nokia adopted APP in most of its newer phones as part of its Lifeblog application (link to PDF Nokia spec). These devices and many others besides as well as desktop and web-based applications currently deposit their content into informal repositories. Soon they will be able to deposit into formal or institutional repositories and who knows, the web 2.0 revolution in content production may arrive on campus.

Some people may think from comments I’ve made that I am against repositories, or don’t see their value. Not so, and quite the opposite in fact. I see repositories everywhere, or at least places that store content in a format that’s available for others to discover and use. Only most people, me included, probably wouldn’t call them as such. I think the reason is because a ‘repository’ suggests something or a service you have to visit or go to to find content. However for many people that are using content produced by others, the content comes to them. By previously identifying what I’m interested in and by setting up the right kinds of subscription service more of the same can come to me without any effort on my part via RSS content syndication. RSS is shifting the point of engagement with repositories away from the remote site and more on to the desktop. It’s a bit like having the paper boy delivery your Sunday paper rather than you having to go and collect it (it’s Sunday morning now so excuse the weak analogy).

One of the desktop apps that I uses most days is a very good RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. By using NNW stuff comes to me. Not just the latest lolcats and posts from my buddies’ weblogs, but all kinds of stuff. A snap shot this morning includes the latest publications from a couple of dozen academic journals (thanks to the excellent Zetoc), a half dozen ‘proper’ academic repository saved searches (including JORUM), a dozen saved searched from a bibliographic database (thanks to PubMed), PodCasts containing interactive multimedia e-learning content (not just video/audio) the latest discussion amongst the students from my course module’s discussion forum, and loads more useful information before even getting to weblog entries (which are mini repositories, or at least content management systems in their own right). In short much of what I’m interested in comes to me rather than me having to go and fetch it.

So I see repositories everywhere, but I seldom think of them as such. I just know what content I’m interested and when I find it, increasingly I can register my interest in getting more of the same by subscribing to an RSS feed. The smart academic repositories are already wise to this and offer content syndication via RSS. Are these web 2.0 repositories? Really, who cares, but the others will ignore this shift in what it is to be a repository at their peril.

In a timely parallel post D’Arcy Norman reflects on why many learning object repositories are bereft of content (other than mandated content from large projects). If you’ve been following the comments on my last post about JISC repositories you see a raw nerve has been touched about a similar lack of activity in institutional ePrints repositories. D’Arcy (and James in a follow-up post) come up with some valid arguments why this may be the case. My tuppence also includes the fact that formal [institutional] repositories were created as a solution to a problem the target audience (academics, teachers, even students) did know they had.

It’s no longer necessary to point out the staggering amounts of content created and submitted every minute to informal so-called social repositories. So why the difference? Who knows, but give an easy to use tool to a person with a desire and motivation to create content that interests them and share it with like-minded individuals, is probably part of it.

Go find on Google: repositories
Go link: repositories

I’m at the JISC digital repositories conference. So far a real mixed bag. As you might expect there’s a lot of waffle about web 2.0 and how disruptive technologies are changing the nature of repositories. I say waffle because the discussion about web 2.0 largely seems to be limited by web 1.0 or 0.1 thinking. It’s no longer sufficient I think to put up a slide listing so-called 2.0 services, you know, the usual suspects, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube … etc. You don’t get insight into how these technologies are changing the teaching & learning landscape just by naming them. Sadly the conclusion after one of the keynotes was to the effect “we need to learn what makes web 2.0 services so successful and apply that to repositories of the future”. Sorry mate, the world won’t wait for you and by the time you’ve figured it out it’ll have moved on.

A question was asked in one of the sessions. “What will a web 2.0 repository look like?” I don’t know what the repository will look like, but for me the interface will be my RSS aggregator.

Oh and also at the conference the JISC launched Depot. Another repository, this time for ePrints. It’s aimed at UK academics who don’t have access to their own institutional ePrints repository. The FAQs are great:

4. What can I put in the Depot?

“Typically this will be an electronic duplicate of a peer-reviewed journal article [...] this is the version of your article after all of the changes due to the peer review process have been incorporated into the text.”

5. Will my publisher allow me to do this?

“This depends on the Copyright Transfer Agreement that you have signed with your publisher. Most publishers allow some sort of self archiving. [...] If your publishing agreement does not allow you to deposit in a repository, it might be possible to negotiate with the publisher to give you a right to archive your article.”

So that’s likely a ‘no’, then, at least if you want to share your work with others via the repository.