Web 2 and repositories

28-September-2005

[ ICT and learning ]
I have sort of tracked the repositories debate over the last couple of years but have lost sense of where it is going.

Puzzling over several questions.

I have sort of tracked the repositories debate over the last couple of years but have lost sense of where it is going.

Now i need to sort out a couple of questions in my head. It seems to me one of the problems is that repositories have always been envisaged as institution wide or cross institution things. In the field I work in - vocational education and training research - there are many researchers but they are dispersed. Typically they work on projects - funded at institutional, national or European level. They are generally required to make the products of their projects available on a project web site. Professional practice requires the production and publication of at least occasional papers in journals or books - which are usually published in some form or other somewhere on the web.

Repository software is too 'heavy' for these sort of documents. Yet we want them to be discoverable and reusable (or I do anyway). The answer would seem to be to use a Content Management System and enhance the metadata - Dublin Core plus what? and to use some form of tagging. Then there is the question of what tagging service to use. Del.ici.us is widely used but is really for on-line citations. Connotea looks good but is a little limited. I can sort of see how to use these services as part of the workflow in a project but still cannot work out where the future lies in sharing information and knowledge through tagging and metadata in a lightweight applications.

Any advice would be welcome.

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Graham Attwell; 28-September-2005 09:14:40;