Last week's ALT-SURF Spring Conference and Research Seminar in Edinburgh was a welcome contrast to mega conferences; delegate numbers were limited to ~80. The conference brought together colleagues from the Netherlands' SURF organization and the UK ALT to consider the current state-of-the-art in digital repositories and ePorfolios. SURF is similar in many ways to the ALT, but the former has a HE-only remit whereas ALT's interests also encompass further education and lifelong learning. Lorna Campbell, Assistant Director of CETIS, gave the first keynote on Digital Repositories and eLearning Infrastructures. Apologies to Lorna for condensing her talk into the following few paragraphs. The interpretation of what was said is mine.
Lorna highlighted how we now have a virtual feast of content and assets supplemented by an equal feast of resource management systems, e.g. content mangement systems, learning management systems, VLEs, eprints etc etc. Such diversity, however, has led to the development of content silos each with their own organization, access, and 'lock-in' issues.
Traditionally, we tend to take an owner-centred view of resources with a focus on creation, access, management/control and gatekeeping. However, a user-centred decentralized model of resource management is now 'rocking the boat', e.g. peer-to-peer networks. However, Lorna contended that it's more useful, perhaps, to think of digital repositories as a continuum ranging from absolute owner management to absolute user management, e.g. DSpace > Jorum+ > DIDET > POOL > LionShare > Edutella.
Browsing the links above will show that hybrid models are emerging, i.e. user-centric repositories or peer-to-peer networks working with central repositories. For example, SPLASH uses 'peer-to-peer' technology so users can maintain mini-repositories on their computers. These mini-repositories are linked together so users can search all the peer sites (POOL) from their own SPLASH applications.
Whilst the concept of a continuum is attractive there are cultural, technical, and political impediments still to be overcome before such peaceful co-existence and co-operation becomes the norm.
