Find and Seek

Led by Phil Barker and Lorna Campbell

How do we support the management, description, discovery and use of educational resources, such as those being created by the OER programme, without mandating large amounts of metadata? Are the days of heavy weight metadata standards and application profiles over? Can we develop new strategies for resource description and discovery?

There is no getting away from the fact that the main way people find things online, even educational resources, is through Google and other generic search engines. Consequently we need to recognise the increasing importance search engine optimisation and customisation to make sure that the right resources can be found by those users who are seeking them. However there are still cases when more structured resource descriptions are of considerable value, and automatic metadata generation may be a fruitful approach in creating these descriptions. Similarly Web 2.0 services with their focus on syndication, APIs, folksonomies and tagging could provide a whole host of innovative new solutions for aggregating collections of resources and dynamic information about where, how and by whom they are used.

In this session external experts and a range of JISC Projects on Automatic Metadata Generation, Rapid Innovation and OER shared their opinions and experiences through presentations and an open forum to discuss the technicalities and practicalities of these issues.

Introduction
Phil Barker, JISC CETIS



Findings of the Automatic Metadata Generation Use Cases project
Charles Duncan (Intrallect)



Linked Open Courseware - building towards an ecosystem of resource discovery and reuse
Chris Clarke (Talis)



Search Engine Optimisation lessons from an individual's OER project
Russell Stannard (University of Westminster)



Workshop/discussion
"What relevant experience do we have, what could be done in the future, how could CETIS and JISC help."

Session summary

