Repository services

Last updated Sept 2006

These pages contain links to groups who are running repository services (i.e. repositories actively storing, managing and serving learning resources or other services enhancing or aggregating the content of those repositories) based on the standards supported by this SIG.

Selection criteria:


 * Must be relevant to UK Further and Higher Education
 * Must support relevant interoperability standards for learning resources, e.g. IEEE LOM, IMS content packages.

Disclaimer

Inclusion on this list does not constitute and endorsement or recommendation; omission from this list should not be taken to imply criticism. Quotes are selected from the service websites. All trademarks are acknowledged.

Data for holds collected July 2005.

COL
"Curriculum Online (COL) is central to the Government's drive to transform teaching and learning in schools by improving access to ICT and multimedia resources for all pupils."

Holds: Unknown

Began: 2003

URL: http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk

Notes: Twenty-five subject areas are covered.

CAREO
Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (CAREO) is an ongoing research prototype, providing:
 * "A searchable collection of online resources for teaching and learning
 * A tool to support and extend communities of practice"

Holds: 4,123 (image, software, text, video, interactive resource)

Began: 2002

URL: http://careo.netera.ca

Notes: CAREO software is also the basis for a number of learning object repositories at other institutions as well. The software has two components the CAREO web application and the ALOHA metadata management server. Based on CanCore.

Curriculum Online
Curriculum Online aims to transform teaching and learning in schools by improving access to ICT and multimedia resources for all pupils. It offers teaching professionals easy, pinpoint searching through thousands of multimedia resources.

Holds ~1,000 (metadata only)

Began 2002

URL http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk

Notes Catalogue of resources to support nursery, primary, and secondary schools in the UK. Resources can be annotated by users. Resources have to be purchased from suppliers directly.

iLumina
"iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science. Resources in iLumina are catalogued in the MARC and NSDL metadata formats, which capture both technical and education-specific information about each resource. iLumina contains thousands of educational resources and several virtual collections. Please feel free to contribute your own resources to iLumina."

Holds: ~1,000

Began: 2001

URL: http://www.ilumina-dlib.org/

Notes: The NSDL metadata format uses elements from the DC-Ed extensions but the repository is designed to be IMS compliant.

HEAL
"The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a digital library that provides freely accessible digital teaching resources of the highest quality that meet the needs of today's health sciences educators and learners."

Holds: 20,786

Began: 2000

URL: http://www.healcentral.org/index.jsp

Notes: Uses local extension of IMS and LOM standards. Uses OAI to harvest metadata from some collections. Aggregated by NSDL.

Jorum
"Jorum is a JISC-funded collaborative venture in UK Further and Higher Education to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing. This free online repository service will contain shared, interoperable and sustainable materials. The system will contain the resources themselves (although it is able to point to resources held elsewhere) which will be described by metadata.

Jorum will essentially run two services. Jorum Contributor allows colleges and universities to upload learning and teaching materials to the system, while Jorum User provides access to the materials for download."

Holds: (Service in development)

Began: 2005

URL: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/index.html

Notes: Implementation of Intralibrary

LON-CAPA
"LON-CAPA (The LearningOnline Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach) is a full-featured web-based course management system, similar to commercial systems. The system is currently being used at over 40 colleges and universities and 40 K-12 schools across the world, and has a shared content resource pool of over 150,000 online resources, including more than 50,000 randomizing online problems."

Holds: 148,483

Began: 1992

URL: http://www.loncapa.org/

Notes: Free open-source distributed Learning Content Management and Assessment System

LORE
"LORE will provide a learning object repository for the Principal's e-learning projects and will investigate the provision of a university wide repository.

The LORE project aims to:
 * 1) Capture resources that are created by projects funded by the Principal's e-learning initiative.
 * 2) Keep the work done through this funding available and accessible.
 * 3) Examine how realistic it is for University of Edinburgh staff to collect/label/reuse resources within a reusable learning object (RLO) repository."

Holds: (In development phase)

Began: 2005

URL: http://www.lore.ed.ac.uk/

Notes: Use restricted to University of Edinburgh staff. Implementation of Intralibrary

SMETE
"The SMETE Open Federation was formed to promote the teaching and learning of science, mathematics, engineering and technology at all levels... The SMETE Open Federation community fosters the ongoing collaborative development among partner organizations, provides tools and services to support collection and service providers, and ensures stability, sustainability and salability of the Federation's programs and projects."

Holds: 8,131

Began: 1999 (based on NEEDS, 1994)

URL: http://www.smete.org

Notes: Supports LOM-based federated searching of MERLOT. They're also developing a federated search API based on SOAP.

SIESWE Learning Exchange
"SIESWE Learning Exchange: a storehouse of learning for social care. The aim of the project, formerly know as Stòr Cùram, is to create an easy-to-use repository of learning objects for social work education in Scotland."

Holds: Unknown

Began: 2003

URL: http://www.sieswe.org/learnx/

Notes: Implementation of Intrallect Intralibrary.

YHLearning
Yorkshire & Humberside - "Born of the HLSI [Higher Level Skills for Industry] project, a Yorkshire Forward initiative, the repository has enabled a wide range of partners to share learning content which in most instances is re useable across different sectors and for different subject and curriculum areas. We also have an authoring tool which enables practitioners with basic word processing skills to create online materials for delivery to learners."

Holds: Unknown

Began: 2003

URL: http://www.yhlearning.org.uk/

AEShareNet
"AEShareNet connects people who are looking for learning materials with those who own them. AEShareNet is a collaborative system to streamline the licensing of intellectual property so that Australian learning materials are developed, shared and adapted efficiently."

Holds: 20,837

Began: 1998

URL: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/

Notes: Serves as a catalogue of learning materials and facilitates IPR license mediation for them.

ADL
"The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is a distributed digital library with collections of georeferenced materials. ADL includes the operational library, with various nodes and collections, and the research program through which digital library architectures, gazetteer applications, educational applications, and software components are modelled, prototyped, and evaluated.

ADL provides HTML clients to access its collections and gazetteer, and provides specific information management tools, such as the Feature Type Thesaurus for classing types of geographic features, as well as downloadable software code."

Holds >15,000 Began 1995 URL http//www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/ Notes Aggregates the DLESE (Digital Library for Earth Science Education) learning resources

Arrow
Australian Research Repositories Online to the World - "The ARROW project objectives are to:
 * Identify and test software to support best-practice institutional digital repositories at the ARROW Consortium member sites to manage e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing
 * Develop and test a national resource discovery service using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories by the National Library of Australia"

Holds: 70

Began: 2003

URL: http://arrow.edu.au/

Notes: Demonstration system currently only has one repository online. Other member repositories will be added as they become available. Implementation of Fedora

DLearn
"DLearn is a learning object repository of shareable, digital, learning materials developed at the University of Arizona."

Holds: 50

Began: 2002

URL: https://www.dlearn.arizona.edu/index.jsp

Notes: Implementation of DSpace

DLORN
Distributed Learning Object Repository Network - "DLORN, your one-stop source for learning object syndication. We retrieve learning object metadata from across the web and store it here."

Holds: ~1,000

Began: 2003

URL: http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/dlorn/dlorn.cgi

DSpace a Parma
"Il servizio, attualmente in fase di sviluppo per la Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, offre accesso a materiali didattici, tesi, atti di congressi e lavori di ricerca in formato digitale. Tramite DSpace, che costituisce l'archivio digitale della Facoltà, questi materiali sono gestiti, archiviati, preservati nel tempo e resi facilmente accessibili attraverso il Web."

Holds: 118

Began: 2003

URL: http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it:8080/index.jsp

Notes: Implementation of DSpace

EdNA
Education Network Australia - "EdNA Online is a service that aims to support and promote the benefits of the Internet for learning, education and training in Australia. EdNA Online will be releasing its next generation EdNA repository and associated administration platform in late August 2005.

As an information service, EdNA Online provides two key functions:
 * A directory about education and training in Australia.
 * A database of web-based resources useful for teaching and learning."

Holds: 21,666

Began: 2003

URL: http://www.edna.edu.au

Notes: Web service components and metadata toolkit for webpages available for download.

GEM
"The Gateway to Educational Materials is a Consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to thousands of educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites."

Holds: 40,825

Began: 1996

URL: http://www.thegateway.org/

Notes: Provides access and search facilities for hundreds of collections held by consortium members.

MLX
"The Maricopa Learning eXchange (MLX) is an electronic warehouse of ideas, examples, and resources (represented as "packages") that support student learning at the Maricopa Community Colleges."

Holds: 1,219

Began: 2000

URL: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/

Merlot
"Merlot: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

MERLOT is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.

MERLOT's strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses."

Holds: ~12,000

Began: 1997

URL: http://www.merlot.org

Notes: Provides RSS syndication of content and also supports federated searching of the EdNa and SMETE collections.

NSDL
The National Science Digital Library - "NSDL is a digital library of exemplary resource collections and services, organized in support of science education at all levels. Starting with a partnership of NSDL-funded projects, NSDL is emerging as a centre of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education, and a community center for groups focused on digital-library-enabled science education."

Holds: 452 collections

Began: 2000

URL: http://nsdl.org

Notes: The NSDL is funded by the National Science Foundation of the USA. Some of the collections the NSDL harvests are drawn from the development projects it sponsors (192 projects to date). They are also examining adding educational metadata to their collections.

RDN
"The Resource Discovery Network is the UK's free national gateway to Internet resources for the learning, teaching and research community. The service currently links to more than 100,000 resources via a series of subject-based information gateways (or hubs). The RDN is primarily aimed at Internet users in UK further and higher education but is freely available to all."

Holds: ~100,000

Began: RDN Hubs 1993, RDN 1997

URL: http://www.rdn.ac.uk

Notes: Central search facility uses OAI-PMH.

Wisc-Online
The Wisconsin Online Resource Center is a digital library of Web-based learning resources called "learning objects." The digital library of objects has been developed primarily by faculty from the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) and produced by multimedia technicians who create the learning objects for the online environment. At present there are 350 contributors of learning objects. The Wisc-Online digital library contains over 2000 objects that are accessible to all WTCS faculty at no cost and with copyright clearance for use in any WTCS classroom or online application. Other colleges, universities, and consortia from throughout the United States and around the world use the library with permission.

Holds: ~2,000

Began: 2001 (earliest learning object)

URL: http://www.wisc-online.com/

Notes: Currently objects in repository can not be downloaded only be linked to. Content is due to be available for purchase and download in November 2005. They also offer a service to set up and re-brand their repository software for other institutions.

RepoMMan
RepoMMan aims to:
 * Assess the feasibility of automated population of object metadata within an authenticated environment by (a) the extraction of descriptive metadata from simple digital objects and (b) drawing contextual metadata from existing institutional sources
 * Conduct a detailed user requirements analysis to underpin this effort, focusing on both existing repository/storage usage and the boundary between personal and institutional repository space. This requirements analysis will be accompanied with an exploration of associated Digital Rights Management issues
 * Adapt a generic workflow framework to the requirements of common Fedora repository tasks within an approach based around Service Oriented Architecture.

Began: 2005

URL: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/index.html

Partners: University of Hull

PERX
Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch - "The project will develop a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities. This pilot will be used as a test-bed to investigate issues including: the range and availability of actual and potential digital repository sources; exploration of cultural barriers to the use of repositories in the subject community, functionality of software tools; advocacy to encourage participation of repository providers; maintenance issues; interactions with infrastructural shared services; enhancing metadata quality; embedding and reuse of resource discovery services; improving search and browse results presentation; service profiling for particular audiences."

Began: 2005

URL: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/

Partners: Heriot-Watt University, Cranfield University, Institution of Civil Engineers/Thomas Telford Ltd, Adiuri Systems Ltd., Geotechnical, Rock and Water Resources Library, Regional Support Centre East Midlands