EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

In Denmark three national repository initiatives supplement one another:

Fagenes Infoguide, Materialeplatformen and E-Museum

Number of users / page views per month
Fagenes Infoguide	130,000
Materialeplatformen	90,000
E-Museum	15,000

Fagenes Infoguide, was initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education back in 1997. It is an educational link repository with the 10,000 best web resources for Danish schools (K12). The web resources are described with Dublin Core metadata. Users can suggest new links to be included in the repository. A hired staff of app. 45 subject specialists register all links in the relevant categories. The goal is not to include everything, but to have the best web-based resources and in this way help the teachers to manage the vast amount of information on the Internet.
Content in the repository can be accessed through SOAP web services and in this way be presented in e.g. Learning Management Systems.
These links to 'all' educational resources on the web, whether Danish or from abroad, supplement the Danish learning resources in materialeplatform.dk.

Materialeplatformen, initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education and implemented together with the Danish publishers. The Materialeplatform opened on-line in April 2006. Status November 2008: 20,000 Danish learning resources and 4,000 media clip (mostly pictures for free use within education). The repository contains titles of both digital and analogue resources (that is books, chemistry sets, exhibitions, etc.). The publishers or teachers, who created the learning resource, must also register the metadata. Metadata cannot be provided by a third party (unless it is specified in an agreement with the content owners).

 

emuseum.dk, initiated by the Danish Ministry of Education and The Danish Ministry of Culture, opened on-line in October 2006. November 2008 the repository includes 883 learning resources on cultural heritage, visual arts, design, film etc.
All the learning resources can also be found by searching materialeplatform.dk. E-museum is a specific user interface (with add-on functionality) to the same repository, including a map providing access to the cultural heritage from a geographical approach.

 

dr.dk/skole and dr.dk/gymnasium are two popular services by which Danish schools (K12) can subscribe to TV and radio productions from DR – the Danish public service TV channel.

 

Cooperation is essential for a successful project. Involve all the stakeholders if possible, including the relevant ministries.

Defining a learning resource is difficult if not impossible. However, it is necessary to have guidelines and criteria for excluding a learning resource submitted by publishers or teachers. Current definition based on "real life": "Any resource which is primarily used for educational purposes in its present form".

Rights issues: Everybody, who registers a new title, must agree to an online declaration. Furthermore, at Materialeplatformen UNI•C has implemented a screening procedure for all teacher produced material. Demands for this procedure were raised both by the publishers and the teachers. Both parties wanted to avoid lawsuits.

Based on IEEE Lom, the Materialeplatform uses a Danish DanLom metadata application profile.

Based on the resources in the repository it can be concluded that teachers and publishers (and museums) need some kind of guidance to guarantee the relevant metadata and content in the repository.