EdReNe – Current state of educational repositories – national overview

The Digital School Library provides easy access to digital learning and teaching resources for anyone involved in educational activities. The library focuses on the selection and description of curricula-linked quality resources from preschool up to upper secondary level: The Digital School Library is meant to function as an exchange platform for contributions from various sources.

Apart from the furthering of current developments in the field of educational internet technology the project focuses on the pedagogic concerns of the teachers and helps build a community which recognizes the shared use of digital learning resources as a common interest.

That is why the Digital School Library brings the resources straight into the classroom and to each student. It forms an integral part of educanet², the password protected learning management system used by the majority of public schools in Switzerland. In the familiar environment of the encompassing learning management system the students search, find, organize, store, and work with the resources according to their own needs.

The Digital School Library provides not only a download possibility for existing resources but may also be used as a tool for the cooperative development of new resources by schools and their teachers. For this specific purpose password protected parts of the administrative interface of the Digital School Library are offered to schools in order to manage their internal resources according to their own needs – in the hope that they will further develop their own resources in such a way that they can be used by the whole user community. Hence the Digital School Library is closely linked to the schools: Over and above the concrete organisation of how the schools and teachers may access and manage their internal resources ‘their’ own repositories thus become part of the Library.

Other points of interest:

• Resource providers are public educational institutions, (i.e. educational mediacenters, schools themselves, teacher training colleges, or other pedagocical institutes, …), public, semi-private or private institutions with an educational purpose (i.e. museums, radio- and tv-stations, associations, …) as well as private partners, who act as distributors of resources which are available commercially (i.e. publishers of teaching materials).
• The description of the resources follows LOM-CH, the Swiss metadata application profile based on IEEE LOM and using vocabularies of the LRE profile. LOM-CH considers the characteristic features of the federalistic swiss educational system and allows the linking of resources to the different curricula by using competencies so that a mapping between various curricula is possible.
• The quality of each individual resource is a major issue. The Digital School Library accepts any kind of resource but not from any source, meaning that the resource providers are limited rather than the resources themselves. In the process each resource will be tagged with its provider’s corporate logo. The users, on the other hand, will have the opportunity to rate and comment on the resource.

Archibald is the open source software for creating, editing and publishing the metatdata of the learning resources in the Digital School Library. It works semi-automatically by using making use of user- and organisation profiles, and organises the proces of proposing, choosing, describing and publishing the learning resources into the Digital School Library while following a predefined workflow, including mandatory stages of quality control. Archibald can be used centrally on the web or be downloaded and installed as a local application at the level of the institution.

The current version of Archibald (August 2009) also includes:

• local or external user-identification,
• multilingual interfaces (French, German, English),
• navigation in keeping with a traditional local application
• personal preferences management, messaging and task management
• user rights management based on predefined roles according to criteria of quality.

The further versions of Archibald will include:

• implementation of consistent validation procedures as described in the recommendation of CTIE (25 March 2009)
• importation of metadata for resources
• creation, management and publication of curricula elements
• local search and navigation interface for resources and curricula elements