Repository strategies - second expert workshop (WS 3.2)

This workshop took place at Reval Hotel Olümpia, Tallinn, Estonia, on September 16^th-17^thThe agenda for all expert workshops is settled on the basis of input from network members. During the second strategic seminar in Lisbon participants were asked to prioritize issues for this workshop. This list of issues will also serve as guidelines for producing the upcoming thematic synthesis report on repository strategies. The issues with highest priority for the second workshop in the series concerning Repository strategies were:

• Quality assurance strategies (editorial policies; technical quality assurance)
• Identifying the decisive benefits that trigger repository use by important target groups: professional publishers, public institutions, teachers…
• Connecting and cooperating with existing repositories (including overcoming barriers such as language, IPR, technical issues …)
• The cost of building and maintaining a repository (business models; initial costs; establishing a critical mass of content; sustainability …)
• Strategies for involving key actors in development process

Emphasis during this workshop was on presenting different strategies when setting up new repositories, and identifying what seems to trigger success and how pitfalls can be avoided.
This was done through presentations of (very different) approaches of existing and upcoming repository initiatives, and elaborated through group sessions.

The focus was on elaborating the above issues in order to produce a comprehensive thematic report containing the most relevant information. Part of the basis of this elaboration was the results – most notably on quality assurance – from the first workshop on repository strategies.

From the diverse nature of different settings and contexts for establishing educational repositories it is hard, if not impossible, to do a simple and rigorous presentation of best practise. In order to present the best possible advice to existing and coming repository owners, the coming thematic synthesis report on repository strategies will thus try to describe common obstacles and barriers, and provide examples of how they have been successfully dealt with within specific contexts. The general consensus from workshop discussions was that emphasis should be on case descriptions combined with data comparable across countries/repositories. There was a general consensus that the networks should collect comparable data through surveys of individual repository profiles and use this to identify relevant trends and strategy patterns.

This second workshop on repository strategies focused on presentation of different approaches and motivations for building repositories. The five issues given the highest priorities during the second strategic seminar were discussed following plenum presentations, and ideas on how these areas should be further analysed and elaborated were drafted in group sessions. In addition, existing reports and advice to repository owners on the same issues will be collected over the next months. Some examples emerged during the workshop, and members have provided others after. This will help provide as comprehensive a view on potential strategies as possible.

Part of the workshop was devoted to updating national contributions to the second version of the State of the Art report on educational repositories and defining in more detail the structure and content of a report on agreement templates for repository owners.

WSOY’s strategies and services on learning material repositories (Heikki Karjalainen, WSOY)
A presentation from one of the leading educational publishers in Finland. The presentation detailed a strategy of providing both publisher produced and user generated content through a common interface (a platform with LMS functionality developed since launch in 2001). Teachers are presented with either “free content only” or can buy access to the commercially produced content which then also includes content produced by teachers.
The commercial service (OPIT) has 134.000 users (September 2008) and includes interactive learning objects, lesson plans, tests, audio and video assets etc.

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National Digital Resource Bank (Fiona Iglesias, NWLG)
Fiona Iglesias did a presentation on the background, business model and choices made so far in the ambitious project of establishing a National Digital Resource Bank – a project building upon the goal of each school having a learning platform by 2008, with the ambition to ease uptake and use through providing quality digital content.
The presentation covered the aspects of funding, delivery, content packaging, quality assurance, copyright (ownership and infringement handling), file formatting, metadata, harvesting, deployment and implementation. According to the project plan most English schools will have direct access to a common bank of free digital content within three years.

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National Repository Strategies: Some Higher and Further Education Examples (Charles Duncan, Intrallect)
Charles Duncan presented an overview of the differences and similarities in the strategies chosen by three repositories: JORUM (UK, 600 institutions; higher and further education), COLEG (Scotland, 40 institutions; further education) and NDLR (Ireland, 21 institutions; higher and further education).
These repositories present three different types of motivations for building a repository: distribution of content; preservation of content; building a community of practice.
From these starting points the presentation introduced the choices made concerning content deposit and consumption, rights, ensuring ease of use, quality assurance, establishing a critical mass and ensuring sustainability.

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Teachers using educational repositories
The workshop included presentations “from real life” in the form of Estonian teachers sharing their experiences with using educational repositories. They presented the motivating factors but also gave examples of some of the barriers and problems to using digital content from repositories. These brief presentations were used as input for the subsequent discussions on whether the current repository strategies match the needs and expectations of this important user group.

• Identifying the decisive benefits that trigger repository use by teachers
  Katrin Saks, Pärnu Koidula Gymnasium (link to presentation)
• Repositories – What’s there for teachers?
  Meeri Sild, Lilleküla Gymnasium (link to presentation)
• Painful experiences in author rights violation
  Kristel Mäekask, Lilleküla Gymnasium (link to presentation)
• Do teachers need repositories?
  Pille Tiina-Kuusik, Lasnamäe Kindergarten-Elementary School (link to presentation)

Education, content and Encyclopaedia Britannica (Adam Bates)
Adam Bates from Encyclopaedia Britannica presented the current status and future plans of Britannica’s work in the school market. With a 240 year history and tradition of content creation and moving through first digitalization and up to today where much emphasis is on providing access to content the way users want it – easy, flexible and trough a number of different access routes and devices (web, LMS, portals, push technology, mobile access, eBookks, interactive whiteboards …).
A second new major trend is allowing users to both interact with and enrich existing content, as well as creating completely new content through an open publishing system.

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Britannica Blog Forum: Brave New Classroom 2.0

Brief news – suggestions for the network
To allow members to share ongoing or planned activities a brief session was devoted to present or discuss ideas and initiatives, which might be of interest to network members (both ideas to be taken up directly within the network, but also as informal sharing of ideas with a bit broader scope).

This first version of the session featured:

• Demonstration of drag’n’drop depositing and open search interface to intraLibrary – introducing the “invisible” repository
• Discussion on teacher training initiatives – concrete example EPICT

Administrative issues and evaluation
The workshop included the traditional update on project administrative issues (finances, web site updates, progress) as well as a brief evaluation of the workshop including suggestions for coming workshops.

Outlining the Thematic Synthesis report on repository strategies
During the first group session participants were divided into five groups, which were responsible for initiating the writing of a section of the thematic synthesis report on repository strategies. The five section headings were based on the topics identified as the most important during the second strategic seminar:

• Quality assurance strategies (editorial policies; technical quality assurance)
• Identifying the decisive benefits that trigger repository use by important target groups: professional publishers, public institutions, teachers…
• Connecting and cooperating with existing repositories (including overcoming barriers such as language, IPR, technical issues …)
• The cost of building and maintaining a repository (business models; initial costs; establishing a critical mass of content; sustainability …)
• Strategies for involving key actors in development process

Each group had access to survey results and background material collected prior to the workshop. Groups were asked to elaborate on these topics and identify what information should be included – and how this could be collected.

Output from group discussions (draft notes, mindmaps etc.) were uploaded to the Members Zone and will be used as valuable input for the production of the thematic synthesis report.
They will be used for:

• Drafting the structure of the thematic synthesis report on repository strategies
• Defining the important issues to cover when producing case stories
• Identifying questions to include in repository profile surveys
• Improving the access to comparable data across educational repositories

The discussions again highlighted the need for detailing good examples and at the same time the complexity and difficulties of transferring “best practise” to different contexts.

Figure 1. Part of mindmap produced by the group focusing on Quality Assurance Strategies

State of the Art report – version 2
A group session was devoted to updating the national contributions to the next version of the State of the Art report (D2.6).
Participants were grouped according to country and faced with the tasks of i) updating their national section, ii) identifying comparable data across countries relevant to include and iii) commenting on the current structure / suggest new headings.

Updated country sections were uploaded to the Members Zone and will be further edited before inclusion in the upcoming State of the Art report.

Link to updated national contributions

Templates for agreements – defining structure and content
The final group session was used for discussing the form and need for the deliverable concerning agreement templates for use by repository owners (D5.5). The coordinator introduced two concrete examples of agreement templates to the groups

• one for a teacher entering new metadata to a repository, including uploading the digital content or linking to it at some server
• one for a professional publisher registering a new educational title

On the basis of these two examples the members discussed, what type of templates they (and therefore also other repository owners and content users and producers) need and find helpful in their daily work.

From the discussion some initial guidelines for this deliverable emerged:

• Produce materials that the network need
• Produce information that does not exist already (refer to it)
  • Example: Becta’s “Guidelines for repository owners”
    (in Members zone – hopefully public some time in the future)
  • Example: “Providing access” guidelines from the Proaccess project
    (in Members zone – also public when final version is ready from the project)
• Make a general section with summaries, advice and useful extracts and samples, and collect concrete examples to be in an annex
• Teachers’ agreement must be simple and easy to understand and operational. To simplify split it into more parts for each situation: Metadata only, Content too and Third party agreement, Who is legally responsible and carries the risk
• Publishers’ agreements should include only parts that publishers use: Quality assurance and measures should be clear; resources should have a ‘didactic aim’, but difficult to establish what didactic is

During and after the workshop members have contributed with a number of examples that will be further dealt with at the next workshop 5.2.