Digital Repositories The management of learning objects Alex Martinez alex.martinez@du.edu Instructional Designer

What are Digital Repositories? Simple Definition: Collections of digital objects. They differ based on characteristics and purpose: Institutional repository? Subject repository? Data repository? Learning object repository?

Digital Repository Criteria Each object has a set of metadata values. Allows you to put, get and have access control for each object. Should be trusted, well-supported and well-managed.

Why is a repository important? Improves teaching and learning. In Higher education we produce and reuse a lot of the same instructional materials. One object can be efficiently delivered to multiple presentation tools.

More important reasons Gives faculty and students easy, secured access to high quality materials. Quality control of materials increases. Makes business sense.

Types of Digital Repositories DSpace: http://www.dspace.org/ Fedora: http://www.fedora.info/ CORDRA: http://cordra.net/

The Challenges Requires collaboration by many departments. Requires processing standards and best practice techniques. Should not burden the content creators and end-users. Giving the user powerful presentation and management tools over content.

More Challenges Who owns the object and the metadata? Who can change or update the object and the metadata? How is copyright protected on the object? What are the security, authentication and authorization models?

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