By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Report on the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Metadata Specifications
Interesting report (if you like this sort of thing) on a collection of metadata experts from major American libraries discussing digital archives preservation. The report contains a useful list of the different metadata formats adopted by various institutes (Dublin Core and Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) were the most popular). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Research Councils Back Free Online Access
Something for my own agency and funding agencies in Canada, where I've been agitating for a similar policy. "Research Councils UK (RCUK), the umbrella body for the eight research councils, are proposing that researchers must archive their papers arising from the work they fund in openly available repositories." The Publishers' Association, naturally, objects. Tough. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Research in Distance and Adult Learning Link
We're about to have a whopping thunderstorm, so I'd better cut this short and send it while I can. I'll catch up tomorrow. Anyhow, I ran into this site today which, although it has been publishing since 2002, has lurked below my radar. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Google Earth – Explore, Search and Discover
Google scores again with Google Earth - now free - which is essentially a three-dimensional representation of the entire Earth. "Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips." Toss your old paper-based atlas into the dustbin. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Infrastructure of Sharing in the Commons
Everyone is talking about things like blogs, Flickr, Wikipedia and the like, notes the author. "What makes all of this possible is the emergence of an infrastructure for sharing in the commons." What this boils down to is a combination of several key elements: the emergence of open source, open standards, and especially XML, "online tribes" (such as hackers) that take sharing as a core virtue, political movements that advocate the same, peer-to-peer distribution of resources, and business models that make them feasible. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Is It a Wiki? A Floor Wax? A Dessert Topping?
After you read Brian Lamb's article, take the time to visit Tiddly Wiki for a bit. As you look more closely, it will become more and more amazing - an entire wiki can be a single file. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Community Plumbing in Action: The Story of BEAT and the Campus Commons
This is a very good paper outlining the development of BEAT (the Business, Education, and Applied Technology program, which is an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional program that takes an applied, integrated approach to IT training) and the Campus Commons at UPEI. There's a lot going on in this paper, so read closely, but the core for me is the conceptual view of a self-organizing academic community and the key lessons: adopt an open strategy, encourage and allow freedom, attract a diversity of members, allow emergent communities to grow, and take an applied and integrated approach. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Has CC Lost the Plot?
I too was left scratching my head at the recent "birthday present" offered by Creative Commons: the right to download and play (but not share) a recording of 'Happy Birthday' sung (badly) by some CC luminaries at a cost (to donors) of 8.5 cents a download. More...