Work in Progress - Invitation to Comment

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors[Edit][Delete]: Work in Progress - Invitation to Comment, Jisc [Edit][Delete]JISC [Edit][Delete] August 7, 2006
Page linking to a large collection of materials from the JISC Trust in Digital Repositories project, with an invitation to comment. Thus I spent my morning today.
Begin with The TrustDR Project: a plain-english description for project partners (all documents are in MS Word). It's a good overview with a nice set of references. See especially section 4. But readers should note some themes that permeate these discussions, themes that just don't ring right - the idea that computer scientists believe that "there is some 'magic bullet' type of solution to the task of running a repository," the assumption "that an institutional digital repository of learning objects is a form of digital library," and the idea that institutional top-down management is required to make repositories work. And it seems off that the athors would claim that "Google algorithms make extensive use of 'traditional' metadata to work their magic," which so far as I know is false (certainly the vast majority of web pages have no metadata). More...