Introduction

The main reason for implementing a repository at Leeds Thomas Danby in 2004 was to manage the NLN materials and to enable staff and students to access the materials easily. Indexing the materials and making them available via the intranet was time-consuming. Uploading multiple copies of the NLN materials to different ?courses? on our VLE (the basic version of Blackboard) was not an ideal solution. If the material was updated, it had to be manually re-uploaded to the various courses on Blackboard.

With Round 3 materials, you needed a viewer (or SCORM player) to display the learning objects. This added to the protracted process required to make the materials available to all.

Getting started

The research into a solution started with the free repository available from MIT called dSpace. However, this used the Dublin Core metadata standard rather than the IMS metadata specification adopted by the NLN. This meant that you couldn?t just ?plug and play? the NLN materials which limited its usefulness to us. However, this was a useful step in understanding what we did want out of a repository in terms of indexing, navigation, viewing and search facilities.

Participation in the Higher Level Skills for Industry (HLSI) project meant that the college were able to access their authoring tools and repository. This gave us another avenue to explore how metadata could be added to learning objects and how the objects could be searched for and displayed by a repository. However, the repository was in development and we were not able to have a local installation. As we did not want to make college documents widely available, this proved not to be the best solution for us.

Creating a repository

Our next phase of exploration was to buy the City College Coventry repository. This worked well in terms of quickly indexing all NLN materials. Adding additional materials still involved meta-tagging with a separate software like Reload from the JISC X4L project but we were one step closer to realising our goal. The search function wasn?t as we wanted it to be and so the quest carried on.

We explored the features of the JISC online repository, JORUM and found them very exciting. The only stumbling block was our need for a locally installed version, which doesn?t exist.

After a year of research, we decided that we had to create our own repository in order to get the full functionality that we wanted:

  1. A locally installed repository so we could store our own college documents (as well as NLN materials) without sharing them publicly. This also meant that we could set up our own classification system and not be restricted to the national classifications like JACS or Learndirect (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/research/archive/docs/vol5_Fin.pdf) that wouldn?t be relevant for non-teaching materials.
  2. We should be able to simply download the NLN materials from the NLN site and put them in the repository for automatic indexing and display.
  3. We wanted to be able to add weblinks.
  4. The viewers of most of the repositories we trialled didn?t launch the first page of the object but displayed instructions that a user had to click on to display the object. We wanted to short-circuit this step and make the viewer display the object immediately.
  5. We wanted users to be able to leave their ratings and comments on the objects.
  6. We wanted to see a Top 10 list of most frequently viewed objects.
  7. We wanted a google-like search facility.
  8. We wanted the user to have a choice on how much detail they wanted on the search results page, for instance, you can simply view a list of the titles of the objects, or expand the detail to see descriptions and keywords.
  9. We wanted to make upload to the repository easy with a web interface for adding metadata to objects.

Another feature that is quite unique to the repository that we built is the ability to select resources and store them as a list for access by other users (you simply send them the URL of the list). You can even re-order the list and add comments or instructions. This can be used by staff as a means of guiding students through the resources, or by any user to keep track of materials they have visited and to annotate them.

The development team consisted of our web developer, Jim Askey, our contracted ILT development officer/Learning Resources Adviser, Fran Bryant and the ILT coordinator, Lilian Soon. The repository was launched in January 2005 and helped us to meet our need to make information available under the Freedom of Information Act. By Nov 2005, over 2600 items were available on the repository.

Implementing the repository

The repository has been embraced by staff and students at the college and is now taken for granted, which we view as a good thing. Everyone assumes you will be able to find what you need on it. Issues that have cropped up as a result of implementing the repository include:

  • The need for an information strategy
  • Who decides what goes on the repository?
  • Who will be allowed to add materials to the repository?
  • Who is going to do the meta-tagging? Learning Resource advisers? What is the impact on their work load?
  • How long will materials stay on the repository?
  • How will house-keeping be managed and by whom?
  • Who does the quality control for teaching materials?

The repository at Leeds Thomas Danby is called the Virtual Resource Centre or vRC for short. This was in consultation with the Learning Resources staff as we aimed for it to be managed by the Learning Centre. Other issues to be worked out include decisions on whether to integrate these resource listings with Heritage, our library system, leading to a true one-stop shop for resources.

Further information

For any information or advice, contact our web developer Jim Askey at Jim.Askey@thomasdanby.ac.uk.