2.4 Trends within Repositories 

2.4.1 Metadata Catalogues not Objects  

Out of the repositories covered in this report only a minority of services are providing access 

to actual resources or content packages. The majority of the repositories are simply online 

metadata catalogues of web based materials.  

This trend has seemingly emerged in response to a drive from the academic community to 

move away from generic internet search engines to producing online catalogues of high 

quality resources based on a structured peer review process. This approach avoids all the 

complexities associated with learning resource management. In particular the issues and 

complexity surrounding digital rights means that few projects have the funding or resources to 

tackle learning resource management. Of the repositories that actually store content, such as 

Connexions, very few appear to have implemented content packaging standards. 

2.4.2 Federated Searches 

Learning object repositories, as a whole, are still extremely immature, with projects such as 

MERLOT and EdNA Online being the leading examples in their respective countries. 

Federated searches between large scale repositories have already been, and continue to be 

implemented. The advantages to the user are obvious, and bring the ideal of global reuse of 

learning resources closer to reality. However, the projects offering federated searches such 

as MERLOT and EdNA are relatively mature and require no authentication. The main 

advantage federated searching for repositories is that the number of objects available to their 

community increases dramatically in a very short amount of time. 

2.4.3 Creative Commons Licence 

Services that provide access to content are in some cases implementing the Creative 

Commons Licence

1

. A good example of a site using Creative Commons Licensing is the 

Connexions initiative (2.4.10) which provides the following description of how it would work for 

a user:  

You can give an existing module an alternate title or delete/edit the author s links. 

But you cannot edit the content of a module unless you are the author or the 

author granted you the maintainer role. Connexions gives you two options in this 

situation. You can request that the author change the contents of an existing 

module with the Suggest Edits function, or you can make a copy of an existing 

module, edit it as needed, and publish it as your own with the Derive Copy 

function. Derived copies contain an acknowledgement that they are based on an 

existing module.

2

Further information about the contributors licensing model adopted by the JORUM Service in 

Development can be found at the JORUM Contributors FAQs

3

 webpage.  

2.4.4 Quality Assurance of Content 

A number of the repositories reviewed in this report are enforcing some format of quality 

assurance of content. The QA process adopted by different learning repositories ranges 

substantially. Resources submitted to MERLOT are catalogued by voluntary subject experts 

as part of their quality assurance policy, whereas the Co operative Learning Object Exchange 

1

 Creative Commons at 

http://creativecommons.org/

2

 Connexions FAQ at 

http://cnx.rice.edu/help/faq/document_view

3

 See 

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/contributors/chelp/faq.html

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