OER repositories and preservation – the elephant (not in) the room?
September 17, 2010 10 Comments
Way back at the beginning of the ukoer programme there were discussions around including a link to a resource in JorumOpen rather than the file itself; Gareth Waller emphasised on my post at the time that “having a chain of URLs does not present any technical problems in the sense that the end resource can still be found, the problems only appear when the link chain breaks (either via a bad URL or a server not responding).” He also emphasised that “if the physical resource is submitted into Jorum, we may be able to offer enhanced searching to the end user for that particular item e.g. full text search on a pdf. If a link is submitted, we can only allow the user to search on the metadata associated with the resource.”
The issue has cropped up again recently on the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list where @lescarr makes the point that, of the recently announced six winners in the Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition, which are all discoverable from Jorum, none are actually deposited in the national oer repository – just metadata records with a web link to the location elsewhere on the web. Les goes on to emphasise that, while this is perfectly useful, “one of the raisons d’etre of repositories is to provide persistent, safe access to valuable material”.
There was a lot of discussion throughout the ukoer programme around the pros and cons of duplicating resources in Jorum as opposed to simply linking to resources held in other repositories/on institutional or third-party websites and also on the development of tools to harvest metadata via RSS and OAI with different projects having different preferences depending on the tools they were using and the types of resources they were releasing (see http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/12/09/oer-rss-and-jorumopen/). Responding to a clear demand from the ukoer community who understandably did not wish to dual deposit both locally and into the national repository, Jorum therefore developed a tool to harvest metadata via RSS (which I presume is why many records are metadata only).
Our Unicycle project, in fact, as one of the ukoer projects using a formal repository platform that makes it straightforward to export resources as IMS content packages, is one of the few projects, I think, to actually bulk upload our OERs to Jorum – however, many of the resources in our repository are themselves metadata records only that point to an external resource on leedmet.ac.uk, YouTube, joebloggs.com or wherever which clearly carries implications for preservation…Our OERs are also harvested by the xpert repository at Nottingham using OAI-PMH. Xpert is “a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources…to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use.” As such, there are no resources in Xpert per se, just links to resources harvested from various feeds – which means, of course, that it cannot have preservation as one of its raisons d’etre (I recently learned during a twitter conversation with the repository itself that xpert use a 404 checker that checks all their links once a week and deletes any that are broken.)
The ukoer programme was necessarily none-proscriptive around technology (apart from mandating “deposit” in Jorum Open) and, as made clear in @kavubob‘s series of posts The use of…in the ukoer programme a wide range of tools and platforms were used including but by no means limited to formal repositories – Web 2.0 technologies in particular lent themselves to the programme, even for projects like our own that did use a formal repository we were often simply curating resources on external web-sites (Web 2.0 is third party pretty much by definition and a well established source of anxiety for preservationists). What, then, are the implications for preservation of OERs and is it an elephant that we will struggle to keep in the room? To what extent does it matter if an individual resource, perhaps poorly curated, disappears from a specific web-location; if it has been “released into the wild” under Creative Commons (and it’s any good) then there is a good chance it has already been reused or duplicated elsewhere – perhaps disaggregated or modified (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)?
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How long does an OER live? How long does a course book live? A hand out? A slide? Should OER live forever? Is this a legacy of repositories as preservers, not quite working when faced with the dynamism of OER formats?
Cat, meet pigeons
Hi Nick,
i think there’s lots of unanswered questions around the curation and appropriate preservation of learning materials more generally – ranging from keep everything to keep nothing. If anything it’s going to be easier to preserve OERs because the licenses will often permit derivative works removing at least one hassle.
Although personally i’d like to see a more of an interest in preserving OERs (as historic/ cultural artefacts) i see a lot of sense in the argument that you rarely need a specific OER (in the identical bitstream sense and perhaps in the wider specific item sense) you just need something like it.
One thing i’d note about some of the web2.0 tools used is that some have good export functions so from a curation point of view they’re perhaps better than some other options. For example – if we think about the use of wordpress – @josswinn was able to move OER content between eprints and wordpress using OAI-ORE. in itself that’s great. but i wonder if they might also be able to ‘ship’ it to the internet archive as well (as it’s increasingly supporting OAI-ORE for memento)
Although “preservation” is a startling complex issue, the problem for me as a lecturer can be simply stated: if I start to use an OER in my teaching this year, do I have to check that it is still there when the course is run next year? Because really, I can’t afford to use OERs if they’ve got that level of risk attached to them. Checking one OER in one course for one year might be an acceptable overhead, but checking a dozen in each of six courses for a decade is a nightmare. And it’s not just the checking that’s the problem (because it can be automated as Nick says), its finding an equivalent or working out a replacement activity.
So my real beef isn’t that the repository has not been used “properly”, but that the provider of the OER (the author?) puts me in a position where they have made something that would really benefit my students (and make the learning experience better) but they haven’t made it safe to do so.
@Les
Surely OER should be downloadable? To me, with my OER hat on. I think that is a essential for the reasons you state?
Do people believe that OER usage is low due to this reason?
@Pat
“Downloadable” as in “view them on my machine”? Or “downloadable” as in “provide a permanent home in my environment because they aren’t safe where they are” ?
Yes, I want to use them and view them, but I don’t want to be responsible for making a micro-internet on my site. Especially when the context that a resource is embedded in may be just as useful as the resource itself.
However, does “safety” relies on someone else maintaining micro-internet of content they may no longer want to use so you can use it?
Does OER need to live forever?
P.S Oer Africa – bad networks, poor electricity – downloadable is quite useful in some cases.
I’m implying that “safety” relies on OER authors being responsible for their content rather than leaving it where they dropped it like unruly teenagers. “Safety” means that if you make a learning object public for community use, and publicise the availability of that object, you darn well ought to make sure that it’s not going to disappear just because you’re too busy to look after it.
I can’t reply to Les’s reply. So am replying here.
One site – which shall remain nameless moved all of the OER to new address. Over 9000 resources gone in a flash.
So it’s not always the authors that create the problem.
Surely all learning materials date though? How do you deal with the migration? Cirriculum (sp?) mapping of courses’ evolution?
No doubt those interested have seen Peter Burnhill’s reply to Les on JISC-REPOSITORIES.
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