Article: Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges

Neil Jacobs has written an article entitled "Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges" in February 16 issue of FreePint. Jacobs says that a "repository is a digital object store into which
material can be deposited." His article talks about:

• Standards and interoperability
• Academic research
• e-Learning
• Multimedia

There are many URLs and pointers to institutions involved in these types of digital repositories.

The section on standards and interoperability is short yet speaks volumes. It says: (with my emphasis)

Repositories only help people share digital resources where both the repositories and the resources comply with international open standards. In terms of repositories, the key interoperability standard is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, OAI-PMH, which enables metadata to be exchanged reliably. In terms of digital resources, the standards vary according to the domain, but include: Dublin Core and MARC for bibliographic data; IMS Learning Objective Metadata; and ISO 19115 for geospatial data. Packaging standards exist to create compound digital objects, integrating both files and metadata, including METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, IMS Content Packaging, and the MPEG 21 DIDL (Digital Item Declaration Language).

I really like that first sentence. Yes...a good document to read or even skim.