Metadata OER Scheme

At the University Nova Gorica (Slovenia) we are piloting a new internal OER repository with the aim to collect and preserve materials from our online masters program in Leadership in Open Education. We have been looking at many examples to see what metadata structures are being used by major OER repositories, including a recent discussion in OE connect.
Our repository is more institutional - not really focused on providing learning materials, but mostly lectures, presentations, reports. We are interested in knowing how other institutions are approaching the issue of metadata scheme. Aligned to Dublin Core? Using LRMI? If anyone is willing to share, it would be quite useful!

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Hello Tijana!

How about MLR? :wink:

Metadata use does come up as a topic, from time to time. One perceived obstacle is that expertise tends to be quite specialized (ā€œask my colleague, sheā€™s the expertā€). Another hurdle is, as you point out, the diversity of standards. And there are institutional issues surrounding those.

If, by any chance, you understand French, this document might prove useful:

It came from a member of the ISO/IEC group concerned with international standards on learning, training, and education: SC 36 - JTC 1 (jtc1info.org).

The basic idea explained by this expert is fairly simple. For a long time, weā€™ve been using a local application profile for LOM. However, thereā€™s been a longstanding desire to move to MLR (aka ISO/IEC 19788). In the meantime, weā€™ve been leveraging several aspects of Linked Open Data practice to support this transition. That includes techniques related to, say, semantic inference across ontologies or to identity federation (with vCards providing a bit of help).
The aforelinked document was published in the context of a project to build a (new) portal for OERs and other types of resources. That project has shifted considerably.

In libraries, people who might be interested in MLR (or LRMI) tend to be those who are familiar with RDA. There are interesting similarities between those two standards. Otherwise, you might find people willing to discuss DC at a broad level (mostly insufficient for OERs) or focusing mostly on MARC 21. There are relatively few people working directly with LOM.
(Iā€™ve heard that even SupLOMfr has been more or less abandoned.)
As for LRMI specifically, I know there have been attempts to adopt it, sometimes with organization support. Phil Barker is still at it, recently changing the meaning of the ā€˜iā€™ in the acronym (now stands for ā€œinnovationā€). However, it doesnā€™t sound like it has become the be-all end-all standard.

Thing is, learning professionals rarely give much thought to metadata, even if theyā€™re deeply concerned with everything enabled by proper referencing. For instance, Iā€™ve heard people say that we only need a few keywords since web searches give good enough results.

As a result, thereā€™s a bit of a ā€œmix and matchā€ approach. People will create schemes for catalogs and repositories where they use Subject Headings from one place, DC for a few dimensions of the resource, claim unique IDs and learning resource type arenā€™t important, and eliminate any reference to pedagogical classification.

I realize this might not be the answer you wanted. Iā€™m hoping that others will chime in. Hopefully with cases which are less entangled in insitutional and technical issues.

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