JOIN IN WITH JORUM: the role of site representatives, library, learning centre and other support staff in the forthcoming JORUM service

Moira Massey, Steve Rogers and Sarah McConnell (EDINA)

A presentation about JORUM was made, which demonstrated that in order to work well, the JORUM service would require assistance from local institutions. Teams of support staff are likely to be required.

In addition, deposits of materials to be shared via the JORUM repository would need to be cleared in terms of copyright by a responsible person at the institution. We are calling the role of this person the "institutional publisher". There would also be a requirement for metadata assigned to each object to be checked, although it is not clear whether the institution, the data centre, or an intermediary organisation should undertake this task. This role would be called the "metadata evaluator".

The specific questions asked at the session were as follows:

With regard to the institutional publisher:

Who in the institution would be the appropriate person to do this?
Would this person be prepared to check materials deposited by academic staff and "sign" the licence?
What would assist them to do their job e.g. the system could ask the academic author whether they have permission to use third party materials

With regard to metadata evaluation:

Would institutions want involvement in the metadata evaluation of deposits made by their staff?
If so, would the library/resource centre want involvement in this?
If not, would you as library/resource centre staff be happy to hand over this role to the data centres or intermediaries?

We also asked:

Will library and learning resource centre staff take on the challenge of becoming metadata experts for e-learning?
Does the JORUM service, along with any local repository developments, offer greater potential to support staff to get involved in e-learning?

Some answers made by staff present were as follows:

Regarding institutional publishing:

Anything that adds time to the process is not good
It will be difficult for one person to be able to check all this information
Our academics cannot be trusted to check copyright. We would expect this kind of work to fall into our domain (library and information services)
The problem may be college resources. Many colleges have few staff who could do this kind of work
Who is liable if someone signs? A: It is likely that the institution is liable.
Institutions are beginning more involved in rights, but they have to realise that it needs proper funding
A tool could be developed that is able to identify if copyright is a problem e.g. if there are any images in the resource then it asks you to identify the source. The tool could step users through the process

Regarding metadata evaluation:

The author should be adding some of the metadata. They may want to adjust the metadata
If I were a member of the academic staff, I would not have time to do this job
Institutions would not want this job - there is no time available to do it. Would prefer the data centres or intermediaries to do it
Academic staff could fill in some fields but could the JORUM team then add the rest of the metadata - this could be sold as an incentive to staff i.e. that they do not need to get too involved

During the general discussion the following questions were raised and answered as follows:

Q: What about a resource that has a number of different resources in it, for example 4 images from different sources?

A: For the best results, it would be good if we could add metadata for each image. If someone does repurpose a resource, if the image is not tagged it can be restrictive. However, it may only be possible in some systems to provide metadata at the top level and most systems in any case only search on top level metadata. It depends on the system we can offer

Q: What incentives can you provide for depositors? What about doing it like COLEG - i.e. put one learning object in and get 10 out?

A: We put this idea to various people under our requirements study and most seemed to feel concerned that may disenfranchise smaller colleges

Q: Our university has not bought a local repository yet. There is no huge demand for this from academics

A: Users could use JORUM as a way of finding content across the UK and, in smaller institutions, it could act as a substitute for a local repository. For larger institutions which have their own repository, JORUM could act as their external publishing wing i.e. they would not need to get involved with exposing metadata etc. In other cases, institutions may sell resources and use JORUM to showcase their materials, although JORUM will not sell on their behalf

Q: Can you share your resources just within your college?

A: We hope to be able to procure a system that will support communities of practice. This is a requirement of the community that came across very clearly in requirements work. One aspect of this could be to support individual colleges, or teaching teams, or teams of colleagues working in different institutions. However, we shall not know whether or not we can support this until the outcome of the procurement is known.

Q: If people are re-purposing, do they have to put their new resources back in the repository?

A: This is up to the individual. They will receive every encouragement to do so.

Q: Different funding councils support different areas and they may have problems sharing nationally. What does national mean, in any case?

A: The word "national" has caused some difficulties. JORUM should not be seen as the top of the hierarchy, rather as one among many distributed repositories. It is national in the sense that it is centrally funded. It is multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral.

Q: Metadata tags may be different between Scotland and England, for example key skills and core skills.

A: The JORUM team is aware of this and has made support for these differences part of the procurement requirements.

Q: Institutions are now in competition for students. Many will not want to share their resources.

A: JORUM will be part of the JISC Information Environment. Hopefully, it will be one of many repositories that take part in this landscape from the point of view of exposing metadata. Some may only make their metadata available for some resources.

Q: Some institutions might want to sell resources.

A: In the requirements work, staff were asked if they wanted to be able to sell resources in the repository. We received a strong message that, while some may wish to do this, most staff felt that this would dilute the message of sharing and re-use that the repository service should promote. Staff would feel that their materials could be re-sold and this would be detrimental to their wish to share.

Q: What about offering small payments to depositors, as the Ferl website does? The Maricopa Exchange offers software as an incentive. COLEG pays institutions to create materials.

A: JORUM is looking at incentives as a research topic. However, once you start offering payments as an incentive, there is no going back. It may be a risk to the overall message, which is to encourage sharing.

Q: How are you going to add materials to the repository?

A: There are various sources that we are in contact with, but we could also come up with ideas such as having a summer school where people would create materials for JORUM. Any ideas would be gratefully accepted by the team!

Q from JORUM team: Can participants see a role for JORUM alongside institutional repositories?

A: Yes - indeed, it may be more popular, particularly in HE. Academic staff in HE tend to have more loyalty to staff in their own subject area than they do to their institution and therefore if JORUM can support inter-institutional teaching, it may be more popular than local repositories

Q from JORUM team: Are Learning Technology teams good people to target?

A: Yes, we could promote JORUM at a local level

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