Metadata Sprint @ OCWC Global Monterrey

We ran out of time but I wanted to say that level (which Brent suggested) is an interesting field to add, and possibly duration of the course - our student services people use these fields on OpenLearn all the time to help prospective students decide on course choice. 

 One issue with these though would be fixing a vocabulary for level (under grad, postgrad or easy, difficult for example) and a unit of measure for duration (hours, days, weeks, months).  Without a fixed vocabulary we won't be able to search with these across OCWs.

Sheila reminded me that there's a new Dublin Core subset "education" which contains these fields - the OCW technical group should investigate when these are going public and include them in our metadata required/optional lists.

Rather than deciding/inventing which fields we'd like to add, I wonder if we'd be better off looking at the LOM standard and working out a required/optional best practice for OCW around these.  We've not done that so far because LOM is much more complicated to implement, but if people are doing IMS exports then LOM is the right tool for metadata as Allyn said.

Might be worth chatting to the DC Education Appliation profile folks as I'm sure there is quite a bit of commonality.

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile_20Task_20Group

I asked the twitterverse about sequencing information being included in metadata - response below.

sheilmcn Should content sequencing info be included in metadata?

repetej@sheilmcn If you want to describe the sequence of some items, independently of items themselves, then you need some metadata to "say" that?

sheilmcn@repetej ta came up here re people searching open courses and wanting to find info about what course to take next/what courses are related

repetej@sheilmcn That sounds like metadata to me :-) But I'm aware that some communities put different labels on different categories of descriptn!

# David Daviesdaviesda@sheilmcn If I understand what you mean by content sequencing I'd say no because sequencing info is a component of content data not metadata

daviesda@sheilmcn This may help http://bit.ly/lbVg9

# sheilmcn@daviesda that was my initial reaction tooabout 3 hours ago from TwitterFon in reply to daviesda


sheilmcn@daviesda but in OCW world there seems to be an interest in providing info re related courses/content

# David Daviesdaviesda@sheilmcn ok if you mean sequencing of separate objects then you can capture the relationship info in metadata e.g LOM 7.x

   
# David Daviesdaviesda@sheilmcn but the sequencing between separate objects is perhaps best handled by a cp manifest, or, never thought I'd say it, IMD-LD ;)about 3 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to sheilmcn

# daviesda@sheilmcn or better still just make a web page with sequential links to required/recommended resources ;)about 3 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to sheilmcn

scottbw@repetej that depends on whether the sequence is itself a first-order object rather than emerging from the properties of the sequencees?



 

 

 

The CETIS Metadata and Digital repositories SIG has produced a number of guides/briefing papers on various metadata standards which might also be of use.

Metadata guides available @ http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Category:MDR_Guides

Briefing papers including IEEE LOM and OAI harvesting protocol available @ http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/MDR_Briefing_papers

 More information on the SIG @ http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/domain/metadata