Handshake ecosystem for Educational Contents between Institutional Repository and OER based Repository

Abstract

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) has led a Japanese institutional repository (IR) project since 2005 and, developed metadata harvesting system named IRDB from all over Japan. NII also defines metadata specific format named junii2 which can indicate contents type such as journal article, dataset, learning material and so on. According to the IRDB statistical analysis, total ratio of the learning material is only 0.3%, however, its usage statistics is always high compared with that of the other item types. In order to increase the visibility of the learning materials in IRs, we started to collaborate with the OER (Open Educational Resources) repository.

As one of the GLOBE (Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange) activity, Open University of Japan is operating the Japanese node repository (GLOBEreferatory@Japan) which harvests OER metadata from OCW member universities in Japan. GLOBEreferatory@Japan also harvests OER contents from IRs via IRDB by using OAI-PMH, and enrich metadata in terms of the learning object metadata (LOM) schema. GLOBEreferatory@Japan employed our repository system named WEKO which can be the data provider and the service provider of OAI-PMH in both junii2 and LOM formats. We are also planning to feedback the OCW based metadata from GLOBEreferatory@Japan to IRs.