Repositories

This page provides an introduction to standards issues around Repositories. See also the Recommended standards on Repositories.

What are digital repositories?

The IMS digital repositories specification broadly defines repositories as being any collection of resources that are accessible via a network without prior knowledge of the structure of the collection. Repositories may hold actual assets or the metadata that describes the assets.

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VET Learning Object Repository Network (LORN)

The VET Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) was established by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework in 2004 to provide an infrastructure for the sharing of teaching and learning resources. It is a network of Australian VET organisations that use agreed standards to enable the discovery and retrieval of learning objects from the repositories distributed across the network.

Currently, the network consists of five repositories - Flexible Learning Toolboxes, Centre for Learning Innovation (NSW), TAFE Tasmania, TAFE VC (Victoria) and DFEEST (SA). It is expected that more repositories will join the network progressively.

education.au provides a federated search across the repositories. The combined search is available at http://lorn.flexiblelearning.net.au.

In the network, interoperability is developed at three levels:

  1. business policy - agreement to a broad set of business policies
  2. technical standards - interoperability of hardware, software and information systems
  3. implementation - alignment of practical considerations when implementing the technical standards.

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What standards are implemented?

The major reference informing the specifications is the IMS Digital Repository Interoperability (IMS DRI) framework.

The current implementation of LORN supports three of the IMS DRI functions (Search/Expose, Request/Deliver, Alert/Expose) and a fourth function (Gather/Expose) may be included in a future implementation. These functions are described in detail in the IMS Digital Repository Specification available from http://www.imsglobal.org/digitalrepositories.

The learning objects housed in each participating repository are packaged to the IMS Content Packaging specification and include metadata according to the Vetadata application profile. Follow the 'Content packaging' and 'Metadata' and 'Vocabularies' links for more information on each of these.

The 'LORN Interoperability Specification' contains a Standard Reference Table showing the standards selected to meet each function, as well as a Use Case scenario and a set of API functions. The 'LORN Business and Functional Requirements' and the 'LORN Implementation Guidelines' provide further detailed information.

View all three Reference Documents:

LORN Interoperability Specification (PDF 215KB)

LORN Business and Functional Requirements (PDF 304KB)

LORN Implementation Guidelines (PDF 337KB)

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