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OCLC Research : Projects : IMS Support

IMS Support

Goal

Represent OCLC in the Instructional Management Systems / E-Learning developer community.

Overview

IMS Global Learning Consortium is a non-profit, membership corporation whose primary purpose is to promote the development of global distributed learning through the cooperative and collaborative efforts of organizations involved with distributed learning environments.

IMS is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities such as

  • locating and using educational content
  • tracking learner progress
  • reporting learner performance
  • exchanging student records between administrative systems.

Why OCLC is conducting this research and how it helps libraries

There is strong interest in E-Learning among the OCLC membership. IMS exists to provide a forum for collaboration and consensus development. A fundamental principle of the IMS architecture is shared metadata objects. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) records are excellent candidates for inclusion in WorldCat.

OCLC was asked by the IMS to participate because of our digital repository experience and to represent libraries within the IMS. OCLC Research has expertise in digital repositories and XML, but this activity is one of our first ventures in the E-Learning arena.

The areas of Digital Repository creation, maintenance and access are active areas of scholarship. There is a reasonable likelihood that interoperable E-Learning systems will come from this work. If so, the entire IMS community would benefit. This group includes many OCLC members, many of which look to us for leadership in this area.

Methodology

  • Participate in the activities of the IMS including the IMS meetings and appropriate IMS subgroups.
  • Write white papers for the groups and articles or reports describing the activities of the group and OCLC's role with it.

Timing

  • This will be an ongoing activity.

Relationship to other projects

  • The COLIS component of the Metadata Switch project is another OCLC Research project focused on learning systems.
  • This project represents another OCLC Research activity relating to the Open Archives Initiative.

Research team