BECTA presentation

Gave BECTA folks summary of our work and deliverables on PILIN and FRED. BECTA are themselves at the scoping stage, and had some welcome scepticism about whether it was worth doing certain things: investing in persisting lots of identifiers, dealing with Their Stuff vs. Our Stuff, setting up formal repositories with metadata as opposed to leaving things to Google custom search. Aware of non-resolvability of hdl: ; I retorted with Standard Resolver solution, as PILIN advocated with resolver.net.au . Wanted to be able to establish flexibility of resolution services, and granularity; we discussed information modelling. Were interested in Reverse Citation service as solution to bookmarking of Handles problem.

Were curious about extent of persistent identifier takeup by e-learning content providers, and what pain points LORN was finding. Liked service approach in FRED, but were aware that little inconsistencies in profiling would ruin interop. Found the decentralisation constraints (for different reasons) of VET and School sector in Australia interesting. Interested in FRED SUM as resource. Would be outsourcing at least some functionality to commercial providers for greater persistence (marked-sustained rather than project-based); interest in tuning ranking of searchers rather than sticking with elaborate metadata searches. Rights management piggybacking on institutional affiliation of requester would presumably exploit shibboleth attributes. Want to get engaged with IMS LODE again. Interested in keeping channel open with us.

Here endeth the point form.