ADLRR2010: Breakout Groups: What are the problems we've identified so far with repositories?

Understanding users and user needs: reuse is not as simple as hitting a button on iTunes.
Mindshare: how do you get enough resources to compete with google, esp as google are defining user expectations: standards are left wagging the tail of the vendor dogs.
complexity of systems, metadata and policy.
Lack of high quality metadata and tools.

Discussion mostly on organisational and social issues.
Need for ways for authors to connect to repositories, reuse at point of authoring.
Parochial development --- "not developed here", barrier to reuse.
Difficult to get ppl to create metadata.
Network enclaves, access restrictions
Organisational inertia

Security: identity management
Scale: scaling up
Building repositories: is that the right answer? (what is a repository anyway?) What would repository standards cover?
Are repositories solving yesterday's problems? Do we need more? we don't know yet.
Connectivity between repositories -- virtual silos
User-centric view of repositories
Is reuse relevant driver? Is there authority to reuse? Is content authoritative?
Optimising repositories to kinds of content
Manual metadata is too expensive
Getting discovered content: too hard, too costly
Sharing is key driver for repositories

More Incentives needed for using a repository, rather than more standards. Developing app profiles just as dangerous as developing more standards: they are very time consuming, and difficult to maintain.
Trust: single sign on. Security of data: needs trust, common security model.
Need common terminology, still stumbling on repositories vs registries
Quality assurance and validity of control.
Must focus on community and user requirements before looking at technology or content procurement; this has been a wrong focus.

Organisations may have bought a repository but be unaware of the investment; need registry of repositories.
Every agency builds silo, need mandate to unify repositories.
Holy Grail is reusable data, reusable at every level. Many business challenges to that: how to learn from failed efforts? Outside schoolhouses, difficult to get right, and much harder than it seems.
Search needs to be brokered.
What apps are needed for easy registering.
What models will incentivise innovation but not impede progress?
Bottom-up approach approach makes it difficult to get shared vision.
Difficult to set up repository technically. Could use turnkey repositories.
Lack of best practice guides for leveraging repositories, or to get answers to questions from community on how best to do things.

Searching is not finding: may want different granularities, content can be pushed out according to curriculum structures.
Should search be exact or sloppy? Sloppy search is very useful for developing paedagogy.
Process of metadata generation is iterative . user perspective can be trapped to inform subsequent attempts to search.
User generated and computer generated metadata is better than none.
Interoperability is a problem across repositories (application profiles, granularity). interoperability layer of repository is more important than the underlying technology of the repository.

Conclusion:

We're missing the users as a constituency in this summit! Hard to draw conclusions without them.
We're also missing the big social networking players like Google & Facebook: they're not interested in engaging despite multiple attempts.
We're missing the publishers. Some had been invited...
Repositories' relation to the web: repositories must not be closed off from the web, growing realisation over past 8 years that the Web is the knowledge environment.

Noone wants more specs here
There is no great new saviour tech, but some new techs are interesting and ready for prime time
"What's special about learning" in this? How do we differentiate, esp if we go down the path of social media?
Have we addressed the business models of how to make this all work?
When do we have enough metadata? Google works because page ranking is complex, *and* critical mass of users. If could gather and share all our analytic data from all our repositories, and share it, could we supplant metadata and start on machine learning? Open question
Building our own competitor to Google & Facebook, our own social tool: is it such a good idea?
Open Source drives innovation, but the highest profile innovation recently has been the closed-source iPhone. Are things moving towards closed source after all? If so, how do repositories play in the Apple-based world?