ABSTRACT
The wholesale adoption of Internet technology as a channel for education and training has resulted in an abundance of learning resources in web-ready digital format. These digital learning objects (LOs) may be lesson content, stored as text, audio-visual or interactive media files (Wiley, 2002), or simply learning activity templates expressed in educational markup language EML (Koper, 2000). Despite their apparent ubiquity, the locating and reuse of LOs is hampered by a lack of coordinated effort in addressing issues related to their storage, cataloguing and rights management. Intensive efforts have been made to create portal repositories by communities such as MERLOT, SMETE and, in Canada, by TeleCampus and CAREO. Not surprisingly, each entity produces a rather individual reflection of its own perceived organizational needs, and the concept of making all these repositories work together, while laudable, has received less attention.
