ABSTRACT
In Chapter 11, ‘Digital libraries and repositories’, Charles Duncan and Cuna Ekmekcioglu have kept the ‘learning’ emphasis but also recognize the many barriers and cultural issues to be overcome. The effective reuse of content depends on educators being able to find items of content, ascertain their quality and availability and then repurpose these things to contribute to enabling their learners to meet the goals the educator wishes to set them. Many of these issues are the traditional preserve of the library and the librarian and this chapter explores the issues around cataloguing, distribution of resources versus centralization, and the diversity of artefacts that form ‘resources’. The thorny issues of quality and intellectual property are raised and these inevitably bring us to the need for cooperation, communication and cultural change involving all of the ever-changing roles that this ‘new world’ implies.
