You can only tell the shape of things by looking at the edges - Ken Price

An article by D’Arcy Norman on the dismantling of CAREO, U Calgary’s digital repository.

CAREO was important, back in 2001-2004, as a prototype. As a sandbox for trying out some of these concepts. As a place to easily host metadata and content and try the repository model. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. Without CAREO, I would likely still be saying that we need centralized institutional repositories to tightly manage resources.

But, because of CAREO, I now know that we don’t need repositories at the institutional level. Personal repositories are much more powerful, effective, and manageable. They’re called blogs, maybe you’ve heard of them? And small pieces, loosely joined. Want to manage photos online? Use Flickr. Videos? Use YouTube/GoogleVideo/etc… We don’t need a monolithic institutional repository.

…

Sure, we were naive, but we meant well. And now, hopefully, people will learn from our successes, failures, and mistakes, and not be doomed to repeat them.

A bunch of materials to support this conference:

Google Earth collection

Here are some kmz files that will open directly in Google Earth.

Pulp Mill kmz file A model pulp mill for a small island…

Nuclear Power Station WA A nuclear reactor for Perth WA…

Bookmarks collection for import into your del.icio.us

bookmarks for library conference 

These can be imported via the Settings - Import/upload  feature (these are all Dictionary websites so you can tag them all that way as they go in).

You’ll need to save this file to your computer somewhere (right click - Save As) (I had to rename the bookmarks file as .txt to prevent Edublogs rejecting it as a dangerous file type.)

 To do this with your own bookmarks file back at work, in IE go to File –> Import and Export and save your own bookmarks, or any part of them, as a file, then import it to your edublog

The actual complete presentation from today is available here, but it is quite large - best to download this some other time! Senior Secondary Librarians Conference - presentation 26 Nov 2007

Workshop presentation

Workshop slides  for afternoon session