Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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accessed; few providers, if any, however, had concrete plans for undertak<strong>in</strong>g this measurement
<strong>in</strong> a systematic way (Harley et al. 2006b)
Several resource providers were explor<strong>in</strong>g various ways of engag<strong>in</strong>g with and build<strong>in</strong>g a user
community as one potential solution to long-term susta<strong>in</strong>ability, a major theme of <strong>in</strong>terviews. “Our
research revealed that community build<strong>in</strong>g is important to digital resource providers,” Harley et al.
(2006b) reported, “and many were explor<strong>in</strong>g tools to enable the development or support of user
“communities.” Some suggested that community contributions might hold a key to susta<strong>in</strong>ability
challenges.”
After conduct<strong>in</strong>g these <strong>in</strong>terviews, a two-day workshop was held with 16 experts to discuss OERs and
how explor<strong>in</strong>g user behavior might be l<strong>in</strong>ked to larger policy or plann<strong>in</strong>g issues. Four broad topics
were covered by this meet<strong>in</strong>g: (1) def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g a common framework to codify different “categories of
content, users, uses, and user studies”; (2) the practicality and expense of different types of user studies
and methods (e.g., what types of common questions to ask, what level of research [formal, <strong>in</strong>formal]
must be conducted); (3) questions of user demand and long-term-susta<strong>in</strong>ability (curricular,
technical/<strong>in</strong>frastructural, organizational, and f<strong>in</strong>ancial); and (4) the larger research questions that would
need to be addressed. The topic of susta<strong>in</strong>ability brought up the largest number of complicated issues.
One question that elicited particularly diverse responses <strong>in</strong> terms of susta<strong>in</strong>ability was whether OER
sites should “adapt their content or services to un<strong>in</strong>tended users.” “To some participants, un<strong>in</strong>tended
use is an opportunity for creative reuse,” Harley et al. (2006b) stated, “while many believed that an
OER site should not or could not change course to serve an un<strong>in</strong>tended audience.” This question was
tightly l<strong>in</strong>ked with the mission of different OERs and their f<strong>in</strong>ancial models. In terms of
technical/<strong>in</strong>frastructural susta<strong>in</strong>ability, many participants proposed that OERs, particularly open-access
ones, need a “common place where they can be reliably housed, organized, searched, and preserved,”
and that “centralized OER repositories” might serve as one answer. Various models for how such a
OER repository might be developed were discussed, and a number of participants agreed that federated
search<strong>in</strong>g across different repositories would be a “user-friendly” start.
While Harley et al. (2006b) offered a number of conclusions regard<strong>in</strong>g their research f<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>gs, a
particularly significant one was the great desire of faculty to “build their own re-aggregated resources”
or to be able to blend materials from their own personal digital collections and with other digital
resources they have found onl<strong>in</strong>e. The limitations of classroom technologies, the vast array of
complicated and typically non<strong>in</strong>teroperable tools that were available for use <strong>in</strong> terms of “collect<strong>in</strong>g,
develop<strong>in</strong>g, manag<strong>in</strong>g, and actually us<strong>in</strong>g resources,” and the <strong>in</strong>ability to <strong>in</strong>tegrate many resources
with standard learn<strong>in</strong>g management systems were cited as significant challenges. Future digital tool
developers, Harley et al. concluded, would need to address a number of issues, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the difficulty
or “impossibility” of reus<strong>in</strong>g objects that are bundled or “locked” <strong>in</strong>to static or proprietary resources,
complex digital rights issues, uneven <strong>in</strong>terface design and “aesthetics,” and grow<strong>in</strong>g user demands for
resource “granularity” (e.g., be<strong>in</strong>g able to f<strong>in</strong>d and reuse one image, text, etc., with<strong>in</strong> a larger digital
resource).
The LAIRAH Project
While the study conducted by Harley et al. largely focused on how faculty used digital resources <strong>in</strong>
their teach<strong>in</strong>g, other research by the LAIRAH project analyzed academic use of digital resources
through the use of “quantitative Deep Log Analysis techniques” and qualitative user workshops. One
core goal of their research was to obta<strong>in</strong> detailed user op<strong>in</strong>ions regard<strong>in</strong>g digital resources and what