Issues in Federating Repositories: A Report on the First International CORDRA™ Workshop http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march05/kraan/03kraan.html[1/11/2012 12:15:34 PM] Search | Back I ssues | Author I ndex | Title I ndex | Contents D-Lib Magazine March 2005 Volume 11 Number 3 ISSN 1082-9873 Issues in Federating Repositories A Report on the First International CORDRA™ Workshop Wilbert Kraan UK Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) <w.g.kraan@bangor.ac.uk> Jon Mason education.au limited <jmason@educationau.edu.au> Abstract One in the IDEA Summer 2005 [ 1] series of e-learning technology interoperability events, the First International CORDRA Workshop brought together a range of communities with an interest in repositories. Because the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA) is essentially an agreed, scalable way to join up different repositories, it draws attention to a wide and diverse set of issues that are not necessarily limited to just the initiative itself. The workshop's purpose was to gather these issues and, where possible, address as many as possible. Introduction The First International CORDRA Workshop [ 2] was a joint initiative of Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) [ 3] and the UK's Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) [ 4], and, in the US, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) [ 5] and the architects of the CORDRA initiative, the Learning Systems Architecture Lab (LSAL) [ 6] at Carnegie-Mellon University. That roll-call already encompasses a technology infrastructure provider, a research and development team and two sectoral representatives, but the audience in Melbourne was wider still. From national policy-makers to institutional librarians, and technology vendors to corporate clients, any group with a stake in finding, managing and exposing learning content was represented. In all,