/research/projects/ims/default.htm

originally: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/ims/default.htm

IMS Support

Goal

Represent OCLC in the Instructional Management Systems / E-Learning developer community.

Overview

IMS Global Learning Consortium is a non-profit, membership corporation whose primary purpose is to promote the development of global distributed learning through the cooperative and collaborative efforts of organizations involved with distributed learning environments.

IMS is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities such as

Why OCLC is conducting this research and how it helps libraries

There is strong interest in E-Learning among the OCLC membership. IMS exists to provide a forum for collaboration and consensus development. A fundamental principle of the IMS architecture is shared metadata objects. Learning Object Metadata (LOM) records are excellent candidates for inclusion in WorldCat.

OCLC was asked by the IMS to participate because of our digital repository experience and to represent libraries within the IMS. OCLC Research has expertise in digital repositories and XML, but this activity is one of our first ventures in the E-Learning arena.

The areas of Digital Repository creation, maintenance and access are active areas of scholarship. There is a reasonable likelihood that interoperable E-Learning systems will come from this work. If so, the entire IMS community would benefit. This group includes many OCLC members, many of which look to us for leadership in this area.

Methodology

Timing

Relationship to other projects

Research team