The Role of the Digital Repository in the Development of Electronic Curricula

Nancy Posel and David Fleiszer, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

ABSTRACT:

Both nationally and internationally, medical schools have demonstrated an ever-increasing commitment to the development and utilization of e-curricula during the last decade. While there is considerable diversity in the extent and use of on-line material, this development of electronic curricula has led inevitably to the design and integration of multimedia objects within most on-line electronic courses and lecture material.

The creation of multimedia objects has, in turn, encouraged medical educators to reprioritize the potential of digital repositories as a means of easily organizing, storing and retrieving existing multimedia objects. Thus, from a pragmatic perspective, the development of a digital repository has shifted from an eventual aspiration to a short term, practical, and necessary objective and is now viewed as a means of providing an electronic resource for storing, searching, processing, retrieving and using digitized multimedia objects, both simple and complex, including text, and multimedia objects such as dynamic and static images, animations, and video and audio files.

This requirement for digital repositories has, in turn, provided incentive for active development. Projects, which might have previously been viewed with muted enthusiasm, are often now perceived as being able to provide a significant contribution to individual schools, and proposals are receiving increasingly substantial funding by government and educational agencies.

The authors believe that, development should be preceded by:

a) thorough review of repositories currently available

b) an analysis of technical specifications

c) a review of other pertinent issues, such as intellectual property and security

d) an evaluation of user's expectations with regard to the impact of a repository on their e-curricula

e) a realistic idea of the cost in resources and time

This presentation will review:

¨ E-curricula and multimedia objects from the perspective of digital repositories

¨ Technical and functional requirements for the development of digital repositories

¨ The benefits of collaboration among repositories

¨ Examples of current initiatives

¨ Future directions

BENEFIT TO PARTICIPANTS ATTENDING SESSION:

This presentation would be of interest to conference participants:

¨ Who are generally curious about new directions in medical informatics

¨ Who are developing electronic curricula and want to explore the role of digital repositories with regard to their own school

¨ Who are interested in the either linking to or developing their own repositories

¨ Who want information regarding currently widely utilized technical specifications and metatagging schema

Nancy Posel Lady Meredith Building McGill University 1110 Pine avenue west, Suite 302 Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1A3 Phone: 514 398 2077 Fax: 514 398 1753 Email: nancy.posel@mcgill.ca

CO-AUTHORS: David Fleiszer McGill University 1110 Pine avenue west, Suite 302 Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 1A3 Phone: 514 398 2077 Fax: 514 398 1753 Email: david.fleiszer@mcgill.ca