http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2008/04/08/significant-properties/
I don’t think I could begin to do justice in a few words to the wide-ranging debate at the JISC/BL/DPC Workshop on Significant Properties at the British Library on Monday: I’d rather leave it to others to analyse the significant outcomes in more detail, or to further discussions like the one started by Chris Rusbridge (our cucumber-cool chairman on the day) on the DCC Blog. Suffice it to say there was a sack of food for thought in all the presentations, and lots of opportunities to wonder “now why didn’t I think of that?”
I think the most enjoyable presentation was that of Cal Lee from UNC Chapel Hill, who managed to lift us with a few laughs about his work – with Microsoft Word file format specifications – just as we were beginning to flag at the end of a long day of considering many things from many angles. The Moving Images study also looks like it may have useful information for our deliberations on standards and formats for PRIMO. If I wasn’t so taken with the presentation on E-learning objects, that was chiefly because I gave it – a mind-bending task to give our account of not only Learning Objects but also Significant Properties in 15 mins. But the slides look nice on the DPC website. (All credit to Ed for the excellent diagrams.)
Neil Grindley and the rest of the JISC/DPC/BL organisers did well to run it so smoothly and facilitate the discussion, and it was a rare opportunity to catch Andrew Wilson on a flying visit to this hemisphere and hear his first hand account of NAA’s approaches and models. I can’t remember if I’ve been to the British Library Conference Centre before or not, but it is certainly an impressive space, and with super-slick AV facilities.
