Hey look! It’s a learning object repository!

An interesting initiative here at UBC is a homegrown repository project that is nearing completion. While the functionality isn’t about to knock CAREO or DSpace off the Internet, it does have its points. It can sit on almost any box (it uses MySQL on the backend), and I find its metadata entry to be as simple and fast as anything else I’ve used. It could be a useful application for smaller projects — and the few people who have tried it out and reviewed the code have had mostly positive things to say about it.

It also has a functioning SOAP layer — though we’re not entirely sure what to point it at (David Davies has suggested we try connecting with him… I forwarded that on to the developer, and hopefully we can make something happen — thanks David!).

It still has a few bugs, and is currently getting a welcome reworking of the look and feel. So in a sense it’s not ready for prime time. But every time I have shared work with the community it’s brought a productive response, so I thought I would throw it out there. Feel free to try it out (forgive some of the dummy records still kicking around) and add a few resources (you need to register for that) if you like. Please refrain from uploading copyrighted material, pornography, hate literature, or anything to do with Celine Dion.

If you have comments or questions, you can direct general ones to me, and bug reports and techie queries to its developer Ming Chen (ming@apsc.ubc.ca). We will make the source code available as well, with the usual disclaimers, and your feedback on that is welcome.

Some places to go:

* Browse records
* Search and advanced search
* SOAP layer admin
* Source files

If you want documentation, drop me a line — I have a fairly substantive Word document I’d be happy to pass on. Obviously, our ability to support implementations is severely limited, but we will try to answer questions and assist you where possible.