Open Metadata Exchange: Bridging the Islands of OER

A major challenge in open education is bridging the “islands of information” that exist across open education repositories. This impedes adoption and use of open educational resources (OER) globally. Making education open in practice requires being able to discover materials across open libraries and repositories, giving users maximum visibility into relevant resources.

The team led by Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education(ISKME) is building the Open Metadata Exchange (OME), a proposed solution to this challenge. OME is a decentralized network of open libraries designed to serve as a force multiplier in the search, discovery, and sustainability of OER. By making it easier for libraries to share, discover, and reuse metadata and resources while maintaining their own local standards and control, it addresses issues such as duplicated efforts to discover, tag, catalogue and curate similar materials across platforms. 

To address these challenges, ISKME and several founding partners have initiated the development of the Open Metadata Exchange (OME), a decentralized network of participating libraries and repositories. The OME is designed to serve as a force multiplier in the search, discovery, and sustainability of open educational resources. It achieves this by enabling any open repository to join or host a “node” on the OME network. This harnesses the curatorial experience and expertise of librarians across the network, catalyzing the exchange of a library’s open educational resource metadata while retaining local control over their collection processes and practices. The decentralized design of the OME is not only a technical solution to advancing further FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) practices, but is also intended to support a more resilient and sustainable open education ecosystem; one that can continue to preserve, connect, share, and build knowledge regardless of changing circumstances and uncertainties over time. This strategy for bridging repositories will not only enable efficient access to distributed openly licensed educational resources, but will also strengthen the integration and sustainability of the “opens”, which include open data resources, open science initiatives, and open access journals, enabling and encouraging their educational use. 

How can you contribute to the development of the OME

The OME has several active partners, including OER Africa, Internet Archive, BioQuest, Open Education Network, Thoth Open Metadata and World Historical Gazetteer. We are inviting organizations and individuals interested in supporting and shaping this endeavor to join us. 

If you are an OER Library or Repository: Join the OME network by creating your repository specific node or plugin or reach out to us for a demo and support. 

If you are a platforms and metadata expert: Support us in designing the interoperable metadata systems that the OME will incorporate. 

If you are a software developer or technical documentation expert: Click here to explore the technical implementation of the Open Metadata Exchange which is available as an open-source code repository on GitHub, and let us know if you would like to contribute to the technical development efforts.

To stay updated on the latest developments and join our open community discussions, please fill out this form to join our open forum. You can also reach out to our team at  info@iskme.org.