Dear members of the OGF Digital Repositories Research Group, thanks to all who participated at the discussions at OGF26 last week. Please find a quick write-up of my impressions from the session. It is hard to squeeze all the issues into just a few sentences, but please do not hesitate to add / correct the lines below. We intend to publish this text, so please make sure to contribute. We hope to see you and all those who could not participate this time at future events. Also, we are still collecting metadata scenarios and are looking forward to your contributions. These scenarios are the basis for the OGF repository work. best wishes, a -------------------------------------- The latest meeting of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) took place at OGF26. The conference saw a much lower participation than earlier OGF's, yet there were 14 participants from various backgrounds contributing to a lively discussion. In fact, we had to stop mid-sentence, but will continue the discussion at upcoming events. As future venues for the DR-RG were suggested * Digital Curation Conference, London, 1st week of December * IEEE e-Science, Oxford, 2nd week of December The OGF26 session featured two presentations from Jane Mandelbaum (Library of Congress) and Richard Marciano (UNC). A common theme were the interoperability requirements for metadata (e.g. on item and collection level) to enable interaction between different communities, organisational contexts, and systems. Herewith just a few points that were picked up during the discussion. Slides can be found http://forge.gridforum.org/sf/docman/do/listDocuments/projects.dr-rg/docman.... Jane Mandlebaum from the Library of Congress gave an impression of the developments in one of the most experienced fields in information science. For decades discussion among cultural heritage institutions were dominated by the idea of the "perfect set" of metadata that is globally applied, by information managers and users alike. This notion of global unification by and large failed. Jane described how future information environments are likely to allow for variations in metadata standards and encourage participation rather than enforce it. In these environments, infrastructure provides the tools to mediate between different data, to simplify metadata creation and to raise its quality. (Seemingly simple things can turn out utterly complex: e.g. how to convert existing long titles of history videos into short titles as required by YouTube.) This point resonated with other participants who also agreed that automatic metadata creation/conversion, and encouraging early metadata creation were amongst the key opportunities in their communities. Richard Marciano from the iRODS team DICE focused on policies for collection management. In a talk seeded with the multiplicity of experiences from iRODS installations, Richard identified standardised mechanisms for describing collection policies (e.g. replication criteria, legal constraints) as a key challenge for the repository community. Without collection policy standards, important contextual information may be lost when migrating or exchanging collections between federated repositories. All participants - cross-community activities in national grids (e.g. D-Grid), at national service centers (e.g. NGS), as well as in enterprise environments - agreed that requirements of users or user communities differ greatly and need to be addressed individually (i.e. dealing with a requirement once it's there, not creating the perfect set, or the perfect service upfront). It is the information environment between dedicated repositories that enables the necessary flexibility over time through mediation, interoperation, added-value services, etc. OGF Digital Repositories Research Group http://www.ogf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=dr-rg