I attended a colloquium yesterday at Harvard (Scholarship in the Digital Age Information, Infrastructure and the Internet) presented by Christine Borgman who was involved in drafting this NSF report issued last July: Fostering Learning in the Networked World: Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2008/nsf08204/nsf08204.pdf).

It’s clear that NSF is very interested in seeing the development standards for metadata that can be stored in open repositories and are interested in funding universities that want to share their metadata in them. It made me totally jealous to learn that the U California system created their own repository for sharing data across systems and wonder why UMass hasn’t taken similar action!