We are very excited to have started our next JISC-funded project, Open Education Metadata UK (OEM-UK). It is all about making collections of mainly bibliographic education metadata openly available in order to explore how we can make this work harder for us and add value to the scholarly community and other wider audiences.

We are building on another JISC project, COMET, in that we as well as using their tools to output our library catalogue data as linked data, we will be doing the same with our  CALM Archives catalogue and two EPrints repositories. We are hoping that this will provide a model for other specialist subject domains to be able to do the same thing, building upon this work. The four core sources of the content are:

• Symphony 3.1 GL Library Catalogue records (250,000)
• DServe CALM Archives Catalogue records (35,000)
• IOE EPrints repository (6,000)
• Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA) (10,000)

Another strand of the project will concentrate on creating new metadata for two related but uncatalogued Special Collections. These are school examination papers and material from the Historical Textbooks collection. We will be concentrating on two discrete subjects: Science and Technology; and History, 1900 – 1950.  We will then create further linked data from this with some case studies which show how, for example, a certain group of textbooks relate to a  particular exam paper. There is interest in this from researchers within the Institute of Education (IOE), but it will also be interesting to what extent researchers outside the field of education may try to use this.

You can follow progress on the project on the blog at http://ioeoemuk.wordpress.com