Jorum
Background briefing for bidders and JISC projects
March 2006
Jorum is a free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, allowing them to collect and share learning and teaching materials. Jorum is helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials and stands as a national statement of the importance of creating interoperable, sustainable materials.
The contributor service allows institutions and project teams to share learning and teaching materials with colleagues in the UK. Jorum will host materials that have been publicly funded and also materials which have been developed within institutions which have been copyright cleared. Contributing institutions benefit from their materials being securely hosted in the UK’s national repository which offers the benefits of quality metadata tagging and cataloguing services as well as a single, purpose-built home for the materials where UK teaching staff can easily locate, access, use and share comments about them. Contributing institutions sign a non-exclusive deposit licence, enabling them to also host the materials themselves if they wish, such as on their own website, VLE or repository. Contributing institutions are also able to list any number of named depositors, giving the institution the freedom to control the deposit process. The use of a licence which clearly states permitted uses of the materials in Jorum means that IPR issues are managed centrally and the contributing institution does not have to spend time answering queries from potential users.
See useful information for contributors at the Jorum website:
The user service provides access to the shared repository of resources. As well as learning materials, Jorum also makes available teaching support, staff development and case study materials to assist practitioners in using the learning materials with students. A comments feature allows practitioners to share information about how they have used the materials and with which groups of learners.
A research and development strand will run in parallel with the Jorum service in order to ensure that Jorum keeps up with the evolving repositories landscape and expanding user requirements.