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 U. K. and European Union. The White House Committee on Science has recently established an inter-agency working group on long-lived data to recommend approaches to scientific data object preservation in the government. The National Science Foundation has hosted several workshops in this area and is leading cyberinfrastructure-enhanced discovery and learning. The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure is encouraging institutions to preserve and curate digital objects for scientific research and education. Google is also reportedly piloting a project for free hosting of large open collections of scientific data.

A growing number of initiatives concerning digital preservation and curation can be leveraged by the OER community. We suggest, however, that Hewlett be engaged in identifying needs and intentional in building partnerships in this area.

We use “digital object” or “digital learning object” as the building block of the OER corpus. Digital objects can be recursive—a digital object consists of one or more digital (sub)objects. By granularity, we mean the size of the objects that can be individually tagged, referenced, found, and re-used under appropriated attached terms and conditions. Is the entire document the smallest accessible/usable object (not decomposable), or can one access and use sub-components such as images, videos, simulation applets, etc? By “object format diversity” we mean the diversity of representations and encodings of digital objects (often signified by a file name suffix: .pdf, for example) and how this diversity effects interoperability between digital objects composed into more complex objects. We are not advocating the adoption of a single standard, especially as this is unlikely to happen. We are, however, noting the importance of accommodating heterogeneity in service of coherence. This is especially important in using mobile devices for delivery, as we will later advocate.

The starting point for OCW at MIT was a large, heterogeneous collection of faculty-produced and voluntarily contributed course material in diverse digital and non-digital formats. The .pdf file format was selected as the common denominator and continues to predominate. The choice of .pdf was the correct one at the time, but it needs to be re-examined. Use of .pdf limits the reuse of the material, especially a portion, or constituent objects, of a given document. Increased granularity of objects and increased accommodation of multimedia objects is desirable.