D'Arcy Norman in the post "Remembering CAREO" writes about starting, maintaining, and ending CAREO--another LOR comes to a close. I found Darcy's account very meaningful, perhaps because I just went through the experience this year of closing down my EduResources Portal (R.I.P. 2002-2007). _____JH
_____
"CAREO was important, back in 2001-2004, as a prototype. As a sandbox for trying out some of these concepts. As a place to easily host metadata and content and try the repository model. From that perspective, I think it was a huge success. Without CAREO, I would likely still be saying that we need centralized institutional repositories to tightly manage resources.
But, because of CAREO, I now know that we don’t need repositories at the institutional level. Personal repositories are much more powerful, effective, and manageable. They’re called blogs, maybe you’ve heard of them? And small pieces, loosely joined. Want to manage photos online? Use Flickr. Videos? Use YouTube/GoogleVideo/etc… We don’t need a monolithic institutional repository.
And now, it’s Halloween 2007. And we’re about to decommission our CAREO server here at UCalgary after 6 years. The software has been acting up, and it’s just not worth the time and effort to figure out what’s gone krufty. So it’s time to put it out of its misery. Farewell, CAREO. Thanks for the good times. I’ve learned a LOT about software design, information architecture, and metadata. More importantly, I had the pleasure to meet and work with a LOT of awesome people, all working on similar projects because they believe (as I do) in the greater good. Sure, we were naive, but we meant well. And now, hopefully, people will learn from our successes, failures, and mistakes, and not be doomed to repeat them."
10:08:34 AM 
|
|
