By the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
Overview of the Open Metadata Exchange (OME)
In a recent workshop session at OER26, members of the ISKME team, Christian Clauss and Anjali Nambiar, presented the Open Metadata Exchange (OME). The OME is a decentralized network of open libraries designed to serve as a force multiplier in the search, discovery, and sustainability of OER. By making it easier for libraries to share, discover, and reuse metadata while maintaining their own local standards and control, it addresses issues such as duplicated efforts to discover, tag, and curate similar materials across platforms, as well as approaches to metadata that make cross-platform cataloging cumbersome. This solution can help the open education community overcome a major challenge: bridging the “islands of information” that exist across open education repositories, which ultimately impacts adoption and use of open educational resources (OER) globally.
We see decentralization not only as a technical solution, but as a way to build a more resilient and sustainable open education ecosystem; one that can continue to preserve, connect and share knowledge regardless of changing circumstances and uncertainties over time. This initiative is particularly timely, as recent events have highlighted just how vulnerable open resources and repositories can be.
We envision the OME as a system that is collectively stewarded by those within the open source and open education communities. In that spirit, our workshop not only covered how the OME works and what participation in the OME looks like, but also engaged participants in discussions to encourage collaborative exploration of how the OME can benefit open knowledge infrastructure that supports open education, and to identify ways in which they can contribute to the development of the OME and its governance.
Participants shared valuable insights into key considerations as we develop the OME, such as including clear quality assurance mechanisms to facilitate stronger and more trusted sharing of metadata on the OME, proactively considering global south perspectives while designing the system and ensuring there are robust processes to train and develop the skill sets of librarians, who might not be subject experts, for the efficient use of the OME. We also had the opportunity to learn from other adjacent initiatives such as the Thoth Open Metadata initiative, and TeSS (Training eSupport System) developed by eScience Lab. We look forward to building on the collaborations that were sparked during the session and through the many conversations at the conference. We also look forward to continuing the conversation with everyone interested in learning more about the OME.
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