The document discusses the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), which is a framework that aims to improve discovery, access, use and publishing of resources across UK higher and further education. It focuses on item banks, which are repositories that store learning items and associated resources, and make them available through standards like OAI-PMH and SRU. The document argues that item banks should assign persistent URIs to stored items, expose simple Dublin Core metadata for harvesting via OAI-PMH, and optionally provide search and news feeds to help discover and share learning items according to JISC IE and Web 2.0 principles.

1. Item banks and the JISC Information Environment CETIS Metadata and Repositories SIG, Glasgow

8. JISC IE Architecture JISC-funded content providers institutional content providers external content providers brokers aggregators catalogues indexes institutional portals subject portals learning management systems media-specific portals end-user desktop/browser presentation fusion provision OpenURL link servers shared infrastructure identity providers (IdP) institutional profiling services terminology services service registries identifier services metadata schema registries © Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, 2006 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Athens federation services (e.g. WAYF) Content providers are services that make content available… e.g. repositories (of anything, including QTI items) Presentation layer applications now typically delivered thru the browser using Ajax, JSON, etc.