REPRESENTING CONTEXT IN AN ARCHIVE OF EDUCATIONAL EVALUATIONS

1. REPRESENTING CONTEXT IN AN ARCHIVE OF EDUCATIONAL EVALUATIONS THE PROJECT QUADS DEMONSTRATOR PROJECTS The project has constructed a permanent archive of significant educational evaluations undertaken by members of the Cambridge Conferences on Educational Evaluation, which have been taking place since 1972. In addition it has developed a set of online resources, tools, interfaces and processes to support secondary analysis and other research, teaching and the development of other qualitative archives. This exploratory project was funded under the ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS), a small initiative running from April 2005 to October 2006. Co-ordinated by ESDS Qualidata at Essex, the scheme is dedicated to the mission of learning more about sharing, representation and re-use of qualitative data, in all of its disparate shape and forms. PROJECT ACTIVITIES ...policies ... plans ... proposals ... diaries ... minutes ... The project team canvassed opinion across the Cambridge Conference community and identified a list of potential education evaluation projects for inclusion in field notes ... photographs ... transcripts ... analyses ... reports ... the archive. These include examples from the UK, Ireland, the US and Australia. The electronic archive was constructed using the Fedora Digital Repository Archive platform following a systematic review of available software platforms. Existing 'paper archives' were reviewed and – depending on the size and scope of the study – materials were selected for inclusion in the electronic archive. Projects range from single case studies with only small sets of data and associated documents to the Boston Bilingual Schooling Evaluation undertaken by members of the Centre for Applied Research in Education at UEA in 1980-1981, the paper archive of which extends to over 6000 documents. This open source platform allows a flexible and extensible collection structure with multiple metadata streams and complex relationships between items. It also allows the generation of an Open Archive Initiative (OAI) metadata feed so that the contents and metadata can be selectively exposed. www.fedora.info Centre for Applied Research in Education CARE www.uea.ac.uk/care/ Key participants in the original evaluation projects were interviewed and 'walkthroughs' of the project archives developed to guide users and draw attention to key features of the projects. www.caret.cam.ac.uk/quads/

2. REPRESENTING CONTEXT IN AN ARCHIVE OF EDUCATIONAL EVALUATIONS KEY PROJECT OUTPUTS • an electronic archive of significant educational evaluations representing a range of approaches and educational, political and methodological contexts • a series of reflexive interviews and other accounts by key participants in these evaluations • technical tools designed to: • assist in data collection and description • ingressing data and metadata into archives • disseminate contents • and embed the archive in a Virtual Collaboration Environment • a specially developed metadata vocabulary to describe the rich range of data, research instruments, interpretative and analytical strategies and other documentation • a systematic comparison of alternative digital repositories and their application to different models of research archive • guidelines and examples for individuals and groups planning to establish electronic archives. ACCESS MATERIALS CONTACT The archive is accessed through the CamTools Virtual Collaboration Environment: camtools.caret.cam.ac.uk. This is an access-controlled environment based on the Sakai open source within which the archive is integrated together with a set of communication and collaboration tools. In the first instance please contact Patrick Carmichael at CARET for access. Dr. Patrick Carmichael Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies University of Cambridge Cambridge CB2 1SB Email: patrick@caret.cam.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1223 765381 URL: camtools.caret.cam.ac.uk www.caret.cam.ac.uk/quads/