Joining LORN as a repository

All Australian learning repositories willing to share their online teaching and learning content to the VET sector are invited to join LORN. Owners of potential repositories are requested to contact the LORN Project manager for more information or to discuss some possible plans.

By joining LORN, a repository can achieve:

immediate Australia-wide exposure to the national training market
a return on your training resource investment
cost-effective promotion of your resources
enhanced market research opportunities
opportunities to exchange resources with other repository owners
a collaborative approach to copyright agreements and issues.

There are essentially just three criteria that Australian repositories wishing to join LORN must meet:

They must offer resources that are relevant to teaching and learning in the VET sector, and that meet Quality Training Product standards.
The resources they offer must meet LORN content description and content packaging standards. See standards we use
The Project expects new repositories to sign the LORN participation charter.

The LORN participation charter

All new repositories who wish to join LORN are asked to agree to work in a sprit of cooperation to advance the interests of the VET sector, especially in relation to gaining efficiencies from sharing teaching and learning resources. This means agreeing to:

expose a reasonable amount of content to people searching LORN for resources to enable them to make an informed choice about whether to download or purchase the resource
adhere to a minimum set of business and technical specifications
licence learning objects as reusable by the user within the terms of the associated conditions.

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Joining LORN as a Consumer access provider (CAP)

If you want to be a LORN consumer access provider (CAP) – that is, to use the LORN search and display results within your organisation's website – LORN provides a simple application processing interface (API) that can be used. This API is REST-style API that returns an XML result set, which can then be styled and presented on your webpage.

How it works

The LORN CAP sends an HHTP ‘get’ request to the LORN API with parameters, receives back an XML result set, processes the XML (for example. via an XSL style sheet), formats it to HTML and posts it to their website. The LORN search API, which provides XML results, resides at http://dspace.edna.edu.au/vlornsearch. This page contains API documentation and a working prototype search form.

How the CAP communicates with the API:

The CAP sends search parameters to the 'search form' - http://dspace.edna.edu.au/vlornsearch
An internal request is sent to the Search API.
A response is received from the Search API which is a XML result set.
This result set is then transformed and included into a HTML page (use XSL) along with other standard page elements (header, footer, etc). CAPs are required to add the 'Powered by LORN' reference on the page.

For more information on how to become a CAP

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