D’Arcy Norman writes that today that “CAREO, the learning object repository we built at The University of Calgary, is being officially decommissioned. Unplugged, mothballed, and put into storage.” I’ve always though this was a very impressive initiative, but I agree with D’Arcy that there is no longer a need for this type of institutional repository.

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.

A job well done D’Arcy, we’ve all learned a lot about knowledge in the last few years, and the LORs were another important and crucial step for our overall understanding. Here’s to celebrating this piece of collective achievement.