Education resources and learning objects are stored and maintained in a multitude of collections and repositories. Having multiple, distributed sources makes resource discovery, access and use overly complex for most users. Resource federations provide a single point of discovery and access to a larger number of resources. In this paper we present a service-oriented model for a scalable infrastructure that supports resource federations for educational content, including support for publishing, federated search, federated metadata registries, and federations of federations. The model is driven by overall business requirements and provides services that support the broad range of capabilities needed to create, use, maintain and manage a resource federation. The services themselves provide abstract interfaces to the resources, repositories, collections and federations and are independent of actual implementation technologies, but utilize open standards for technological interoperability. In addition to the overall federation model, we outline the components of a broader service-oriented infrastructure for managing education resources and describe how the services from the federation model can be incorporated into end-user applications. Our models are fully detailed and documented using the approach from the e-Framework for Education and Research, an open service-oriented approach used to model and describe educational and research technology systems.

This article describes the role of a digital library in a joint educational Master of Science (MSc.) programme involving organizations in Ghana and the Netherlands. A brief introduction of the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) is followed by an outline of the joint educational MSc. programme developed by these two institutions. The digital library support provided in this joint programme will be described, and observations resulting from experiences delivering the programme are summarized. The article also provides general comments on the importance of libraries in building digital partnerships between organizations in developed and less technologically advanced countries.