The participants agreed that this also is a many-to-many problem affecting almost every “higher-level” application involving content needing the service. There are production requirements for enterprise interoperability in both the DM and KS projects. Mackenzie Smith asked about the policy issue of interoperating with systems, such as an academic press, that do not have the resources to build their service to the integration boundary.  She also mentioned that the number of repositories is two or more orders of magnitude larger than the number of systems in the other work areas. There may be hundreds or thousands of collections to search.

Gerry Hanley provided some ways to measure the benefit of interoperability that go beyond the simple convenience of federated search. Specifically, he cited more affordable content through federated search yielding more options for instructors and students; more timely availability of accessible content; a means to better map content utilization and outcomes (by using a data warehouse that is fed from a federated repository service); and a useful feedback loop / reviews / effectiveness enabled by consistently discovering content through a common service. 

Other use cases mentioned by participants involved federated submission and logical centralization of research data.

There was a consensus among participants that the Repository OSID already is providing value. However, more Repository OSID applications, while useful, do not provide data about whether other OSIDs? offer value.

Interested parties in further work on Repositories:  George Ward, Bill Ying, DSpace?, and SakaLibrary?