This morning the Library Lab had a very productive conference call (yes, there are such things, you cynics!) with Steve Midgley about the federal Learning Registry.

The Learning Registry is a new project coming out of the Dept. of Education and the Defense Department, intended to provide easier, smarter access to federal content. The LR will list sources and provide ways to subscribe to metadata about the content at those sources. (There’s more in this blog post.)

It’s a fascinating project, and seems headed in the right directions. Unlike what we usually think of when we think of federal metadata projects, Steve is trying to keep the LR as lightweight as possible, providing transportation and subscription services, but not trying to come up with new standards and specs for metadata. This is purely a back-end effort, with no plan to build a data.gov-ish portal.

Very interesting. Meta Web 2.0-ish. Very cool that our government is thinking this way.

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