Media Centre

Giunti Labs

Master List

PRESS INFORMATION ISSUED ON BEHALF OF:

Giunti Labs
Abbazia dell'Annunziata, Via Portobello - Baia del Silenzio, 16039 Sestri Levante (GE), Italy

Phone: +39 0185 42123; Web www.giuntilabs.com

1st December 2008

Giunti Labs' HarvestRoad Hive Digital Repository as a 'content bridge' for Sakai and Moodle on show at Online Educa Berlin

At this year's Online Educa conference and exhibition, held in Berlin from 3rd to 5th December, Giunti Labs, a leading learning and mobile content management solution provider for the Educational sector, will be showcasing new developments in its Hive digital repository technology which was acquired by Giunti Labs in March 2008 from the Australian Stock Exchange quoted Harvestroad™ company.

In particular, it will be demonstrating the new HarvestRoad Hive online and mobile learning authoring plug-ins (Hive Packager™ and Hive Mobile™) as well as the new SOA architecture favouring state-of-the-art integration with Sakai and Moodle, the leading open source virtual learning platforms, using Hive's advanced DR technology for managing, sharing and federating multi-channel learning contents across content providers and educational networks.

Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation, an open source software project driven by a worldwide consortium of educational institutions, commercial organisations and individuals dedicated to providing course management, research collaboration and e-portfolio tools will be joining Giunti Labs' exhibition booth at Online Educa Berlin on Thursday 4th December, from 4:30pm to 7:00pm.

"The emergence of open source solutions, such as Sakai and Moodle, heralds a period of greater choice and flexibility," said Fabrizio Cardinali, Giunti Labs' CEO.

"HarvestRoad Hive is a content bridge solution - helping organisations to move their content safely from one learning management system to another while federating their content offerings and provisions into open digital marketplaces sharing both user generated and professional publishers' materials. This not only allows organisations to protect their investment in content but also opens the way for greater choice and flexibility for managing learning and knowledge objects among the end user community, similarly to what the iTunes model has done for music."

Digital repositories, such as HarvestRoad Hive, provide a centralised, co-ordinated and user-focused resource to serve the teaching, learning and research needs for organisations in all sectors of the economy. They bring together an organisation's digital resources in a single, cohesive and accessible web-based environment that also provides access to external digital resources to further support the learning process.

Having a digital repository aims to accelerate the development and digital accessibility of unique interdisciplinary materials by creating an infrastructure that allows learners to bring together concepts, data, discoveries, ideas, interpretations and methods in powerful new ways.

According to, Andrea Gentili, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for Giunti Labs: "A key 'pain point' facing the modern organisation is that it has a great deal of content but its staff spends a significant amount of its time to find this content when they need it.

"A recent study by Forrester Research shows that workers tend to spend between 25 per cent and 40 per cent of their typical working day trying to find existing content," he said. "They then spend 70 per cent of the time left recreating the information that can't be found.

"Organisations can easily develop 'vertical' silos of information which, by their very nature, make this information difficult for others to find."

"In order to make this information available and accessible to all those within the organisation who need it - and, more importantly, all those who can benefit the organisation by having it - you need to store it in a single place but deliver it to multiple places. That is what a digital repository, such as HarvestRoad Hive, does.

"And, in learning terms, if you can't even find the learning content you're looking for, you can't learn from it!" he pointed out.

"One way of overcoming this problem is to have a digital repository offering refined categorisation and search tools that help locate information quickly. Such a system would provide quantifiable savings in terms of time and resources - and that's what HarvestRoad Hive does."

"The system's advanced copyright engine lets you record and track usage of copyright material and licences," said John Rowling, Hive's chief technical officer. "And it interfaces with other systems to provide a flexible hub for digital asset management, delivering content to a range of front-end delivery systems."

It is in this way - as a 'content bridge' that Staffordshire University in the UK is using HarvestRoad Hive. Established in the early 1990s, Staffordshire University has some 16,000 students, based at two main campuses in Stoke-on-Trent and Stafford, as well as a co-funded University Centre in Lichfield.

The university provides courses at foundation, certificate, diploma, degree and postgraduate level in the arts, media and design; business and law; computing, engineering and technology; as well as health and sciences. It also runs a number of vocational courses, including a range of employer-backed foundation degrees, through its network of further education colleges throughout Staffordshire and Shropshire.

Recognising that geographical and time barriers can be a constraint to learning, the university continues to develop online courses for access at home and/or in the workplace.

Using HarvestRoad Hive, university staff can now share, re-use and repurpose their content. This avoids anyone having to 'reinvent the wheel', enabling the university's investment in e-learning content - probably over a million pounds' worth of effort - to be used more effectively.

"In addition, we can use HarvestRoad Hive to hold course-related information - for example, where a work-based mentor can go to a work-based support portal and get relevant resources," said Professor Mark Stiles, Staffordshire University's head of Learning Development and Innovation. "Thus, more than being used merely to develop course material, HarvestRoad Hive can support the entire learning experience."

End

Editor's Note

About Sakai

Sakai is an open source software project driven by a worldwide consortium of educational institutions, commercial organisations and individuals dedicated to providing course management, research collaboration and e-portfolio tools. The Sakai Project is supported by the Sakai Foundation, a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to coordinating activities around Sakai and the Sakai community to insure Sakai's long-term viability.
For more information, please visit www.sakaiproject.org.

About Giunti Labs

Giunti is unique in the international publishing industry.

In 1497, Giunti publishers and typographers in Florence, together with others in Venice, began modern book manufacturing. Over the years Giunti has built a 'historical catalogue' of huge dimensions, through a gradual process of 'fusion' of different publishers, but also through the creation of new brands, including Giunti Labs. Giunti Editore now includes 20 companies in the publishing sector.

Giunti Labs, which has its global headquarters in Italy and offices in London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Lund (Sweden) and in Boston (US), provides a wide range of services, in response to any content, learning and knowledge management need, covering:

• Content production

• Research and development

• Technological solutions for content, learning & knowledge management

• Architectural and technological solutions for mobile & wireless

• Training and consulting

Giunti Labs provides the learn eXact® suite, Europe's leading e-learning and mobile learning content management technology. This suite is interoperable with all major vendor-driven and open source LMS and VLE solutions in the market including Plateau, Oracle, SumTotal, Saba, WebCT, Blackboard, Sakai, LRN and Moodle.

Moreover, Giunti Labs does not just adhere to the international standards relating to the LMS/LCMS world, it is one of the organisations that helps to determine and drive these standards: co-writing and developing them. Giunti Labs plays a key role in most of the international institutions for the definition of eLearning specifications (IEEE LTSC, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36, CEN/ISSS WSLT, AICC, IMS, ADL-SCORM and OKI).

Further information from:

Minna Leikas, Giunti Labs, +39 3489 399127
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR, +44 (0)1727 860405