Presentation given at the Edinburgh Repository Fringe 2008 conference

The Object Reuse and Exchange initiative, under the Open Archives umbrella, aims to provide a method of describing complex digital objects in order to provide boundaries on an otherwise formless web. As scholarly communication becomes more open and personal, distinguishing and being able to cite online multi-resource objects becomes both more difficult and more important. In order to ensure that it is possible to reference existing works, and hence to provide an initial impetus for scholarly communication using these digital objects, a large scale collection of ORE-described academic resources is essential to provide citation targets and to facilitate further research. It is envisioned that these resources would then be cited from new works, and the descriptions used as surrogates for the work in institutional repositories with URI pointers to the originals held outside of the repository.