Data and metadata in architectural repositories

In many schools all over the world, teachers as well as researchers have been developing digital learning contents. These contents exist mostly in isolation; that means in and within a school or in the personal files, although it would be much more profitable to the community of teachers in architecture to share the results of all these efforts. In this paper we present and discuss two different strategies regarding this ambition:The first develops digital pedagogical material and tries to invite others to contribute in order to create a big repository. As an example we will present DYNAMO, a dynamic architectural memory on-line built over the last 8 years, with to date more than 600 architectural projects fully documented with plans, pictures, texts and a fairly developed category search engine. In the second approach every owner of a repository keeps his/her data and shares its content with others through a central search engine. As an example we will present and discuss a recently launched EU-programme called MACE - Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe - which aims at enhancing the metadata of as many as possible different repositories in order to allow searches by distant partners. Real access conditions to the data still will remain those specific for each repository. The purpose of this paper is to share information and (similar?) experiences in Asia or outside Europe in general.