The deployment of educational institutional repositories (IR), has grown substantially in recent years. In Europe has emerged initiatives like CELEBRATE[3], MELT[10] sponsored by the European commission or LorInteroperability[9] of CEN/ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop, UK-federation[16] supported by JISC and BECTA while in Australia exists Edna[5] for example. However to this date, very few consortial repositories have been created, most repositories rely on Google for cross-repository searching and the majority of repositories remain housed at academic institutions or in walled gardens. The countries will be able to take advantage of federations of knowledge to provide access to valuable content, if they have their own repositories. Clifford Lynch[4] predicted that future IRs would consist of consortial repositories or use "federating" for searching across repositories and involve public organizations that are not necessarily academic libraries with a joint effort between the public and private sector.

Red.es[17], public entrepreneurial entity attached to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Commerce, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Commerce, the Ministry of Education and the Autonomous Communities of Spain have been collaboratively developing these last years a programme to facilitate the introduction and integration of technologies in Education, for public schools (non universities), special needs schools, and training centres for teachers. Moreover a programme call “Internet en el Aula” for impelling information technology in education, has been launched under the Spain government Plan Avanza[18]. Incardinated in “Internet en el Aula” programme[12], a project named “Agrega”[1] (Spanish word for “Add”) has been launched in 2007 to create a network of federated Spanish education community learning objects repository. Red.es as a public entrepreneurial entity attached to the Ministry of Industry devoted to the development of information society is actively involved in the launch of Agrega. So by the means of a collaborative process the education community identified that there were actions to be taken in order to:
• Promote, unify, establish a common cataloguing, packaging and publish standard of Spanish education community learning objects
• Create a technological reference framework where learning objects can be ubiquitous accessed under different models of utilization
• Generate a common proceedings and best practices to create digital earning objects from standards.

The development principles of Agrega are:
- Generate a federation of interoperable educational repositories instead of a single repository[7]
- Use whenever is possible standards and open source tools with a dynamic and an active and growing community[6,8,15].
- Develop a service oriented architecture (SOA)[14] promote an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Both provider and consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners.
- Open to repository interoperability whenever is possible using standards like SQI[2], IMS DRI, RSS and OAI-PMH[11]
- It can manage (based on the SCORM[13] package and sequencing model) different types of content preferably web and digital format based. They can be simple objects (text, images, audio files, video files…) or complex ones (any combination of the former)

Agrega is expected to be public launched after July 2008.

References:
1. Agrega http://redes.agrega.indra.es
2. “A Simple Query Interface for Interoperable Learning Repositories”. Bernd Simon, Zoltán Miklós, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria. David Massart, Frans van Assche, European Schoolnet, Belgium. Stefaan Ternier, Erik Duval, Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Stefan Brantner, BearingPoint Infonova GmbH, Austria. Daniel Olmedilla, Learning Lab Lower Saxony (L3S),
Germany.http://nm.wu-wien.ac.at/e-learning/interoperability/www2005-workshop-sqi-2005-04-14.pdf
3. “Celebrate: A federated model for exchange of learning Objects”. J. Simon and J.N. Colin. In Proc. of the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government,Healthcare, and Higher Education (ELEARN), volume 2004, pages 886-891, 2004.
4. Clifford Lynch http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/index.shtml/226/ir.html
5. Edna. Education Network Australia http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go
6. “Enhancing Educational Metadata Management Systems to support Interoperable Learning Object Repositories”, P. Karampiperis, D. Sampson ,Proc. Of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT 2003, Athens, Greece, July 2003.
7. “Federation and brokerage of learning objects and their metadata”. F. Van Assche and D. Massart. In
Kinshuk, C.K. Looi, E. Sultinen, D. Sampson, I. Aedo,L. Uden, and E. Kähkönen, editors, Proc. of The
Fourth IEEE International. Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT'04, pages 316-320,
Joensuu, Finland, August 30 - September 1 2004. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California.
8. “From Educational Metadata Authoring to Educational Metadata Management”, V. Papaioannou, P.
Karadimitriou, A. Papageorgiou, C. Karagiannidis, D.Sampson,.IEEE International Conference in Advance Page 7 Learning Technologies (ICALT2001), Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Best Paper Award, August 2001
9. LorInteroperability http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/lomi/index.php/LorInteroperability
10. MELT. Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching. http://info.melt- project.eu/ww/en/pub/melt_project/welcome.htm
11. OAI PMH http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html
12. Programa “Internet en el aula” http://www.red.es/actividades/internet_aula.html
13. SCORM. Sharable Content Object Reference Model http://www.adlnet.gov/scorm/
14. SOA. Service Oriented Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
15. “The interoperability of learning object repositories and services: standards, implementations and lessons learned”, Marek Hatala , Griff Richards , Timmy Eap , Jordan Willms, Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters, May 19-21, 2004, New York, NY, USA http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1013367.1013371
16. UK-federation http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/
17. Entidad Publica Empresarial red.es http://www.red.es
18. Plan Avanza http://www.planavanza.es