BUILDING AN INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY WITH MULTIPLE PUBLISHING WAYS. A CASE STUDY

The integration of technologic media in education has triggered massive use of virtual learning environments where material organized through Learning Objects and educational resources increases the potential of the teaching process. The possibility of storing these resources in open access repositories further increases the availability of this material, allowing for greater learning flexibility and extending our capability to collaborate and share knowledge.

Our project consists of building a digital repository for the Computer Science School of the National University of La Plata with the goal of publishing educational objects that are open and free to access for the whole community. Implementing this repository implies multiple publishing mechanisms, considering, on the one hand, automatic publishing from a Learning Management System such as Moodle and, on the other, manual storage with shared cataloging. The automatic publishing method is applied to projects developed by students during class and uploaded for teachers evaluation. This publishing manner includes a communication module between the LMS and the repository that prepares the resource for transfer by incorporating metadata in a standard format according to platform context information. The repository will also store other institutional information such as reports and videos with activities carried out at the School, as well as the theses required for the degrees. This information will be cataloged by means of automatic loading of some basic metadata, in order to simplify the overall publishing process, complemented by an interdisciplinary team that will complete specific metadata for other search criteria.

The goal of building the repository is not only to disseminate academic material to promote new learning experiences, but also to be part of a more general project focused on the integration of several platforms. The first step was to implement communication with the LMS and the following stage is to integrate it with the library catalog software.