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External repositories

Being member of the project Sample Library of OERs  is required to be able to classify Repositories of OERs: you can apply for membership from the project page.  

How to catalog the source Repositories

Note: you can find an example of the process in an old video tutorial on Vimeo; now the user interface hat changed completely, but the video still contains useful information, especially suggestions on how to choose the metadata!

Catalogued sources can be browsed starting from a synoptic page showing the distributions of all kind of resources in the Educational library of CommonSpaces; said page can be accessed

  • from the homepage, by clicking on the icon at the left of the page (caption "Educational Library")
  • by selecting the All resources entry of the Library menu.

To add the record for a new repository, you should click on the Classify external repository link in the summary page of the project Sample Library of OERs: a form will open; you will be able to describe the repository by assigning values to the following metadata:

  • name (*)
  • repository type (*): real repository or catalog or directory or portal or some mix of the former
  • URL (*): the web address of the site or of a site section
  • short description (*)
  • features: a set of yes/no attributes trying to capture essential characteristics of the repository
  • subjects: one or more topics chosen from a small pre-defined set; no selection means that the repository addresses any subject: this is ok for a generalistic repository such as Youtube; similarly, selecting a top-level entry, such as Humanities, is enough to refer to History, Literature, aso: lower level entries can still be selected to indicate a specific interest
  • languages: the language or the languages corresponding to a substantial number of contents; no selection means that the repository includes OERs in almost any language: this is ok for Youtube, Vimeo aso
  • longer description: could include suggestions on how to navigate the portal or query the catalog
  • comments /evaluation: could include comments on the type of contents, their quality, their possible use.

(*) The red star identifies mandatory information fields.

The repository type vocabulary includes the following choices:

  • Repository (contents)
  • Catalog (metadata only)
  • Directory / Portal
  • Repository plus Catalog or Directory
  • MOOC.

Features considered are the following ones:

  • Authors info
  • Creative Commons license info
  • Download support
  • Full-text search
  • Multi-lingual UI support
  • Popularity score (by users)
  • Quality rating (by the editorial board)
  • Advanced search
  • Tags.

The edit form

Here is the picture of the form allowing to catalog external repositories:

Other data associated to a Repository

The data model of a Repository record includes fields whose values aren't entered by the author through the edit form but are set by the application; they hold context and state information.

  • original editing language: as explained in a couple of help pages (Internationalization, Translation), some fields of the Repository record are language aware, that is they can hold content adapted to the language of the user; the translation of a few text fields, including name and description, is under direct control of the author of the Repository record; the value of the original editing language field remembers the reference language of those language aware fields, which is implicitly chosen by the author at creation time
  • author: the user who has submitted the repository
  • creation date: the date when the cataloguing of the repository has started
  • modification date: the last date on which the the repository record has been modified
  • publication state: the value of this field changes according to the state transitions of a publication workflow.