Repositório Institucional de Objetos Educacionais na Nuvem utilizando DSpace

Abstract

Technological development has brought benefits to diverse areas and is no different for the educational environment. The ways in which teaching is employed is also undergoing changes thanks to the new technologies that emerge. A resource that has been used in classrooms by teachers to improve and make them more interactive are educational objects, which are digital materials whose main characteristic is the possibility of reuse, either by different professionals or in different activities. However, the following question is found: How to make these objects available so that anyone in any part of the world can access them? And that’s where digital repositories come in. They are widely used databases for various purposes, the most recurrent is in storing articles, theses and dissertations, but are also used for the preservation and consequently the provision of educational objects. There are several types of software developed to be used as repositories, the most widespread of which is the DSpace, created in 2002 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Making the most of the features that computing provides, the cloud computing system is used, due to the various advantages it offers when compared to the use of physical servers. A problem faced in making content available in Internet is to allow it to be indexed in searches, to face it, new metadata patterns are created, or new elements are added to existing patterns. The objective of this work, therefore, is to implement an institutional digital repository using the DSpace platform in a machine located in the cloud. With the repository created, two use cases were used to perform the submission of objects in the repository. The other part of the work consisted in the elaboration of a metadata proposal more focused on the description of educational objects. Then, an analysis of the metadata schema as a whole was carried out, based on six principles of “good metadata” published by NISO, as well as a comparison between existing repositories and the one implemented in this work. It was possible to verify the often advantageous features that the repository has in relation to those used in the comparison, and having as reference point the above mentioned principles, it was possible to observe that the final metadata scheme satisfied all six principles