An Easy Gateway to Electrical Engineering Contents on an Institutional Repository

—This work presents an overview of digital contents created in the different areas of a Brazilian Institution of Higher Learning and a solution that was implemented to make it easy to access items in Electrical Engineering – a significant part of it. Characteristics of the collection (types and numbers of contents) and the compliance to international standards and best practices are addressed too


I. INTRODUCTION
Universities all over the world have been using the Internet to make available different types of digital contents -some restricted to specific communities of users, others open to the public.
Clifford Lynch [1] defined an institutional repository (IR) as "a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.". His work was published after DSpace (http://www.dspace.org/), a free and open source product, was released by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before DSpace and IRs, many institutions made their digital collections available from digital libraries. This was the case of PUC-Rio -Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, as presented in section II.
Harnad and Brody [2] and Harnad et al [3] showed the importance of Open Access to digital contents in increasing citations and the impact of publications. This was when the Open Access Movement started.
Some years before these two events, ETD -Electronic Theses and Dissertations started being published. In 1997, they became a requirement at Virginia Another important service related to the availability of digital contents, based on Open Access and cooperation, is MERLOT -Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (http://www.merlot.org/). MERLOT is a repository of metadata on OA courseware whose authors voluntarily register on the system. This informs the ICT -Information and Communication Technology supported learning community.

II. THE STEPS FOLLOWED AT PUC-RIO
Management of digital contents at PUC-Rio began with a digital library of (of very simple hypermedia) courseware in Electrical Engineering -the Maxwell System (http://www.maxwell.lambda.ele.puc-rio.br/). It was deployed in 1995.
This system has been enhanced all over the years and now is referred to as an IR when digital contents are considered. A Learning Management System (LMS) was added to support face-to-face courses as well as distance ones. All content management of the LMS is managed by the IR module, yielding flexibility, share and reuse of digital materials.
Later on, new types of digital contents started being published -ETDs (2000), senior projects (2003), journals (2003), articles, videos and administrative documents. All areas of the university contribute to the collection. A set of Special Projects has also been made available, most of them in specific subjects and devoted to specific target audiences. The last significant enhancement of the system was the launching of version 4 that is accessible to the blind and the visually impaired.
Currently, there are almost 18,000 titles on the system. The two largest collections are those of ETDs and senior projects; they account for over 10,000 works in all areas of the university undergraduate and graduate courses.
An important feature of the system is that it is a data provider compliant to OAI-PMH -Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (http://www.openarchives.org/). For this reason, metadata of all contents are collected to be transferred to national and international union catalogs.

III. DIGITAL CONTENTS IN EE
Since the system started with the hosting of contents in Electrical Engineering and the system is still maintained and operated by EE, the digital collection has a significant number of items in this area; the variety of types is also bigger than in other areas. Table I presents an overview of the most significant items in the EE collection. Interactive Exercises (in the books) 685 Learning Objects 13 (1) Videos 28 (2) Assorted Learning Materials 2,200+ (1) Four additional LOs are under development.
(2) There are additional 10 videos that need review.
Currently the number of items related to learning activities has been growing at a fast pace since there is a plan to cut the number of contact hours in undergraduate courses; online activities will substitute for them and courseware is of paramount importance.
An overview of the main types in the EE collection follows.

A. ETDs and Senior Projects
As shown in Theses & dissertations as well as senior projects have a three-fold role in the context of scholarly works. The first is that they are outputs of an educational level; the second is that they are inputs to the educational process; and the third is that they are documents that keep the memory of Institutions of Higher Education.

B. Articles and Research Reports
Articles and research reports in EE are published in series. Two of them are thematic -Antennas and Computational Intelligence; the third covers miscellaneous subjects. The first series started in 2009. All three may contain preprints and postprints. The total number of articles is higher than 50.

C. Courseware
Courseware were first items to be made available from the Maxwell System in 1995. In the almost 20 years since then, ICT has undergone an amazing change. This has led to a situation that all original contents, except one, were discarded. This one will have to be modified in order to "run smoothly".
Currently, the authors of this article have been engaged in the development of courseware to support two courses that will go from traditional face-to-face to partially online. This change will be implemented in the school term beginning in February 2014. For this to be possible, many items are already availble online, others are being reviewed, another set is under development and a fourth group is under final planning. Since all digital contents are managed by the IR, they are all described according to the metadata set used on the system. This set is compliant to the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (ISO 15836/2003) and to the best practices for specific types of contents.

IV. DIGITAL CONTENTS IN OTHER AREAS
As mentioned in section II, the Maxwell System serves all areas of PUC-Rio. For this reason, almost 90% of the items are not related to EE. Most ETDs and senior projects come from other courses; all journals with more than one thousand articles are not related to EE either.
Such variety of contents and their numbers posed a problem to users who wanted EE contents only. The solution to this problem came with Elétrica On-line, presented in the next section.

V. ELÉTRICA ON-LINE
In order to make it easier to access contents related to EE, an interface called Elétrica On-line was implemented. It is an easy gateway to EE contents and information on the system. Figure 1 shows the opening page of this interface. Its objective is to yield easy access to all EE related digital contents available from the system. At the same time, it offers a set of links to other sites/systems that have EE or EE related materials.
The "links" in the links section of Elétrica On-line connect to different collections. Some examples are: (1) MERLOT that offers more that 400 EE contents among its almost 43 thousand items; (2)

VI. FINAL REMARKS
The contents have been under development for many years. Many persons have contributed to them. The Interactive Books are considered as a collective authorship due to the many authors that have created the almost 700 exercises. This has been a remarkable team work of undergrads, graduate students, faculty and technical staff.
Currently, all courseware are in Portuguese. The Interactive Books, the Learning Objects and the Circuits in Video are indexed in MERLOT. It is important to remark that even though EE contents are accessed using Elétrica On-line, they maintain their original access from all other tools and search mechanisms of the system. An important aspect of Elétrica On-line is that it integrates digital contents in EE that were developed at the University along with others that are available worldwide in Open Access. The objective is to enhance accessibility.
This project is under way and, due to the possibilities of creating additional contents and exploring new technologies, it can go on for many years.