National learning and teaching resource audit and classification

Impact: Public policy Impact

Impact summary

The project included the reconfiguration of the publically accessible Resource Library of the Office for Learning & Teaching (OLT) to make the collection of outputs from all OLT-funded projects over the past two decades far more findable.
A new schema of 22 metadata elements was devised based on empirical study of users’ needs and a close analysis of the resources themselves. A new, controlled vocabulary was selected as a means to improve subject searching, and adapted where necessary so that the thesaurus covered all of the topics represented in the Resource Library. In addition, a new resource type taxonomy was constructed, and a grant type taxonomy introduced. Detailed indexing guidelines were developed and applied by two professional indexers, editing over 700 records and adding over 1,500 different subject terms.
The effect of the re-indexing was demonstrated to have significantly improved the search performance of the database, with more relevant resources retrieved and more of the resources retrieved being relevant, on average. The indexing guidelines and the new schema and vocabularies were adopted by the OLT to optimise access to new resources added to the Resource Library. The project’s recommendations around both indexing procedure and system enhancements were all accepted and implemented by the Department of Education and Training, with a system migration now in train.
The impact was at a national level, as the OLT’s Resource Library is used predominantly by academics based across Australia. It is ongoing, as the Resource Library remains publicly accessible, and may spread in the future – for example, its contents are presently in the process of being linked from the National Library of Australia’s Trove database.
Impact date20142015
Category of impactPublic policy Impact
Impact levelBenefit

Keywords

  • learning and teaching
  • portals
  • OLT
  • higher education

Countries where impact occurred

  • Australia