Building digital educational repositories for agriculture: The AgLR tool
While there is a wealth of open source software repositories for bibliographic records, such as DSpace, Eprints etc., this is not the case for the educational ones; a short research showed that there are only a few solutions for this purpose and most of them are proprietary ones, commercial software etc. I am aware of a case where a Dspace installation was used as an educational repository but still this seems to be an exception to the rule.
In the context of the Organic.Lingua ICT-PSP project, we decided to build a new learning repository tool, in order to meet the requirements collected by the stakholders/agricultural learning community, focusing mostly on multilinguality aspects as well as the automatic update of the Organic.Edunet AP and the ontology. This tool should be based on open-source software, always use the latest version of the Organic.Edunet ontology, it should support automatic translation of metadata (domain-specific translation, proviing more accurate results) and other useful functionalities and adaptations for the agricultural stakeholders. Well, after three years of work for the Organic.Lingua project, this tool is here: named Agricultural Learning Repository tool (AgLR), its main features are listed below:
- Built on the open-source Omeka platform;
- Uses the latest version of the Organic.Edunet IEEE LOM AP for the creation of metadata records;
- Uses the latest version of the Organic.Edunet ontology for the classification of the learning resources;
- The AgLR took is connected to the MoKi tool used for the management of the ontology through the ontology service API;
- It features a user interface available in ten (10) languages; additional languages can be easily added using an online form;
- Supports the automatic translation of metadata (Title, Description and Keywords) in ten (10) languages);
- Supports the "Suggest Metadata" functionality, for automatically extracting metadata from HTML pages;
- Supports the Template functionality for minimizing the time needed for the creation of metadata records sharing identical information in metadata fields;
- It is fully compliant with the OAI-PMH standard for exposing metadata of each collection/set through a unique target;
- It supports ingestion of metadata in the form of XML files.
Of course such a tool needs to be easily accessible by anyone, anywhere, at any time, with only the minimum effort to set up, so the obvious question: How can one access, evaluate and actually use the AgLR tool?

In this context, the agINFRA project is providing a free version of the tool, which you may access at:
http://212.189.145.247/oe/admin/users/login using the following credentials:
username: aglrdemo / password: aglrdemo
If you decide to use the AgLR tool, please take some time to provide us with your feedback using this online evaluation form - it will not take you more than 5 mins to complete and at the same time you will greatly help us to further improve the tool!
In the meantime, we are planning a series of webinars for the agricultural learning resources and tools, including one for the AgLR tool, so stay tuned!
You can read the full blog post at the Agro-Know blog.