Engineering Materials and Personal Spaces in Public Repositories: The Case of the MERLOT Digital Library

Abstract

The open educational resources are learning, teaching and research materials available in open sites for free access, and are frequently grouped into personal collections by users. MERLOT, the well-known online repository, includes amongst its materials Bookmark Collections (BC) created by its contributors. This article evaluates, from the point of view of users other than the creators, the usefulness of the MERLOT personal collections in engineering education. There are at least 895 Bookmark Collections in the Engineering collection of MERLOT. The main assessment criteria are the potential of shareability and reusability of the collection in terms of the engineering content and description, and the coherence of materials and collection with the respective engineering discipline and sub-discipline. Results show that the quality of these collections could be improved if the assignment of the collection would be declared, as the title and description, during the BC creation. The improvement of the BC title and most especially its description would be also a good improvement that will guide the searcher more precisely.