Share.TEC Portal: How the Metadata Repositories of Educational Resources Meet the Users’ Expectations

This is an extended version of an article presented at the Second International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, 11–12 September 2010.

This paper presents the process of building contemporary digital libraries with metadata for educational resources in Europe. The importance of enriching digital resources with complete, descriptive and accurate metadata is discussed as well as how these metadata are supported within the European project Share.TEC. The paper presents subsequently: the results of a workshop with teachers and teacher educators, who were asked to provide feedback about specific issues related to the metadata of digital re-sources for the teacher education community; design of a system in response to the user requirements: its architecture, main features,their implementation; and, finally, testing and validation of the Share.TEC portal, built as a result of a join effort of researchers, developers and users.