Evaluation of the Design and Usability of the Digital Repositories of the Universities of Porto and Minho (PT), Yale (USA) and Melbourne (AU)

This study is part of the Wisdom Transfer (WT) research project, which aims to contribute to the scientific inscription of the individual legacies, at risk of disappearance, of retired or retiring professors, who marked the beginning of design education in northern Portugal. In this sense, the intention was to evaluate the current panorama of the digital repositories of higher education academic institutions, in order to assess the creation’s need of a specific digital repository for the Portuguese art and design universe. In Portugal, there is currently a total of 60 digital repositories of academic institutions, with none of these being exclusively dedicated to art and design education. Thus, in order to assess the need for the creation of a specific digital repository for the artistic universe, this study evaluated the design and usability of four digital repositories of reference universities (two national and two international), namely: the RepositóriUM, from Univeridade do Minho and the Repositório Aberto, from Universidade do Porto; the Cross Collection Discovery repository, from Yale University, USA; and the RMIT Research Repository, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia. The results showed that the analysed repositories aggregate a very high volume of information from many different scientific areas. This plurality and the immensity of available content make the search process difficult, and it is also difficult to meet the specific needs for sharing content from certain fields of expertise, particularly art and design.