Design, development and testing an academic repository

Abstract

Technological advances, established best web development practices, and modern design of the 21st century have provided students, professors, researchers, etc., quasi-effortless access to academic documents encompassed within cleaner user interface and a higher level of usability. Access to and rigorous management of research publication and products is also mandated by funding agencies. Given these characteristics, we have developed an academic repository to maintain the student projects in a typical academic department. A repository of this nature is comprised of two major components: the database and the user interface. The key focus is to provide secure access to research materials (e.g. Master's projects and the like), similar to that of a community or university library's online catalogs, while sustaining a keen eye for contemporary front-end design. In addition to providing access to documentation, this repository uses collected data to present various citation styles, assisting users with easy composition of reference pages. Through a familiar search engine paradigm, information on projects, as well as the projects themselves, are discovered and queried using keywords and will be as if performing a Google search. The repository, while focused on single academic unit, can be expended as a campus wide tool, and provides an in house, easily expandable solution to off-the shelf repository solutions.