RepoSearch, a centralized search engine for End-of-Degree Projects of the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering

Students in their last year of the degree in computer engineering must complete an End-of-Degree Project (EDP) as the culmination of their studies. The reports of these projects are usually published in the institutional open access repository of the universities in the state. The network of Spanish university libraries (REBIUN) comprises a directory of 76 university repositories where reports on end-of-degree, end-of-master and thesis projects -among other documents-are published under an open access license. Any student of the degree in computer engineering (or any other degree) who wants to start the development of his EDP should, at least, query these repositories about the existence of previous related works to rely on them (or to avoid duplicities). However, there is no option to execute a global, simultaneous query in all repositories filtering by the degree in question. Yet, the institutional repositories that are part of REBIUN fully implement the OAI-PMH protocol (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). This work describes how this OAI protocol has been used to capture the meta-information of the stored reports and how we created a search engine (RepoSearch) allowing queries on said metadata throughout 19 repositories of universities offering the Degree in Computer Engineering. Finally, we propose some reflections about the reality of open access policies in university repositories.