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Internet Portals as Integration Means of Access to Educational Resources
Electronic educational resources are currently an important component of the modern educational process at all the levels. Most of these educational resources are located on sites on the Internet. Therefore, doing an effective search of electronic educational resources is a very important issue. It is more efficient to group electronic educational resources and their descriptions in the framework of the thematic educational portals. Universal search engines return a list of links to all available electronic resources, which use the specified keywords. Thematic portals are organized in a different way. Only the electronic resources (or information about them) that explicitly refer to the theme of a portal are included in the thematic portal. In addition, it is possible to perform the search by using attributes assigned to the resource (for example, on the subject of study, the level of education, the type of educational resource). The combination of attribute search and keyword search provides significantly better (much more relevant) results for the found electronic resources. When creating a thematic educational portal, it is necessary to develop a system of classifiers with the lists of categories and to allocate each resource to a class of all used classifiers. So, the standard of classification system for the Russian educational electronic resources has been developed. This system makes it possible to classify educational resources according to the level of education, the subject of study, the resource type and the class of users for whom the resource is intended. For secondary and high school levels, subject of study classifier is based on Russian state educational standards. At the same time, for higher education resources, the area of knowledge category, used in librarianship is applied. The initial aggregation of digital content involves a large share of manual labor: when creating the Russian Federal educational portals www.edu.ru and window.edu.ru, the initial set of educational resources was formed through the analysis and selection of quality educational e-resources available on the websites of Universities and other educational organizations. When operating the educational portal, it is necessary to provide a simple and understandable way to the authors and organizations to offer their electronic educational resources for publication. Establishing of an authoritative and effectively functioning editorial board is very important for portal functioning. In the proposing paper some measures for increasing the credibility of educational portals are described. It is possible to store either electronic educational resources, or metadata descriptions of those resources with links to their Internet addresses, it is also possible to use a combination of such approaches. The paper analyses a number of possible variants. If not one, but a system of educational portals is established, the standard of classifiers and metadata formats enables the designers to organize automatic replication of resources descriptions between theme portals and integrated catalog. Each thematic portal should adequately cover all matters of the theme. Therefore, the content enriching and development of the portal should be made by the Editorial Board of educational experts on the topic of the portal. The paper describes a creation experience of a system of federal educational portals in the Russian Federation