The Role of the Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI in the Re-Accreditation of the Higher Education Institutions Processes

Since 2004 the higher education in Croatia is structured according to the Bologna process and offers three-degree cycles: undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate. Given that Croatia has a binary higher education system, study programmes can be more academically oriented (university studies) or more labour market-oriented (professional studies). While the former can be conducted only at universities and its constituents, the latter is conducted typically at polytechnics and colleges, but exceptionally also at universities. 

Higher education in Croatia has a long history and currently it is provided by eight public and two private universities, eleven public and five private polytechnics, and three public and nineteen private colleges. The University of Zadar is the oldest university that was founded in 1396 and was renewed in 2002.  The largest university (by a number of constituents as well as a number of students) is the University of Zagreb, continuously working since 1669.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) went through processes of regular periodic re-accreditation governed by the Agency for Science and Higher Education (ASHE). ASHE started the new re-accreditation cycle in 2017 where applied criteria for (self)evaluation have been improved in accordance with the new Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the EHEA (ESG). Re-accreditation procedures are supported by the information system - Module of the Agency for Evaluation support (MOZVAG) which provides the data used in processes of external quality assurance evaluations and has been recently upgraded. Instead, to collect the data from paper documents, the decision was made to gather the data from the existing bibliographies and other databases storing the data relevant to the research in Croatia. Nowadays all quantitative data used in the new re-accreditation procedure are obtained through the MOZVAG database.

 There are four categories of data used for the re-accreditation:

1. Study programmes and learning outcomes

2. Learning process and student support

3. Human and institutional resources

4. Scholarly/artistic and professional activities.

To ease the process of data gathering and improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data, new release of MOZVAG import the data about various HEIs activities which are stored in other with other information systems. For example, administrative data about HEI are imported from Information System of Higher Education Institutions (ISVU), data about publications from the Croatian Scientific Bibliography - CROSBI and data about projects from the Project Database of the Croatian Research and Higher Education System. To enable this, different adjustments at different levels have been made. For publications, the most challenging was the mapping process between evaluation criteria in the different disciplines, which are often ambiguous, and metadata description of different types of publications. An established system to exchange the data was tested in a pilot in which ten HEIs participated. Continuous cooperation will improve all included information systems as well as interoperability levels.