Repository Project Sites

These sites provide some interesting information about digital repositories and data management. As a starting point to repositories you may like to take a look at an article: “Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges” written by Neil Jacobs in February 2006: www.freepint.com/issues/160206.htm

A recently published article by Arthur Sale (2006): “Comparison of content policies for institutional repositories in Australia” found that for the seven universities analysed, a requirement to deposit research output into a repository coupled with effective author support policies delivers high levels of content while voluntary deposit policies did not. Arthur Sale is the Professor of Computing Research at the University of Tasmania and the article is located at: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/sale/index.html

i. APSR - Survey of Data Collections 2005

A report about some of the data collections held by researchers in the APSR partner Universities following a survey conducted in 2005.  The information outlines software tools, development of repositories, assessment of risk and development of risk management approaches, implementation of preservation metadata and the development of supported formats.  The survey of the collections was also developed to help characterise the types of data repositories, to determine if different sorts of data sets needed different facilities, technology or management.  http://www.apsr.edu.au/publications/data_collections.htm

ii. University of Queensland

As an APSR partner UQ under the umbrella of eScholarshipUQ, is investigating the feasibility of local harvesting of born digital and digitised UQ research material. It is estimated that m uch of the valuable research output of universities is either hidden or poorly indexed. eScholarshipUQ aims to expose such research via the UQ Research Finder central gateway, which can be readily searched or browsed. The metadata will also be harvested and exposed by national and internal gateways and search engines.

UQ is also testing Fedora and have developed FEZ , a Web-based digital repository and workflow management software system based on Fedora 2.1 and available for download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/

iii. Australian National University

Demetrius is the ANU's Institutional Repository. It contains digital resources and collections developed by the ANU Community. Digital collections maintained in Demetrius are preserved for long term access and distribution. http://sts.anu.edu.au/demetrius/index.php

iv. University of Sydney

The SORRT (Sustainable Object Repositories for Research and Teaching) Project addresses and promotes the sustainability of object repositories as part of e-research (and research-led learning) infrastructure. http://sorrt.library.usyd.edu.au/ 

v. ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World)

The ARROW project will identify and test software or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing. Partners include Monash University , National Library of Australia, University of New South Wales , and Swinburne University of Technology. http://arrow.edu.au/ 

vi. DART (Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility & Annotation e-Research Technologies)

The DART project was funded by the Australian Research Information Infrastructure Committee (ARIIC-DEST) under the MERRI (Managed Environments for Research Repository Infrastructure) initiative.

During 2005-2006 DART “…will undertake a coordinated program of e-Research requirements analysis, software development, policy and guideline creation and prototyping to investigate how best to:

• collect, capture and retain large data sets and streams from a range of different sources;
• deal with the infrastructural issues of scale, sustainability and interoperability between repositories;
• support deposit into, access to, and annotation by a range of actors, to a set of digital libraries which include publications, datasets, simulations, software and dynamic knowledge representations;
• assist researchers in dealing with intellectual property issues during the research process; and,
• adopt next-generation methods for research publication, dissemination and access.”