The ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project’s objectives are “to identify and test software to support best practice institutional digital repositories at the consortium member sites to manage pre- and post-print research publications, digital theses and electronic publishing; and to develop and test a national resource discovery service using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories by the National Library of Australia.”1 The Project is sponsored as part of the Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability. Consortium members include Monash University (lead institution), National Library of Australia, The University of New South Wales, and Swinburne University of Technology. Representatives from the Project answered our survey questions.
ARROW is attempting to build an institutional repository capable of managing a variety of types of digital objects generated in Australian universities. The intention is to allow declaration of a content model including its Fedora object structure, its required metadata, and validation rules for the metadata and the object data streams. It must be possible to declare and work with additional digital object types as required. In the first instance functionality is being developed for the management of research publications, image collections and electronic theses. All descriptive metadata is being mapped to Dublin core for harvesting via OAI-PMH for inclusion in a National Research Discovery service developed and managed by the National Library of Australia as part of the ARROW project. The ARROW project is also working with the Open Journal Systems software to support publication of e-journals, with the intention that these publications will be archived in the Fedora repositories.
Fedora was chosen as the repository architecture for the project as it offered in our view the most flexible, extensible structure in which to manage a wide variety of digital objects, with proven scalability and support for the OAI-PMH protocol.
Initially the intention of the project is to achieve wider access to Australian research by making it available on-line with appropriate discovery facilities. The target audience for this activity is researchers around the world. The Australian universities are also required to compile an annual archive of their research outputs as evidence of outputs achieved with government research grants. The management of this process within ARROW repositories offers administrative efficiencies around this process, and improves accessibility of the publications. The audience for these activities is individual Australian researchers reporting their outputs, and the research managers responsible for maintaining these archival records in accordance with government audit requirements.
The project is working with VTLS, Inc. to build the tools required by the member institutions in the timeframe required. VTLS, Inc. is coding a web-based access portal, a web-based management tool and a more fully-featured Windows-based repository management tool. These will be made available as a commercial offering called VITAL. ARROW is contracting VTLS to create open-source web-services as part of this activity.
One challenge faced by the project in generating technical specifications for VTLS, Inc. and in beginning the tasks of designing content models and disseminators and preparing data for ingestion into the repository was the lack of demo content models for institutional research repository, as well as detailed instructions for preparing data for loading.
Relevant Links:
1 The ARROW Project. ARROW: Australian Research Repositories Online to the World. Victoria, Australia: Monash University. 2004.