Australian Research Repositories Online to the World

Developing an Institutional Repository Solution for All Types of Digital Objects

The ARROW project is led by a consortium consisting of Monash University (lead institution), Swinburne University of Technology, the University of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia. The Project had a number of specific goals that it wished to achieve. The key one was the need for a solution for storing any digital research output, regardless of format in which it was created. The initial focus was on digital objects with print equivalents, specifically theses and journal articles. As the solutions for these areas have become clearer the project has been looking at a range of other objects. These include datasets, specifically those produced as a part of research and which might usefully be attached to the published research, as well as learning objects that might need to be organised and made available from a repository.

The Australian Government has had a system of reporting research for the purpose of tracking the output of universities. At the time the project was conceived, this took the form of reporting eligible research publications. It was envisaged that a repository could be used to help manage this process and to retain the audit copies. Since then there has been a change in direction to a proposed Research Quality Framework (RQF), which will involve the review of research outputs by experts from outside Australia. DEST have identified that repositories offer the potential for widespread access to these outputs in a less labour intensive fashion, and ARROW has been working with them on how this might be achieved.

A key requirement of the project was to employ Open Standards to make sure the data stored in the repository would be transferable in the future. In conjunction with this it was determined that the project would develop and deliver open source tools back to the Fedora Community. This was also a requirement of the program under which ARROW was funded.

After a careful analysis of the candidates available at the time, it was felt that only Fedora provided the right combination of attributes for the underlying architecture. It was chosen 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. More background on the reasons for selecting Fedora for the ARROW project is available.

The end result of these decisions is a software solution combining open source and proprietary software, combining Fedora with a proprietary services layer called VITAL, which has been developed by VTLS Inc. This software has been licensed by fifteen universities in Australia, and ARROW’s work at present is focussed on refining and supporting this software, and aiding these universities in their use of it.

A complementary activity of ARROW has been the development and testing of the ARROW Resource Discovery service (developed by the National Library of Australia) using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories. ARROW is also supporting a sub-project called Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PILIN).

The ARROW Project wishes to acknowledge the support of the Systematic Infrastructure Initiative as part of the Australian Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).