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Australian National University

 

A brief history of repository work at ANU:

• 2001: Division of Information established, bringing together IT services, the library, corporate IS, and teaching and learning systems

• 2002: “Repository Agenda” established, with a number of individual repository initiatives, including an e-prints collection, an archive of Asian material, and participating in the ADT programme

• 2003: picked up DSpace, which had emerged as an institutional framework for repositories, on an experimental basis and merged the repositories work with ANU’s ePress initiative for electronic publishing; this led to the APSR proposal under the SII programme

• 2004: awarded the APSR contract, to focus on an open standards based, long term sustainable, national programme to develop a range of repository-based services; created a temporary repository of 5,000 papers to support an academic audit — this was seen as a big win

• 2005: evolve the development work into an operational and supported university service based on DSpace; DSpace repositories contain some 40,000 items and the development unit has 6 staff

The purpose of the APSR project is to move repositories out of the development phase to become part of the research infrastructure. The SII programme seeks to promote excellence by:

• developing and documenting best practices
• addressing strategic infrastructure issues
• ensuring solutions fit the Australian context
• stimulating and sharing experiences

APSR recognises that each institution has its own context and has to find its own right answer — one size doesn’t fit all. Making a repository part of the infrastructure means addressing 4 distinct aspects:

1. establish — what to do to set up a repository
2. manage — processes to support content providers and information seekers
3. co-ordinate — mechanisms to federate with other local and global repositories
4. sustain — principles for the long term future, including
   • serving all its user communities
   • enduring content (eg file format migration)
   • accessible and available
   • institutional commitment

The ANU repository philosophy is that any material submitted is available to the world by default. Light content access restrictions may be applied on a collection by collection basis, but the metadata are always visible. However, an open repository isn’t appropriate for some research communities. There is a need to support research collaboration where access is limited to the members of the community, for example in some medical research. ANU had to decide whether this was an appropriate function for a large central repository and concluded that the best solution was to set up a special purpose repository instance. This illustrates an important benefit of using open source software — you can create another instance without buying an additional software licence.

There is ongoing debate on a number of policy and culture matters; having a flexible architecture is essential, so you can adjust to new or changed requirements. The project talks widely to different groups of researchers about what services meet their needs. It uses an agile approach and aims to keep future options open. Issues include:

• whether to adopt a “mandated deposit” policy
• what level of completeness to aim for (eg historical content capture)
• what kinds of services are needed, eg ePortfolios
• how to strengthen the repository community
• how to lower the barriers to participation
• where does the job of a repository stop (it can stream audio on demand; should it offer this service?)

APSR sees a repository as people, policy and tools to support an entire institution. It is not aimed at a particular research community. It uses DSpace essentially as an asset store, overlaid with a repository management tool set. The architecture does not require a particular software package — DSpace could be replaced at some point if it becomes appropriate to do so. APSR sees a national resource discovery layer as a separate and complementary service, rather than trying to create a national repository service, which is impractical.

The project is exploring use of Apache Cocoon to provide a presentation layer over the DSpace content layer. By disaggregating the repository into its component blocks, it becomes possible to offer a range of services over the collection of asset stores. Examples include: music collection publishing, print publishing, multimedia publishing such as interactive CD-ROM, access management services. These services make research collections more accessible to people, for example for use in schools.

The ANU research repository is called Demetrius. It takes a “softly, softly” approach, recognising that you can’t demand participation and there is not yet a corpus of repository best practice on which to draw — you don’t know where repositories will be in 10 years’ time. The repository uses a 3 tier structure: community (any node on campus that has an organisational unit above it); collection (any organised body of work); item (a discrete work, made up of one or more resources). Policies are designed to be inclusive and encourage participation:

• explain the benefits of certain file formats, but accept any format
• the service is voluntary not compulsory
• people can use it in any way they see fit, eg just as an archive service
• promote the service to academic nodes, not to individual academics
• use of metadata is encouraged but not mandated or policed

Older academics are particularly interested in preventing their research materials from disappearing, but this requires a commitment on their part to put in metadata.

The repository is part of the wider learning management environment. Use of open standards means different types of repository, or repositories in different institutions, can talk to one another.

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