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National Library of Australia

 

As a member of the ARROW project consortium, the National Library of Australia hosts the national ARROW Discovery Service. This is a national harvested metadata repository that links a number of OAI-compliant trusted digital repositories. It ensures long term access and preservation of research output through a framework of digital repositories.

Public funding

The ARROW project seeks to make the results of publicly funded research more accessible by building open access online repositories in a range of institutions. Better access to the outcomes of research will:

• enhance the profile of universities and national research programs
• contribute to the further advancement of knowledge
• recognise the public contribution to the funding of research

Public knowledge

The ARROW repositories will support annual research reporting requirements and provide a tool for better management of research publications. The ARROW project 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
• develop and test a national resource discovery service using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories by the National Library of Australia

Public access

The underlying purpose of the ARROW project is to enhance the value and impact of Australian research by making it available globally through effective dissemination. It will:

• make research more accessible through open access repositories
• provide an enduring home for research publications on the World Wide Web
• support a scholarly friendly copyright environment, encouraging retention of researchers’ ownership of their work
• be easy to use

The aim: deposit, share, and find the outputs of research. The national discovery service uses the TeraText software. The National Library may also host a repository for independent scholars, although it is not yet clear how big a requirement this is.

Institutional research repositories need to be seen in the wider context of research information infrastructure, covering:

• content
• discovery (access and alert)
• collaboration
• authentication and authorisation
• preservation and sustainability

To date, funding has been project-based, with no support for ongoing operation. For repositories to be sustainable long term, there is a need for some permanent financial support. There may be a case for a transitional national help desk; there is still a need to explain repository basics to people.

The ARROW project will enable repositories to interoperate with Research Master, providing one streamlined work-flow to support the research quality framework. The aim is to reduce the effort required to record, measure and report research outputs. For example, can you use the discovery service layer to support reporting across institutions?

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