Coventry University Repository Validation and Enhancement
CURVE provides a single repository for the university’s digital academic content and is used for both teaching and research objects. The policy decision to develop a single repository brought with it a number of major challenges. It needed to serve the diverse needs of a broad range of stakeholders (the Library, faculty members, researchers, students, teachers, specialist research groups etc).
Executive Summary
The balance between providing a centralised and fully supported high quality service which also promoted the degree of local ownership and control which would promotes and incentivises individuals to deposit their content was a major challenge, all within the context of a complex IPR/DRM environment was a major challenge. The third major set of issues contingent raised was the need to integrate CURVE with a wide range of other systems, notably CUOnline (the learning and teaching environment), library systems, the e-research environment and access/authentication systems. CURVE was developed over a two year period leading to full release to the university in June 2008.
Background
The Coventry University Repository Virtual Environment, CURVE, is the bridge between the e-learning environment (CUOnline) and the information environment provided by the CU university library. It is based on the Equella system from The Learning Edge International.
CURVE is intended to provide easy discoverability, management and access to a wide variety of digital assets including some important archive material. The short-term aim of CURVE is to explore the issues in creating a ‘blended’ repository, having a range of functions and types of digital asset, a single institutional repository for e-theses, research outputs, media objects and learning objects.
Repository development was already a central part of the e-Learning strategy at Coventry University, embedded in the Library Development Plan, the Applied Research Strategy and approved by the Information Architecture Group before the project started. It is also important at the Faculty level; three (out of four) faculties (Art and Design, Health and Life Sciences and Business and the Environment) had expressed a need for repositories in their area. Given the support for this development internally, we aimed, through CURVE, to enhance the repository for use across these areas, and suggest how a blended repository could work, covering issues for its set-up and also integration with a network of other repositories containing resources of use in these faculties.