JISC

Aim

The aim of the project is to assess the feasibility of approaches to improve the consistency with which repositories share material. To achieve this aim, the project will need to:

• articulate the goal of sharing material across repositories so as to define where consistency of practice is important to achieving that goal
• document current practice, and identify good practice, in those areas
• identify technical and organisational options for achieving and maintaining consistent good practice in those areas across repositories
• assess the feasibility of those options and recommend the best approach(es) in the UK context, depending on where significant value can be added

Objectives

The project objectives are to gather requirements from those who can represent the needs of service providers[1] and end users with respect to the:

• consistency, richness and precision with which repositories share material and associated metadata
• consistency, richness and precision with which repositories express associated policies, including collection, IPR and preservation policies

Assess what levels of (i)(a) and (b) might be both useful and realistic targets for UK HE institutional and national/subject/funder repositories in the near future:

• identify the costs and benefits to relevant stakeholders of achieving those targets
• assess what approaches to achieving and maintaining consistent metadata and policy expression would be effective and acceptable to relevant stakeholders
• break down the problem space by discipline, material type, etc, and focus only where value can be added within the limited timeframe and scope of this project
• make international comparisons on these questions
• make recommendations based on this work