Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland : JISC

Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland

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Background

The IRIScotland projects produced two pilot services – the IRIScotland cross-repository (an OAI-PMH harvester/search to aggregate research outputs in Scottish repositories) and a hosting service based at the National Library of Scotland for institutions that do not wish to set up their own research repositories.

The projects also produced a Repository Toolkit for Use by Researchers and Institutions, a Draft Metadata Agreement for Institutional Repositories and, through the formation of the IRIScotland Council, a broad grouping of stakeholders responsible for overseeing the future development of the service.

These achievements are testaments to a long-standing tradition of expertise-building collaboration between Higher Education Institutions across Scotland in the field of research information.

The ERIS (Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland) project looks to build on the success of these collaborations.

Overall Aim

Whereas IRIScotland took a more ‘top down’ approach of working with repository managers and decision makers, the purpose of the ERIS project is to develop a more ‘bottom up’ set of user-led and user-centric solutions (operational and technical) that will motivate researchers to deposit their work in repositories, facilitate the integration of repositories in research and institutional processes and, as a result, develop the IRIScotland outputs into a set of trusted cross-repository services, which together are capable of providing access to a critical mass of Scottish research output.

To achieve this overall aim, ERIS will pay particular attention to the requirements of research pooling – an innovative cross-institutional way of conducting research, which has been widely credited for having substantially contributed to Scotland’s RAE 2008 successes.

Delivery Approach

In order to achieve these goals, the project will undertake to deliver 5 work packages. This breaks down as 4 work packages focusing on meeting the project objectives and deliverables, and 1 work package focusing on the project management and coordination of the work.

The work packages are described simply below:

Enhancing researchers’ engagement with repositories (looking at the need of both researchers and research pools)
Enhancing the curation and preservation processes within Scottish institutions
Provide technological enhancements for improved research-centric functionality
Developing an IRIScotland policy framework for organisational and financial sustainability
Project management and work package support

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