Digital Repositories – building coherence from diversity?

1. Digital Repositories – building coherence from diversity? Catherine Grout: Programme Director JISC Development Group Digital Repositories Town Meeting: 2nd March 2005

2. The past ten years • First defined digital archives/repositories: storage of research data/cultural heritage data – libraries, museums/archives • Repositories have multiplied and there are marked differences between • Users served • Types of material stored • People Responsible • Organisational structures • Technical specifications • Services offered

3. It’s all on the increase • Figures from SHERPA – January 2005 – based on Institutional Repository being a repository that receives research output from the spread of subject-disciplines at the institution: • 2004 has seen rapid growth – now around 40 in IR’s (KPL) • Out of the top 20 research institutions 15 already have IRs, others are being planned. • Russell Group - 16 out of 19 have IRs operating • 1994 group - 8 out of 16 have an IR

4. Working in this space • JISC: Standards Development (JISC Services, and many others, building up experience in digital archiving practices) • Amount of digital “stuff” to store has increased exponentially • Digital Archiving/Repository building has become less of a specialised activity to an activity for all in FE, HE, Research • JISC: Defining architectures to look at how all these repositories fit together • Programmes and Projects to allow people to experiment

5. The JISC IE Architecture Digital Repositories £ JISC-funded content providers institutional content providers external content providers authentication/authorisation (Athens) JISC IE service registry user preferences services provision brokers aggregators indexes catalogues metadata schema registries resolvers fusion institutional preferences services OpenURL resolvers subject portals institutional portals media-specific portals learning management systems terminology services £ presentation end-user desktop/browser shared infrastructure £ £

6. Important Programmes of Work • The work you (will) do will owe at lot to those who worked on: • FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) • X4L (Exchange for Learning) • MLE’s for Life Long Learning • Digital Libraries in the Classroom • Digital Libraries and VLE’s • Portals and Shared Services • International Research and Development Work

7. So its all sorted out now then? • With the number of people involved/interested • Standards/Specifications/Architecture/Software/Approaches have proliferated too • Communities have also diverged (learning, research, digital libraries) • Also peer to peer and personal repository activity • Very positive but too diverse to offer sustainable/stable services needed to improve learning and research

8. What else needed? • Cultural/organisational evolution: • Digital “services” of many institutions becoming more complicated • Proliferation of “services” with different functions(VLE, Library Catalogue, Enterprise Portal, Departmental Data Stores, Institutional Repository?) • Who should be responsible for looking after the digital assets which need to be integrated with these? • What should institutions best do themselves, what should you expect to get from national infrastructure/services? • Defining the role of Partnership (others in your institution!, developers, publishers, other types of public organisations)

9. JISC Digital Repositories Programme? • Phase 1: working with you to help answer some of these questions • Answers may be about: • Technology and standards development • Defining good/best practices • Supporting organisational change/evolution etc. • Defining services/functions needed to join all this up • Working with you to help work out what JISC can do to support your activity and those who need to use repositories