Australian Research Repositories Online to the World

ARROW is a national demonstrator project funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education for the support of digital repositories of Australian content.

The ARROW project will identify and test a software solution or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing. A wide range of digital content types will be managed in these repositories. The National Library of Australia will develop a repository and associated metadata to support independent scholars (those not associated with institutions). A complementary activity of ARROW is the development and testing of national resource discovery services (developed by the National Library), using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories, and the exposing of metadata to provide services via protocols and toolkits.

This will include a potential path for the redevelopment of the Australian Digital Theses Program metadata repository incorporated into the National Library’s national resource discovery services. Initially ARROW will be tested in four consortium partner institutions, prior to it being offered more widely across the higher-education sector. Consortium members are:
* Monash University (lead institution)
* National Library of Australia
* University of New South Wales
* Swinburne University of Technology

The solution will be open standards-based, or will support open standards, and will facilitate interoperability within and between participating institutions.

ARROW Stage-2

The following is taken from Minister Julie Bishop's media release: Research capability to be boosted by improved collaboration, 31 July 2006.

"The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project has been very successful in providing tools to enable accessibility and discoverability of research from institutional repositories. ARROW Stage-2 will build upon this success to support the building of institutional repositories for project partners and advise new members on how to proceed and what to expect. An important aspect of the ARROW Stage 2 project will be the establishment of sustainable pathways for institutional repositories beyond the term of the project.

The experiences of current trials in using repositories for the RQF will inform institutions on how they can prepare for RQF-repository integration. The project will develop software to support a more comprehensive set of digital objects and hence enable more creative uses of repositories and more flexible ways in which repositories integrate with other knowledge management tools.

The project will also address the pressing need for a universally usable architecture and solution to the issue of persistent identifiers for digital objects and will implement a sustainable shared identifier infrastructure based on the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) Handle System. This work will will carried out by the PILIN Project"

External links

* [http://arrow.edu.au/ ARROW project web site]
* [http://adt.caul.edu.au/adtariic.html Australian Digital Theses Program]
* [http://dest.gov.au/ Department of Education, Science and Training]
* [http://www.dest.gov.au/Ministers/Media/Bishop/2006/07/B001310706.asp Minister Bishop's media release]
* [http://arrow.edu.au/docs/files/ARROW%20Stage2%20PublicDescription.pdf ARROW Stage-2 Project Description]
* [http://arrow.edu.au/pilin PILIN project information and links]