Institutional Collaboration around Institutional Repositories

Abstract

Three New Zealand universities have been collaborating on a project to provide open, web-based, access to research outputs through the creation of institutional repositories using the DSpace software. This poster will therefore address the theme of eResearch with particular focus on the benefits of active collaboration, intra-university, inter-university and international, in this area of activity. New Zealand has a small population of 4 million, an innovative and resourceful academic community, a newly implemented research funding model, based on performance (PBRF) and a readiness to stay competitive with the rest of the world. Institutional Repositories in New Zealand are in their infancy but a considerable body of experience already exists overseas which we can draw upon if we work in partnership with those institutions who have already implemented institutional repositories. Funding is limited but by sharing resources and working collaboratively each institution can make substantial progress towards the creation of individual repositories. This poster reports on the joint project between the University of Auckland, the University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington. The three partners have been funded by the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission to make available, via the Internet for access by Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant search engines, research outputs created by staff and students of the three partner institutions. This poster will present information on the work to: • Establish DSpace repositories in partner institutions that conform to the OAI-PMH standard. • Contribute to the development of linkages with the Australian DEST funded information infrastructure projects, i.e. ADT, APSR and ARROW projects. • Identify methods for increasing academic understanding of, and promoting contributions to, digital repositories the content of which is then available to enhance teaching and learning, as well as research. • Provide digital materials, either through the deposit of “born digital” material or through digitisation of material already available in print, that contribute to the developing digital content landscape as envisaged in the NZ Digital Strategy • Contribute to national research resource discovery service to be established by the National Library of New Zealand. Ensure that the content in the project repositories is visible for harvesting by global OAI-compliant search engines such as Google Scholar, OAIster, etc. Collaborate with other IR projects and communicate the lessons learned to the wider tertiary and research communities of New Zealand