| The Role of a National Library in Supporting Research Information Infrastructure [Conference Paper] (2009) | |||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||
| In Australia, the National Library is collaborating with the higher education sector as part of a national program to improve the nation’s research information infrastructure. These activities have provided a focus for the National Library in its engagement with the university community. Among other things, the National Library has: • worked to digitise research resources, especially those required to support research in the humanities; • developed integrated discovery services such as the national union catalogue and a service providing search access to all Australian university repositories; • actively participated in three research information infrastructure projects; and • worked with partners to develop solutions to the problem of sustaining university repositories to support long term access. One of the research information infrastructure projects is Project ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) which is developing a solution for institutional repositories in collaboration with a commercial vendor. The National Library's principal contribution has been to build a national search service covering all Australian institutional repositories, thus improving the discovery infrastructure. In another project, the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), the National Library is sharing its expertise in digital preservation. Among other things, the Library is helping the project to develop a sound approach to assessing the obsolescence risk of file formats, is advising on a strategy for including preservation metadata in the repositories, and is seeking to influence the future development of open source repository software to make use of preservation metadata. Persistent URL: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla72/papers/155-Cathro-en.pdf | |||||||||
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