Purdue University is developing a Distributed Institutional Repository. Amy Page Christiansen has a short article about it in the current HPC Wire. Excerpt:
Purdue Libraries and Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP) are collaborating on an initiative that includes innovative software developed on campus to help researchers store, sort, archive, retrieve and manage large-scale data and information. The Distributed Institutional Repository is a Web-based data portal that provides tools and systems to manipulate large data sets and to help users understand the origins of data and learn about additional research applications using the same data. "The DIR is an architecture Purdue Libraries developed which utilizes a unique approach to pulling access together from a number of distributed repositories," said Scott Brandt, professor of library science and associate dean for research for Purdue Libraries.
Most institutional repositories use a single system within a single software environment. In addition to data repositories built by ITaP and the Libraries, the DIR will access a wide variety of information systems, including electronic dissertations e-prints and archival special collections...."The Libraries have always supported research through building and organizing collections," Brandt said. "With a distributed repository, we hope to enhance discovery and use of data across campus."
An institutional repository is necessary to meet the growing need to house massive amounts of data and to make it usable for users across the academic environment, Brandt said....Purdue added its own twist through software developed by Michael Witt, senior research systems administrator for Purdue Libraries, that can interface between SRB [Storage Resource Broker] and standard OAI-PMH software (open archives initiative-protocol for metadata harvesting), which allows repositories to talk to each other...."We need to be able to access this data wherever it resides," Brandt said. "This gives us different ways to test that access and discovery." Part of the overall initiative is to work with Purdue's Cyber Center to address issues related to interoperability of data -- representing and combining data in new ways to generate knowledge. In addition to providing a home for researchers' massive data sets, the repository project also will spur decisions about data-rights management, sharing of intellectual property and length and format of data archival storage.
The DIR developers are giving a public talk about it at Purdue on May 2.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/28/2006 11:09:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
