The Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory (DRAI) Project aimed to provide a comprehensive snapshot of digital resource provision in the UK and to examine the technical infrastructure and preservation environment of this digital content. There has been a clearly articulated need for a “one stop shop” for information discovery across a range of different digital collections. By concentrating on resources containing digital objects, the catalogue of resources created during the Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory (DRAI) project updates and complements previous aggregation efforts and provides more specific information about the preservation of each collection (which has not been part of the scope of previous portals). This information is crucial to understand the current preservation environment in the UK and will build on previous work by the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (amongst others) in building strategies for digital preservation.
The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR.
The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.
Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.
Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/02/2008 07:04:00 PM.
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.
