Neil Dickson
ARROW Research Content Manager
Monash University
David Groenewegen
ARROW Project Manager
Monash University
The Australian Government’s Department of Education Science and Training took the view of institutional repositories as a mission-critical infrastructure component to supporting scholarship, facilitating stewardship, and advancing the global recognition of Australian universities as among the world’s finest in academia. To that end, the ARROW project commenced work in February 2004 with the objective of developing best of breed solutions for open access institutional repositories and electronic publishing in Australian universities over three years. The ARROW consortium consists of Monash University as the lead institution, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia. ARROW decided to have the main modules built on top of Fedora and written by VTLS (http://www.vtls.com) using VITAL. ARROW licensed VITAL and has been working with VTLS to extend the functionality of Fedora by commissioning a series of Open-Source Web Services. This has been a true partnership, with significant transfers of intellectual property in both directions. ARROW is also trialling the Open Journal Systems software (http://www.pkp.ubc.ca). This briefing will present an overview of the progress of the ARROW project, which has been developed within the following three stage framework:
1. conceptualizing and developing an ARROW institutional repository solution comprising software, policy frameworks and implementation strategies,
2. implementing the ARROW repository within the project’s partner institutions, and
3. offering the ARROW repository solution to other Australian universities.
We will discuss the decisions the ARROW project made at the outset and provide a review of those decisions after two years of operation. We will also look forward at ARROW’s plans for 2006 and ongoing development work.
Web Site:
http://www.arrow.edu.au/
Handout (PDF)
Handout (PDF)