Boloka, the Research Repository of the North-West University in South Africa was exposed to the global research community today in the DRIVER Research Infrastructure. Congratulations to the repository team at NWU!

As the first African repository to go global, the contents of Boloka, which means to store, to keep safe, or to preserve, can now be searched in conjunction with over 1 million other research papers harvested by DRIVER and made openly accessible through Open Access institutional repositories.

The repository comprises electronic theses, an Open Access journal (Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal) as well as the research output of the University of the North West, and periodic harvesting will capture incremental growth. As many OAI repositories contain restricted content, DRIVER harvests only those repositories that voluntarily register for prior validation and confirmation of data quality. To assist in improving data standards, and ultimately ensuring the interoperability of data in global information spaces, DRIVER provides support for repository managers in online Guidelines for Content Providers. Boloka was validated and registered smoothly, which speaks highly of the interoperability standards achieved.

Congratulations are due to repository manager, Louw Venter, and his team at NWU . Louw says: " This has been a tough road for us so far having to figure out a lot of things on our own, so we are also very proud of what we've achieved, in what I think is a relatively short time. Initially I just used the Validation tool to see if our repository is more or less on track and was reassured when the results looked good, which gave me confidence to register."

Repository managers are invited to validate their own repository and register with confidence in the knowledge that the research papers of your researchers can enjoy full exposure to their respective disciplines and subject communities.

To find out more, visit the Driver website: Register your Repository: http://validator.driver.research-infrastructures.eu/validatorWeb/

We encourage repository managers to register their repository with DRIVER, so that its contents are harvested periodically, indexed into the DRIVER platform and presented in the DRIVER European Repository search portal. In this way, publicly funded research deposited in your repository can achieve wider distribution - to be read, used and cited more widely by the global research community.

Repositories successfully harvested by DRIVER are entitled to display the DRIVER logo on their library website, to certify quality and global networked status of their content.