eIFL INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES SETTING THE PLATFORM FOR INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION!!

[Susan Veldsman]

Dear colleagues,

 

Over the last year we have been working hard to create a database and record
all aspects of Institutional Repositories that have been developed in all
our member countries. After a lot of correspondence and updating with
countries, we can now report that 17 member eIFL countries currently have:

 

-          27 repositories in progress

-          69 active repositories, 

-          Total of 96 institutional repositories

 

This gave us the opportunity to look for international co-operation with
other projects. Being so closely associated with SURF, the Netherlands, eIFL
were quite aware of the DRIVER project and it follow up DRIVER II sister
project. (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European
Research:DRIVER) that they were involved in. One of the objectives of DRIVER
is to organize and build a virtual, European scale network  (portal) of
existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, United Kingdom,
Germany, France and Belgium.

 

eIFL saw the challenge and decided to piggy back on the expertise and
technology infrastructure that the DRIVER project already had in place.
Talks began with all parties involved and during June/July 2007 a similar
portal(network) was created and can currently be viewed at HYPERLINK
"http://eifl.cq2.org/"http://eifl.cq2.org. (please not that this is only a
test site and not to be distributed yet) We hope in two weeks time (GA)  we
will have something that you could show the world!

 

This, therefore, implies that , eIFL has organized and built a virtual, eIFL
member country scale network  (portal) of existing institutional
repositories from eIFL countries!!!!

 

This is only the beginning of a long journey. A meeting was held in Utrecht
in October  to discuss the way forward with this portal/infrastructure we
have created. The decision was that

 

-          a contract will be signed till December  2007 with the IT company
to refine and adjust the portal

-          general data e.g. base URLs, contact people , etc  will be
continuously updated

-          the portal will get an eIFL look and feel to it (currently it is
on the test site, and resembles nothing of eIFL)!

-          The metadata will be cleaned up, so that we could present it
internationally

-          A statistical programme will also be attached to it , to monitor
usage from across the world

 

eIFL’s ultimate goal is to develop these repositories and getting them on an
international standard. This will be done by training e.g  metadata, other
standards, linking, setting up repositories. Etc etc These repositories
should be at such a level so that they could easily feed or be included in
e.g. DRIVER project.

 

 

This has brought a great profile to eIFL and feedback has been with big
enthusiasm and excitement!. 

 

This is not the only activities we are envisaging, we are also busy to “mass
register”  eIFL repositories in IR registers and harvesters (OAIster and
OpenDOAR) We are also looking at additional training that could be given to
countries to “move” their repositories form inactive to active, as well as
to start up repositories.

 

I hope this has given countries enough overview, over the short term for the
eIFL OA program?

 

KIN REGARDS

SUSAN

 

 

 

+++++++++++++++++++++

Susan Veldsman

eIFL content Manager

 

30 O'Reilly Merry Street

Northmead

1510

South Africa

 

Tel: +27 11 425 4736

Fax: +27 11 425 4737

 

+++++++++++++++++++++

 


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