About CAIRSS

The primary function of CAIRSS is to offer support for Repository Managers in the higher education sector in Australia and New Zealand.

Following discussions with the Department of Innovation (DIISR) the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) Executive, and the ARROW Management Committee, CAUL established the CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service (CAIRSS), to provide support for all institutional repositories in Australian universities, regardless of the software being used. The first CAUL service was funded for two years, with the approval of Department of Innovation (DIISR), with monies remaining from the successful ARROW project, supplemented by CAUL member subscriptions. The second CAUL service is also funded for almost two years and incorporates many of New Zealand’s higher education institutions. With this expansion, CAIRSS now stands for the CAUL Australasian Institutional Repository Support Service.

CAUL appointed the University of Southern Queensland to undertake its new institutional repository support service.

University of Southern Queensland, within Library Services, Global Learning Division is the CAIRSS service provider in collaboration with Swinburne University.

Behind the service is CAUL’s Steering Committee led by Heather Gordon of the James Cook University.

The service commenced officially on March 16, 2009.

The service:

• Provides a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia;
• Supports emerging areas of activity;
• Supports and develops toolkits for copyright and institutional repositories;
• Provides best practice and policy advice for areas such as data migration, metadata, standards compliance, import and export, harvesting, ingest of new forms of digital material;
• Assists with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises;
• Assists the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment;
• Provides a watching brief on trends and developments in repositories.