This is a proposal from CAIRSS of a possible new service for repository managers.
This proposal will be run past CAIRSS repository managers to gauge service value.
If deemed of value by the CAIRSS community, ‘Snapshots’ could be offered as a CAIRSS service and maintained by the CAIRSS technical officer.
‘Snapshots’ is a service designed to take periodic snapshots of Australian University research repositories for the purpose of research into the development of Australian repositories. It will perform static quarterly snapshots of the content in all Australian University repositories to provide stable persistent reference points of Australian repository progress over time. This data will provide a history of change and growth over time of Australian repositories and enable repository managers to discuss Australian repository development, growth, and standardisation issues that arise from repository data collected at a national level. It will include repository data from both a ‘raw’ perspective and a ‘normalised’ perspective to help highlight issues of standardisation across Australian repositories.
‘Snapshots’ is not a discovery service (like the ARROW Discovery Service) for end-users.
‘Snapshots’ is not a daily changing harvest of repository content.
‘Snapshots’ will not harvest fulltext OA content, instead just metadata for the purpose of research into repository development in Australia over time.
The ‘Snapshots’ service will harvest Australian University repositories using standard protocols into a single interface (powered by The Fascinator).
We are investigating the cheapest, most sustainable approach to this, including harvesting normalized data from the ARROW discovery serivce and raw data directly from repositories.
This content will be displayed via the ‘Snapshots’ fascinator interface with 4 views of data per year.
‘Snapshots’ could prove to be valuable to Australian repository managers in a number of ways:
A tool to analyse the contrast between ‘raw’ and ‘normalised’ content (as displayed in the ARROW Discovery Service) in Australian repositories. This would expose repository managers to the ‘normalisation’ issue at an institutional and national level and allow repository managers to analyse standards in federated data and how this impacts on their repository harvesting internationally.
Note – this may lead to a business case for the sector to investigate new software tools that help repository managers to set up repositories to work in federations.
Assistance in tracking repository growth over time (via number of publications statistics at repository, state or national level).* Note – not usage statistics.
A source of data to reference when researching/writing publications about the history/growth/standardisation issues of Australian repository activity.
A quick source of analysing which institution had/has which repository software over time.
A quick source to analysing the change and growth of ‘resource types’ in Australian repositories. (For example to watch the growth of datasets inclusion in Australian repositories).
Data to analyse Australian repositories in a number of ways. For example: What trends are emerging in repositories? Which disciplines has the greatest growth in repository content? Which repositories are growing the fastest? Identifying correlations between repository software and advancements/issues with content growth?
A platform that could be adapted to test ideas such as shared centralised repositories.
