"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

About the Project

The interest in exploiting the content to be found in institutional repositories is growing. At the same time, there is a range of possible uses for a central cache of metadata records held by institutional repositories. Most notably, with a recent emphasis on 'rapid innovation', there exists an opportunity to position this aggregation of data to support research and development generally in the fields of metadata and/or repositories. Rapid innovation projects which require a corpus of metadata to work with will benefit from this readily available data-store, avoiding the resource-intensive overhead of developing their own harvesting and aggregation solution.

In the sense of Lorcan Dempsey's notion of 'concentration', the central cache or aggregation of metadata records can also serve to support ongoing services. Most notably, this aggregation is a ready source of what we might term business intelligence - that is, from this data the sector could expect to extract some useful understanding of the state of, and more importantly trends in, OA repository data in the UK.

Objectives

• To provide a heterogeneous metadata store which consists of a managed aggregation of regularly harvested IR metadata record
• To provide a simple, RESTful API primarily to serve third-party retrieval of harvested records
• To provide feeds of subsets of this aggregated metadata to various R&D projects according to their specific needs negotiated with the project team
• To prototype a business intelligence reporting service, providing visualisations of result sets from queries based on the aggregated store
• To engage in technical knowledge sharing with related projects

RepUK Demonstrator

http://repuk.ukoln.ac.uk/

UKOLN staff working on the RepUK Project

UKOLN staff who have worked on the RepUK Project previously