From DigiRepWiki

CRIG Motivation

The repository landscape is increasingly complex. Hiding this complex provision layer from the producer / consumer, whilst utilising federation, harvesting and other interoperability mechanisms, is a key consideration for repositories and the JISC Digital Repositories Programme. (Heery and Powell, JISC Digital Repositories Roadmap, 2006)

Institutional repositories need to interface with other applications within institutions and with the wider information landscape. Institutional repositories might usefully interact with VLEs, authoring tools, packaging tools, and research systems. Taking a wider perspective, an institutional repository might interact with other repositories outside the institution such as subject repositories, research council repositories; and with third party services such as name authority services and classification services, as well as with national and global aggregator services.

The WG will help to co-ordinate current work on repository interoperability within funded JISC projects, and will identify gaps in progression to short to medium term improvement. The JISC Repository Interfaces WG will support JISC in coordinating work on defining common service components, and will provide a focus for feeding into international activity.

The WG will build on the approach taken by the ‘Deposit API’ group coordinated by the Repository Research Team. This group brought together repository software developers to define a lightweight ‘Deposit’ service description. The group took the approach that precise prediction of requirements at the outset is unlikely, and that an incremental and initially lightweight approach to protocol specification is most productive.

It is timely to establish this WG in order to focus requirements and experience from the JISC repository programmes to input into the recently announced US Object Reuse and Exchange project. The ORE will be running in parallel to the JISC Capital programme strand over the next 2 years and the proposed WG would assist in articulating JISC requirements, and will support those members of the ORE advisory and technical committees that represent the UK HE community.

It is important that the WG recognises and addresses any service components that are important within the UK landscape but are not in scope for ORE.

For further information about ORE, see: OAI-ORE

CRIG Terms of Reference

1. To identify interfaces critical to development of an interoperable network of repositories to serve the UK HE community. The WG will identify existing funded development on interfaces, and look for critical gaps.

The WG will focus on interactions between institutional repositories and

• other components within institution e.g. VLEs, research information system
• national/international subject-based repositories (arxiv.org, PubMed Central etc)
• repositories managed by research council and major funders (e.g. CCLRC, the Wellcome Trust)
• national JISC funded repository initiatives (e.g. JORUM, Prospero, Intute Repository Search)
• national and global repositories/aggregators and global search engines and other services.

The WG will draw on work on business requirements, scenarios and use cases being developed within the JISC Digital Repositories Programme. Work on modelling a repository ecology, workflow mapping and other process modelling ongoing in the Digital Repositories Programme will also be relevant.

2. To prioritise those interfaces critical to achieving interoperability in UK context.

3. To map out work required to specify service description for those interfaces and to test implementation.

4. To liaise with eFramework activity to specify service description.

3. Inform plans for JISC funding and feed into ORE and other international work.

4. If time permits to articulate base level interoperability for priority interfaces.