The Welsh Repository Network has been launched.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The Welsh Repository Network (WRN), a network of twelve institutional repositories within each of the higher education institutions (HEI) within Wales, was launched at the National Library of Wales on Thursday 19th February, 2009. The launch celebrated the success of the WRN Project; a project funded by the JISC in association with the Wales Higher Education Library Forum (WHELF), to provide each HEI in Wales with the resources and support needed to establish and operate effective, individual institutional repositories. Each HEI was provided with funding to purchase repository hardware or to purchase a hosted repository system, along with support and assistance via the Welsh arm of the Repositories Support Project (RSP) based at Aberystwyth University.
The WRN launch celebrated the fact that the principality of Wales now has 100% coverage with respect to universities and repositories. This will allow the universities in Wales to not only preserve and protect their research, but also make available cutting edge research to the world, enabling more open dissemination of the ground breaking and world leading research undertaken across Wales through the Open Access movement.
A further deliverable of the project is the production of a suite of twelve case studies, documenting the hardware purchases of each institution (available from http://hdl.handle.net/2160/1881). As the HEIs in Wales are diverse in size and type, ranging from large research-led institutions to smaller liberal arts or specialist institutions, a variety of hardware and software solutions were required to fit with their existing infrastructures. It was hoped that creating these case studies would assist other universities to allow them to compare their profile with a case study of an institution with a similar background and infrastructure plan, and to gauge their hardware needs for repository support accordingly.
