The CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service has begun operation.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
CAUL has appointed the University of Southern Queensland, through the Australian Digital Futures Institute (ADFI) within the Division of Academic Information Services (DAIS) to undertake its new institutional repository support service. The service will commence officially on March 16, 2009.
The service is being funded for two years, with the approval of Department of Innovation (DIISR), with monies remaining from the successful ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project, supplemented by CAUL member subscriptions.
The aim of the service is fully described in the Invitation to Offer released in October, 2008. It will, inter alia:
- provide a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia; support emerging areas of activity;
- support and develop toolkits for copyright and institutional repositories;
- provide 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;
- assist with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises;
- assist the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment;
- provide a watching brief on trends and developments in repositories.
Project Manager and institutional repository specialist is Katy Watson, currently Research Information Systems Coordinator at the University of the Sunshine Coast, one of the two full-time staff in CAIRSS. She will be supported by a small team from the University of Southern Queensland. The copyright element of the service will be provided by Swinburne University. The key personnel are Tim McCallum, Technical Officer; Luke Padgett, Copyright Officer; Dr Peter Sefton, Senior Advisor and Professor Alan Smith, USQ delegate.