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| Introduction |
The establishment of the VUIR is
an opportunity to showcase the University’s scholarly and research
publications in an institutional repository. As stated in the
University’s VUIR Policy, the following benefits are anticipated
through its implementation.
- Increase in impact of VU research output
- Raising of profile and prestige of the University
- Management of assets in a secure and stable environment with
ease of access
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| Background |
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Victoria University is using the Eprints.org platform as the foundation
of its repository. EPrints.org is an open source repository application
developed at the University of Southampton. There are currently
approximately 269 Eprints.org archives in operation around the world.
EPrints is built on the widely applied OAI standard. Other
applications also utilising this standard include DSpace and Fedora. The
OAI or Open Archives initiative sets out a metadata specification that
enables compliant publications to be shared and retrieved across
platforms.
“The essence of the open archives approach is to enable access to
Web-accessible material through interoperable repositories for
metadata sharing, publishing and archiving.” (http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/english/page1.htm)
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VUIR/OAI Complaint Repositories in Action: |
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Victoria University is in the early stage of establishing its
Institutional
Repository however many Australian and International scholarly
institutions have also started or established repositories. The
University of Melbourne, Monash University, QUT, University of
Queensland, Oxford University, and University of Strathclyde are just
some of the institutions with scholarly archives.
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| Content Access and Harvesting: |
| There is no question that the open access movement is growing and
provides increased exposure to the work of researchers and scholars
internationally. There are a number of access points for the content of
OAI Archives including OAIster, Google Scholar and the Arrow Discovery
Service OAIster is a search engine that searches across
approximately institutions with OAI compliant repositories. Increasingly
researchers and academics will turn to OAIster as a vital search and
retrieval tool in much the same way as they have traditionally utilised
the major citation indexing and abstracting services. The added value
being that much of OAIster harvested material also includes access to
the paper itself.
http://www.oaister.org/
The Arrow Discovery Service enables the
simultaneous searching of approximately 223,686 Australian research
outputs and these including theses; preprints; postprints; journal
articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.
http://search.arrow.edu.au/
 
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