HaIRST project report.

Abstract

The HaIRST (Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed) project commenced at Strathclyde University in 2002 and aims to ‘investigate the deposit, disclosure and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC information environment’. St Andrews University is one of the partners in the project, whose overall management and direction is controlled by CDLR at Strathclyde University. Other partners in the project are Napier University and a consortium of ten Glasgow Colleges of Further Education and the John Wheatley College. One of the key areas of the project, and the one which St Andrews is primarily involved in, is the creation of metadata which will be harvested and disclosed by Strathclyde. St Andrews’ remit is to: (1) create a suitable archive which will deliver metadata in an approved format, simultaneously addressing the issues of standardization and interoperability; (2) gather institutional material for the archive. ‘Institutional material’ means any material generated at St Andrews either in the present or in the past. The focus will be both on research work (at any level) and administrative/informative documents. If the material is from the present, then eprints would act to disseminate current material – in the case of research, it would serve to increase the impact of any work, in the case of informative material it could be used both by prospective and by current staff and students to learn more about the University, its facilities and its regulations. From this point of view an ancillary function might be to fulfil the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. If the material is from the past, then the eprints repository will function as an archive. Consequently this is an Institutional eprints archive which focuses on exposing the resources of a specific academic community unlike the majority of subject-specific archives which accept data from a variety of institutions e.g. ArXive, CogPrints; (3) report on the problems encountered in the above two actions.