Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research

The Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) project aims to provide a unified approach to manage the challenging and evolving Digitial Repository landscape by building an online infrastructure for sharing content and functionality.
Many valuable online repositories such as OAIster and BASE have been established to search and retrieve bibliographic records as metadata. However, these are sometimes hidden behind several intermediate web pages, obscured by authorization procedures, not fully presented, or their data is irretrievable. To further improve and develop the repository landscape, DRIVER is a multi-phase effort with the primary objective of establishing a cohesive, pan-European infrastructure of digital depositories, which offers sophisticated functionality and services to both researchers and the general public. Moreover, DRIVER aims to deliver a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure through which potentially all European and worldwide digital repositories can be presented in a cohesive manner supported by a wealth of generic or specialized services.
Objectives
Funded under the EU Sixth Framework Programme Research Networking Testbeds program, the initial phase of the DRIVER project was proposed to last 18 months and involve ten European partners. This initial phase focuses on providing access to scientific research including articles, scientific and technical reports, preprints and working papers from the five countries participating in the DRIVER testbed: Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. In subsequent project phases, DRIVER intends to expand its offering to include a wider range of materials from all EU countries.
When all phases of the project are complete, the following objectives will have been accomplished:
* Development of an advanced-quality test-bed infrastructure, based on a distributed service-oriented architecture enabling enhanced interoperability of data and improved functionality.
* Establishment of a co-ordinated network of Digital Repositories, containing textual research and other scholarly publications from individual institutions or national institution clusters in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. These will become available through the DRIVER test-bed infrastructure created in Phase 1.
* Creation of an awareness and advocacy programme fostering the development of digital repositories in all European countries.
* Completion of studies on the current status of the digital repository landscape and identification of the most pressing issues requiring future development work.
Information regarding completed DRIVER studies can be found on the DRIVER Support Website. As of January 2008, three of these have been published by Amsterdam University Press of which open access electronic versions are available.
DRIVER partners
* National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
* Bielefeld University, Germany
* Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
* STICHTING SURF, Netherlands
* SHERPA, University of Nottingham, UK
* Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique, France
* UKOLN, University of Bath, UK
* Uniwesytet Warszawski, Poland
* Universiteit Gent, Belgium
* Göttingen University, Germany
DRIVER and the research and repository community in Europe
As a European project, DRIVER provides a voice for the repository community across Europe and is working to increase awareness of open access and repositories among researchers and research funders as well as the general public. DRIVER is also able to lobby policy makers on behalf of the repository community. Through its partner experiences in the development of national networks such as Darenet, DINI, Archives Ouvertes /HAL and SHERPA, DRIVER can provide advice to national initiatives and groups on the development of similar networks as well as provide information and support through the DRIVER Support Website and DRIVER Wiki.
The support webite provides links to national groups, projects and services and acts as a source of news and information for the research and repository community in Europe. DRIVER is working with national groups, including Belgian repositories, to facilitate the development of national websites in association with the DRIVER Support Website. Based on contributions from the general repository community, the DRIVER Wiki contains information on individual repositories, local projects, and events. News may be added to the wiki to inform the wider community. Where national co-ordinating groups or projects do not exist, the wiki can provide a platform for their initial development. Since the focus of DRIVER has been on developing the infrastructure, it does not provide a pre-defined set of services. The infrastructure includes open, defined interfaces which allow any service provider working at a local, national or subject-based level, to build services on top. They will be able to reuse the data infrastructure (also known as the "Information Space"), and the software infrastructure to build or enhance their systems. Services can therefore be developed according to the needs of users.

However, in order to demonstrate exemplary functionality and the potential of repository infrastructures, several services are being developed by the project at the same time. These include end user services (e.g. search) and services for repository managers (e.g. the Guideline validator tool and mentor service).
Existing networks can benefit from an increased visibility in the European repository community through linking with the DRIVER Support Website and through participation in the DRIVER Wiki.
Guidelines
The digital repository landscape varies across different countries where available text, data and multimedia resources differ as does platform technology and national metadata policy. As distributed systems, repository networks critically depend on interoperability in terms of both technology and content provision.
As a result, the project has published DRIVER Guidelines for Content Providers: Exposing textual resources with OAI-PMH. The main goals of this document are to provide guidance for managers of new repositories in defining their local data management policies for textual resources; to allow managers of existing repositories to take steps towards improving their services and for developers of repository platforms to add support functionality in future versions.
Compliance with the guidelines enables a wide range of services through the DRIVER infrastructure. DRIVER offers support to local repositories to implement the guidelines on an individual basis through the Internet or via the DRIVER helpdesk.
Infrastructure
Taking a top-down approach, the DRIVER Guidelines attempt to ensure that repository data is exposed for access in a standard fashion. At the same time, the DRIVER Infrastructure takes a bottom-up approach, and provides the technology and infrastructure to harvest content from multiple repositories and manage its transformation into a common and uniform shared information space.
Re-use is a key feature of DRIVER. While traditional approaches to service development have involved each service provider deploying a new system with high maintenance costs (possibly involving installation, customization of services and building from scratch to create a new information space), in DRIVER's case, service providers can reduce costs and effort by relying on the DRIVER Infrastructure and cooperating in order to populate and re-use the global information space as needed to develop search, citation and other services.
Benefits
DRIVER offers wide-ranging benefits to both service providers and end users of the project's infrastructure. Service providers will be able to use the DRIVER information space to access Europe’s repositories and to build national, regional or subject-specific services. End users can use services built on the DRIVER Infrastructure to access a broad spectrum of disciplines and topics. As a result of DRIVER, these services will be able to ensure effective search and retrieval of high quality full text content in an efficient manner.
DRIVER II: complex digital objects and collaborative environments

The initial phase of DRIVER focused on the support of institutional repositories and their textual content. DRIVER II follows on from this and is funded under the Seventh Framework Programme. Under DRIVER II, subject communities will feature more prominently in the project and DRIVER technical developments will focus on the development and enhancement of services for their specific rquirements. DRIVER II's technical focus will expand from the management of textual content in repositories to also include the management of complex objects such as data and multimedia while the original partnership involving ten European partners which will expand to 13 then later to 19.
DRIVER II partners
* National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
* Bielefeld University, Germany
* Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Italy
* Joint Research Unit, Netherlands (includes SURF, Leiden University Library, Library of the University of Amsterdam, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
* SHERPA, University of Nottingham, UK
* Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique, France
* UKOLN, University of Bath, UK
* Uniwesytet Warszawski, Poland
* Universiteit Gent, Belgium
* Goettingen University, Germany
* The Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark (DTU)
* The University of Minho, Portugal
* The National and University Library (NUK), Slovenia
* TKK: Technical University of Finland
* Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
* The Lithuanian Electronic Academic Library (eLABa), Lithuania
* University of Oslo Library, Norway
* National Distance Education University of Spain (UNED)
* National Library of Sweden
* Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research participates in the WorldWideScience global science gateway.

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