Trinity College Dublin
Trinity College Dublin worked with Enovation Solutions to create an open-access information repository to store all academic output and allow its research to be more widely disseminated.
Several factors have driven the creation of the repository. The first is to capture the growing amount of digital content that is being generated by the college, but not properly archived due to lack of resources or inexperience on the part of individual researchers. A second is the increased pressure from international funding agencies to make publicly funded research freely available on the web. Yet another is the Irish Government’s requirement for greater accountability and transparency from the universities IT funds. Gathering all of its research output in one place would put TCD in a position to do that.
Why Enovation?
Enovation Solutions was chosen as the services partner on the project because they were judged as presenting the greatest chance of delivering a functional repository for TCD within the timescale and budget provided and because they have a strong track record in Open Source Software (OSS) – OSS is widely used by universities around the world for digital repositories as it can be developed relatively cheaply. After investigating several OSS systems the college decided that DSpace was the best fit with its requirements.Developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard, DSpace is a leading digital repository application used to capture, store, index, preserve and redistribute academic material.
‘DSpace is heavily used around the world for institutional repositories and has acquired a large user community’, says Gary Mahon, sales director at Enovation.’ It is popular because it is freely available and can be extended and integrated into your college infrastructure quickly and easily.’
Three Phase Approach
The project, named Project Tara (Trinity’s Access to Research Archive), was split into three phases.During phase one, which ran between February and April 2006, Enovation customised and installed a DSpace prototype on a college server and integrated it with their existing Research Support System (RSS). Phase two, which began in August, involved further customisation of DSpace to facilitate a full roll-out. At this stage students were able to submit theses online - This was the first time that any Irish university had captured theses and dissertations online in one place. Enovation also provided support from our in-house support division for the duration of phase one and two.
Phase three is an on-going phase. With the system operating successfully the challenge now is to keep it going. This involves constantly evaluating the performance of the system and exploring how it can be sustained in the future.
Benefits
Investment in DSpace has brought several major benefits to TCD:
- Increased likelihood of citation in research papers internationally.
- Preservation of a variety of digital formats, including text, audio, video, images and datasets.
- Showcasing the work of various faculties.
- Rapid distribution of research results.
- Easy access to a researcher’s work for students and others.
- More efficient use of researchers’ time by relieving them of the task of maintaining a publications presence on the web.
