Background

The IRIScotland projects produced two pilot services – the IRIScotland cross-repository (an
OAI-PMH harvester/search to aggregate research outputs in Scottish repositories) and a
hosting service based at the National Library of Scotland for institutions that do not wish to set
up their own research repositories.

The projects also produced a Repository Toolkit for Use by Researchers and Institutions, a
Draft Metadata Agreement for Institutional Repositories and, through the formation of the
IRIScotland Council, a broad grouping of stakeholders responsible for overseeing the future
development of the service.

These achievements are testaments to a long-standing tradition of expertise-building

collaboration between Higher Education Institutions across Scotland in the field of research
information.

The ERIS (Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland) project looks to build on the
success of these collaborations.

Overall Aim

Whereas IRIScotland took a more ‘top down’ approach of working with repository managers
and decision makers, the purpose of the ERIS project is to develop a more ‘bottom up’ set of
user-led and user-centric solutions (operational and technical) that will motivate researchers
to deposit their work in repositories, facilitate the integration of repositories in research and
institutional processes and, as a result, develop the IRIScotland outputs into a set of trusted
cross-repository services, which together are capable of providing access to a critical mass of
Scottish research output.

To achieve this overall aim, ERIS will pay particular attention to the requirements of research
pooling – an innovative cross-institutional way of conducting research, which has been widely
credited for having substantially contributed to Scotland’s RAE 2008 successes.

Delivery Approach.

In order to achieve these goals, the project will undertake to deliver 5 work packages. This
breaks down as 4 work packages focusing on meeting the project objectives and deliverables,
and 1 work package focusing on the project management and coordination of the work.

The work packages are described simply below;

• Enhancing researchers’ engagement with repositories (looking at the need of both

researchers and research pools)

• Enhancing the curation and preservation processes within Scottish institutions

• Provide technological enhancements for improved research-centric functionality

• Developing an IRIScotland policy framework for organisational and financial

sustainability

• Project management and work package support

Partner Details

Lead Institution

• University of Edinburgh
Partner Institutions

• University of Strathclyde
• National Library of Scotland
• Online Computer Library Centre
• Scottish Agricultural College
• Scottish Confederation of University and research Libraries
• Scottish Library and Information Council
• University of Glasgow
• Scottish Alliance for Geoscience Environment and Society
• Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance
• Scottish Institute for Research in Economics
• Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance
• Heriot-Watt University
• Robert Gordon University
• University of the West of Scotland
• University of Aberdeen
• University of Dundee
• University of St Andrews
• University of Stirling

Project Details

The project is funded as a result of the Grant Funding Call 12/08: JISC Information
Environment and e-Research Strand A5: Repository enhancement and is scheduled to run for
2 years between 1st April 2009 and 31st March 2011