DRIVER: the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research

The EU-funded project DRIVER (www.drivercommunity.eu), or “Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research”, has two main aims:

• to set up a European confederation for advocating and promoting EC Open Access mandates across European researchers and institutions;
• to enable a technical infrastructure of European Institutional Repositories to aggregate Open Access content and make it accessible throughout Europe.

The DRIVER confederation
The DRIVER confederation is moving towards a global, interoperable, trusted, long-term data repository infrastructure, the European nucleus for which DRIVER has built in Europe. The confederation encourages collaboration in repository development and represents European and international repository communities, subjectbased communities, repository system providers and service providers, as well as organisations sharing the DRIVER vision. DRIVER also liaises with institutions from across Europe, as well as the U.S., Canada, Latin America, China, Japan, India and Africa.

The DRIVER guidelines
The DRIVER guidelines were developed enable data harmonisation and validation, and aim for interoperability on two layers: (i) syntactical (use of OAI-PMH and OAI_DC), and (ii) semantic (use of vocabularies). Data in the technical infrastructure is based on locally hosted resources that are collected in digital repositories, then harvested and aggregated by DRIVER.

DRIVER then makes aggregated data available via OAI-PMH to all partners in the DRIVER network, whilst respecting the provenance of resources by “branding” them with information from the local repository. The DRIVER guidelines help data repository managers to define new data-management policies, take steps towards improved services, and encourage the addition of supportive functionalities. Repositories following the guidelines can become part of the DRIVER network and can re-use DRIVER data for the development of local services. Thus, the DRIVER guidelines assist repository managers in making their material more widely available. Interoperability in this sense means standardised metadata for harvested records.

Technical infrastructure
An important outcome of the DRIVER project is D-Net (http://www.driver-repository.eu/D-NET_release), a software toolkit that allows data and service providers to (i) aggregate OAI-PMH PMHcompliant institutional repositories into shared information spaces, and (ii) build and customize their digital library applications to operate over such spaces. This technology supports a serviceoriented e-Infrastructure, where distributed and shared resources are implemented as standard Web Services and applications consist of sets of interacting services. D-Net currently offers services required to build distributed aggregation systems and end-user applications. Aggregation systems enable uniform information spaces to be constructed using records harvested from heterogeneous institutional repositories. Here, Store Services, Index Services and Aggregation Services offer advanced tools for OAI-PMH harvesting, cleaning and integrating metadata records. The resulting information spaces can then be accessed using digital library applications built using D-Net services such as Recommendation, Collection, Browsing, User Interfaces and so on. D-Net is notable for its scalability and openness: an instance of DRIVER can scale up to an arbitrary number of services, applications and organisations, while the application framework is open to the introduction of new services and functionality.

Successes so far
Since July 2008, DRIVER has maintained a running instance of D-Net that hosts one main aggregation system, integrating Open Access metadata records from a growing number of European Institutional Repositories. At present, the infrastructure runs 36 services distributed over nine partner sites. As a result of confederation efforts, the resulting information space numbers 1,000,000+ records out of more than 200 repositories across 27 countries, and the number of repositories is growing. Currently, the space is accessed by three digital library applications: the Belgium national repository portal, offering search over the Belgium Repository Federation subset; the Recolecta national repository portal, offering search on the Spanish Repository Federation subset; and the main DRIVER portal, providing access and advanced functionality over the whole space.