DefiningImageAccess/Resource/DRAI
From ImageWeb
JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Invemntory
Comments
Looks as if this might be a useful source of information about data stores and sources. Needs further investigation.
Unfortunately, it appears that the interesting output, the data, is not publicly available; from the project's final report:
- The demand for a single portal listing sources of educational digital resources was the principal user need identified by respondents to the AHDS Performing Arts Scoping Study. Whilst making the catalogue publicly accessible is not within the scope of this project, ...
Executive summary
HE institutions, education and research organisations, and research groups in the UK have created and provide access to a wide range of electronic content for use in learning, teaching and research. Access to this content is provided through a number of different routes including web accessible digital archives, open access repositories, and web-based collections. These repositories and archives are hosted by departments, institutions, consortia, and national bodies such as research councils, learned societies and other publicly funded organisations. Some registries and services aggregate these sources of content, but there is currently no single place where these sources are listed.
There has been a clearly articulated need for a “one stop shop” for information discovery across different digital collections. The catalogue of resources created during the Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory (DRAI) project updates and complements pervious aggregation efforts and provides more specific information about the preservation of each collection (which has not been part of the scope of previous portals). This information is crucial to understand the current preservation environment in the UK and will build on previous work by the AHDS and JISC (amongst others) in building strategies for digital preservation.
The overall approach was focussed on interoperability with the JISC IESR and in future the DRAI data can be incorporated with the minimum of effort. The DRAI project aggregated and classified nearly 2000 records from a variety of critical existing sources and reports, including checking over 60,000 of Intute’s links to digital resources. A wide variety of information on the access to and preservation of these digital collections was recorded into a database and XML document. This allowed the production of a report, Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory: Conclusions and Recommendations, detailing the project’s conclusions regarding the current preservation environment and recommendations for future issues relating to the preservation of the digital resources identified. The project also delivered the MySQL database data, the data in XML format, the conversion script, a document showing mapping to the JISC IESR, and full documentation for the project.
