ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 76 | August 2005
The ARROW Discovery Service On 11 March 2005 the first deliverable component of the ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) Project became available. A national resource discovery portal for higher education research, known as the ARROW Discovery Service, was completed for use by the Australian higher education sector as well as for access by the general public. The Service harvests metadata records from institutional repositories on a daily basis, and makes them available for searching or browsing, citing or counting. Harvesting is achieved using a combination of the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema. A guide describing how to provide metadata to the Discovery Service is available from the ARROW Project website.
ARROW project website, at <http://www.arrow.edu.au> The harvested metadata describes and gives access to many types of research outputs held in the institutional repositories, including journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, theses, datasets, and images. It is expected that new forms of research output will be supported in the future. The institutional repositories themselves form a safe digital archive for future access to research content. The motto of the ARROW Project is ‘Public funding, Public knowledge, Public access’. The ARROW Discovery Service encourages awareness of the research content by creating a range of different access pathways to the same content, at both an individual and a portal level. There are three individual pathways. The first is by individual request: the service allows an individual to sign up for alerts to new material when it is added to any institutional repository. This function merely requires an email address to be registered, which can be deactivated at any time. The alerts inform researchers across communities at different universities who otherwise may not be aware of each others’ work.
The alerts function in the ARROW Discovery Service The second individual pathway is support for citation. When an output of interest is found, a citation of the work may be sent via email in one of two formats: the EndNote bibliographic citation tool, or plain text. There is no limit on the number of email boxes which can be targeted with the information.
A sample citation emailed from the ARROW Discovery Service The third individual pathway offered by the service reflects the forward-thinking actions taken by the researcher. Many universities’ research repositories will allow works not formally published to be deposited. However, as that research is discovered and used, the ARROW Discovery Service keeps track of the interest in the research. If the researcher moves to another Australian university, the record of the use of his/her research is retained by the service and provides a summary of its success.
A statistical usage count The aggregation of metadata from all of Australia’s institutional repositories puts the Discovery Service in the unique position of trusted broker. While a searcher may not set out to find institutional repositories’ content, the Discovery Service makes the metadata more visible. In addition to the individual pathways, four portal-to-portal pathways have been established to date; others may be possible in the future. The first portal-to-portal pathway is invoked using a Z39.50 query from the Australian Academic Research Libraries Information Network (AARLIN), a higher education portal; and from Libraries Australia, a library community portal accessible to all Australians. This pathway is available to any Z39.50 compliant system, but the Discovery Service host (the National Library of Australia) may recommend some arrangements not be invoked, to minimise metadata duplication (and therefore keep user confusion to a minimum). Nevertheless, giving people access to research outputs through their portal of choice will help to increase knowledge of the existence of institutional repositories. This also applies to the second portal-to-portal pathway: discovery via a search engine.
Disclosing ARROW through Libraries Australia The Discovery Service has negotiated with two international services to further disclose Australian research outputs. The Google search engine was an obvious choice. In addition, the OAIster service, which was the original trusted metadata aggregator for significant educational content, forwards records which it has harvested onto the Yahoo search engine. So Australian research is discoverable from more than one search portal of choice. The third portal-to-portal pathway may be locally or internationally based. Metadata records are exchanged according to subject discipline or content format with subject gateways or format-specific gateways. Two exchanges were trialled. Australian Policy Online is a subject portal which focuses on current social policy issues. It shares its metadata records with the ARROW Discovery Service to ensure a broad reach for its highly analytic and respected content.
Disclosing Australian Policy Online through ARROW Similarly, the Australasian Digital Theses Program managed by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) makes its metadata records available on the collaborative basis originally promulgated by the international Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) initiative. The increased awareness of higher-degree theses in digital form is likely to have a significant impact on the reputations of universities. But the Discovery Service does not seek to limit itself to a single type of research output. The intellectual effort invested is worthy of the widest possible exposure, and as research grids develop while the domain of publishing changes, the service must adapt to new forms of output over time. DEBBIE CAMPBELL, Project Manager, ARROW Discovery Service, National Library of Australia
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