Significant Milestone for Australian Research Repository Community Achieved
Over 250 000 Australian research outputs (including theses, journal articles, book chapters, music recordings and pictures) are now represented, as metadata records, in the ARROW Discovery Service. These records link to research outputs held in 27 university repositories across Australia as well as online journals and aggregators. This milestone reflects the very substantial efforts, during the past few years, of the research community and those who work on repositories, making a significant contribution to the development of Australian research now and in the future.
The ARROW Discovery Service searches simultaneously across the contents of Australian university repositories and is a free web-based service available to researchers and the general public. The Service was developed with generous funding from the Federal Government, through the ARROW Project, and is hosted by the National Library of Australia. Features include a league table of contributors, simple and advanced search options, a tag cloud highlighting the frequency of terms within the database, a statistics page displaying popular creators and institutions, faceted search refinement, and an alerts service.
A majority of Australian universities now have public research repositories. Each repository stores and maintains digital data relating to research for future retrieval. In addition to the university research repositories, aggregators such as the Australasian Digital Theses Program, and a range of research related e-journals can be simultaneously searched through the ARROW Discovery Service website. While access to full text resources is highly desirable, most repositories contain a mix of full text and non full text items. Availability of the full text resource is determined by the repository that owns the resource.
Universities employ a wide variety of software to store digital research in their repositories. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) provides the ARROW Discovery Service with a method of harvesting the metadata records from these repositories, irrespective of the variances in software. Each metadata record includes a web link to the full record held by the owning repository. OAI-PMH compliant repositories will export their data in simple Dublin Core standard as an XML file, and the harvesting service then interprets that data and stores it for use by the ARROW Discovery Service.
The ARROW Discovery Service offers a place where students, academics and others can search across Australian research. In this way, Australian research is made more visible, and more people are provided with access to it. Facilitating access to existing research aids the creation of new research and thereby contributes to the future successful development of Australian scholarship.
Future plans include providing access to more research repositories, including those hosted by universities, government, aggregators and e-journals, as they become publicly available and OAI-PMH compliant. To access the ARROW Discovery Service go to http://search.arrow.edu.au/
Natasha Simons
Manager, ARROW Discovery Service



