About the project
the project
HaIRST - Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed - is one of 14 projects funded by the Joint Information System Committee (JISC) under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) programme.
A 3-year effort started in August 2002 by a consortium of three Scottish universities - Strathclyde via the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR), Napier, and St.Andrews - and ten Glasgow FE colleges - the Glasgow College Group (GCG) and the John Wheatley College) - HaIRST investigates into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland.
The ultimate aim of the project is to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the Information Environment (IE).
This requires addressing issues of interoperability on a number of levels. At the technical level, it requires a agreement on, and adherence to, inter-institutional exchange protocols and metadata semantics capable of respecting local autonomy and expertise.
At the cultural and organisational level, it requires action to ensure the existence of institutional environments that stimulate and sustain the creation and deposit of quality resources, and of collaborative collection development policies that support co-operative activity in the area.
technical strategy
Technically, HaIRST approaches interoperability using the harvesting paradigm for remote interaction and the Open Archive Initiative protocol (OAI-PMH) as its standard harvesting protocol. Metadata on research and learning resources available at partner institutions are created or mapped from pre-existing forms and then regularly harvested into a common repository for local querying and further disclosure.
Examples of available materials include e-prints, electronic teaching materials, digitised collections of Victorian era parliamentary papers, learning support materials, digitised ephemera from the first Scottish Parliament elections, electronic teaching materials, and digitised historical photograph collections.
To respect autonomy, HaIRST experiments with a layered approach to standardization.The generated metadata adheres to one or more of a number of layered agreements, all uniformly implemented in XML, where each layer extends or refines the previous one to reflect stronger degrees of coupling within smaller communities, and thus support a class of more sophisticated queries or other processing tasks.
A local discovery service will then be implemented over the repository of harvested metadata. Exposed to the user through a Web-based interface, the service will be capable of querying the underlying metadata at different levels of granularity, each level corresponding to a different layer of agreement among the metadata providers.
To ensure the integration of the service with the current IE landscape, HaIRST will also develop two-way mapping services to support further discovery and disclosure of metadata through a number of different routes, including local institutional interfaces, other national and international OAI harvesters, Z39.50-based services, and collection-level discovery services.
institutional strategy
Building on the experience of the CDLR's Digital Information Office (DIO), HaIRST will coordinate inter-institutional activity, stimulate institutional activity, and offer advice and support to those running institutional or inter-institutional services on issues such as standards, IPR, managing security, and preservation.
The aim of the project is to develop a model that can be expanded to encompass other Scottish FE and HE institutions and perhaps offer an approach applicable to other areas of the UK. In its final year, in particular, the project will offer institutions outside the consortium direct assistance in depositing into the IE in exchange for an agreement to adhere to the identified interoperability standards and agreements. It will also encourage Scottish FE and HE institutions with their existing e-archives to adopt HaIRST standards and to be involved in their development, and offer space on HaIRST servers to institutions who prefer this approach.
The project will be co-ordinated with other relevant initiatives such as the Resource Discovery Network (RDN ), the High Level Thesaurus Project (HILT ), the CAIRNS distributed catalogue, the SCONE Scottish Collections Database , the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL ), and NGfL Scotland. The project will also take into account work on MLEs and VLEs locally and nationally, drawing on work already carried out in the INSPIRAL project's examination of issues associated with the links between digital libraries and digital learning and work at participant institutions.
Last updated: 19 Mar 2005