DRIVER Objectives

The long-term vision: Pan-European Digital Repository Infrastructure
DRIVER's vision is to build a Europe and world-wide Digital Repository infrastructure, which follows the principle of linking users to knowledge. Digital Repositories form an integral part of the e-infrastructure for research. They provide the content as a third layer to the existing data network (GEANT2 and NREN's) and Grid-middleware infrastructure layers.

Digital Repositories (DRs) contain today the full spectrum of scholarly materials, from theses, technical reports and working papers to digitised text and image collections and they can contain sets of primary research data. Institutional Repositories (IRs) present a specific form of a Digital Repository, where a significant fraction of the content is created by the research institution such as universities, research institutes, national laboratories, etc. A future, Europe wide Digital Repository Infrastructure will be a virtual network of physically distributed and decentrally maintained repositories from all countries in Europe. The plan is, to organise in an incremental process networks of institutional repositories on the national level, exploit them and take them from there to the European level, similar to the organisation of GEANT. State-of the-art middleware will be implemented to offer researchers a virtual single content resource, which can be used for highly effective information access and exploration.

By virtually integrating multiple repositories from many institutions in all European countries, the network will at the same time build up a critical mass of research materials, which can be disseminated and presented to the world as a powerful demonstration of research output in Europe, and which can thus contribute to innovation in a wide variety of sectors and communities. Within this virtual network, each repository will maintain its own identity and will be clearly marked with a label of the providing repository host.

The project: Step One Towards the Vision - DRIVER builds a testbed
DRIVER has formulated the following objectives for the project:

1. To organise and build a virtual, European scale network of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Belgium.
2. To assess and implement state-of-the-art technology, which manages the physically distributed repositories as one large scale virtual content resource.
3. To assess and implement a number of fundamental user services, with main focus on search and primitive personalized services.
4. To identify, implement and promote a relevant set of standards used for interoperability in distributed environments.
5. To prepare the future expansion and upgrade of the DR infrastructure across Europe and to ensure widest possible user involvement.

DRIVER-II has formulated the following objectives for the project:

1. To strategically expand its geographic and community coverage through the means of the DRIVER confederation.
2. To establish a robust, scalable repository infrastructure accompanied by an open source software package (D-Net).
3. To cover a broader area in content and types with the use of enhanced publications.
4. To deliver advanced end-user functionalities and develop tools aiming in the support of scientific exploration through the use of complex digital objects.
5. To develop larger outreach and advocacy programmes for all types of communities.
6. To continuously sustain and support the work of repository managers.
7. To develop guidelines for interoperability in the larger European digital library community.
8. To support and advocate the use of Open Access material within the European research communities.