Inventory of digital resources catalogues 3,707 free collections

The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR.

The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.

Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.

Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections.

The final report from the project is available now (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/244/) and has some very interesting results on preservation, usage rights, subject coverage, discovery, collection owners and the availability of information about the collections.

September 1, 2008 | Filed Under metadata, preservation, repositories, resource discovery, shared services, sustainability | Author Andy McGregor 

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