The primary objective of the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project is to realise the latent potential of these collections by employing a two fold process. Firstly, by minimising or removing the obstacles to the use and secondly, maximising their value by improving access to them.
To do so, it will be necessary to:
- Create a critical mass of digital content representing a cross section of all media and document types held in the repositories.
- Research and establish appropriate and innovative metadata structures ensuring that the digital objects are appropriately described and identified within the virtual library and archive.
- Develop a web-compliant interface enabling a large number of researchers to identity, locate and retrieve digital objects of relevance to their areas of interest or study regardless of media type or collection provenance.
This will enable the project to:
- make the material available to researchers at their desktops, within and beyond the university, thereby reducing inconvenience, saving time, and facilitating collaborative research within the institution and between institutions
- contribute to the conservation of physical resources, as the use of digital surrogates will reduce wear and tear on the originals, and in the majority of cases negate the requirement to access original materials.
- provide a personalised and customisable user interface which will offer both user defined searches and recommender services.
- Facilitate new forms of scholarship allowing for data mining and material to be drawn into virtual collections depending upon user research interest or requirements.
- Integrate with e-learning tools and collaborative e-learning environments allowing for lecturers and academic staff to identify material for students based on profile and log in criteria.
- facilitate simultaneous searching in a standardised form across a range of resource categories
To meet these objectives, the Project is examining a number of repository type systems to store and manage the digitised content. The Project requirements for such a system require that the system is open source, fully configurable and able to integrate with current and future library and database systems.
