ARROW is a national demonstrator project funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education for the support of digital repositories of Australian content.
The ARROW project will identify and test a software solution or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories compris The National Library of Australia will develop a repository and associated metadata to support independent scholars (those not associated with institutions). A complementary activity of ARROW is the development and testing of national resource discovery services (developed by the National Library), using metadata harvested from the institutional repositories, and the exposing of metadata to provide services via protocols and toolkits.
This will include a potential path for the redevelopment of the Australian Digital Theses Program metadata repository incorporated into the National Library’s national resource discovery services. Initially ARROW will be tested in four consortium partner institutions, prior to it being offered more widely across the higher-education sector. Consortium members are:
The solution will be open standards-based, or will support open standards, and will facilitate interoperability within and between participating institutions.