An Institutional Repository for UOW

Capturing, preserving and disseminating the university's intellectual capital - this is the role of the digital archive or institutional repository at the University of Wollongong.

An institutional repository exists to archive and make available research outputs such as journal articles, conference papers, working papers, reports and data sets or teaching and learning material such as tests, images, animations, web sites, video or sound files. An IR can also encourage sharing and collaboration of teaching and learning material and increase the visibility and accessibility of research output.

A multidisciplinary UOW team spent 2005 investigating the benefits of an open access institutional repository for digital objects. The final report of the team is available here.

On 14 November 2005 the University adopted Bepress's Digital Commons software under the banner Research Online - the University's open access research repository. Research Online was rolled out during 2006, with the aim of collecting and exposing the University research outputs for the period 2000-2006. The Learning Edge (Equilla) was also put in place locally around this time to accomodate the teaching and learning object needs of the Graduate School of Medicine.

Research Online (ro.uow.edu.au) site went live on 12 December 2005 and the first objects were loaded on 18 Janaury 2006.

This present site contains information on the concept of repositories for teaching and learning and research objects. It records the work of the Content Management System Evaluation Team during 2005 and the Research Online Management Committee 2006+. This site also links to relevant examples of higher education institutional repositories both locally and abroad, to supplier information and to related commentary.

For further information please contact Michael Organ, Manager - Repository Services, University Library, University of Wollongong 2522, Australia. Ph: 02 4221 3108.

15 July 2010