The Role of a National Library in Supporting Research Information Infrastructure

The National Library of Australia is collaborating in a national program to improve the nation's research information infrastructure. These activities have provided a focus for the Library in its engagement with the university community. The Library has developed integrated discovery services, actively participated in three research information infrastructure projects, and worked with partners on the problem of sustaining university repositories to support long-term access. The Library is an active partner in Project ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), which is developing a solution for institutional repositories in collaboration with a commercial vendor, and also in the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), where the Library is helping to develop a sound approach to assessing the obsolescence risk of file formats, advising on a strategy for including preservation metadata in the repositories, and seeking to influence the future development of open source repository software to make use of preservation metadata.