An Australian Research Data Repository

“During 2012 The University of Western Sydney (UWS) will be rolling out a Research Data Repository (RDR)... Part of this RDR project will be a project funded by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) under the Metadata Stores programme. There will be a number of meetings over the next couple of months where Australian Universities discuss how they are going to spend their Metadata Stores money. There is a great opportunity for organisations running similar software architectures and solutions to pool their development resources... In ANDS speak, a Metadata Store is something that has all the metadata about research data and associated entities like parties (people, organisations) and activities (grant funded projects for example), in order that collection descriptions (of research data) can be published to their search service Research Data Australia (RDA).But in many organisations we’re lacking the most important thing. We don’t have the descriptions of research data to suck up into a ‘metadata store’... Describing collections is a key part of this whole ANDS agenda, which strangely sometimes gets a bit forgotten... The repository will consist of two main components: [1] A scalable storage service linked to a combination of local and cloud-based high performance computing. [2] A catalogue of research data for internal use in management, and external use in dissemination and collaboration...”