Monash has also been a leader in the establishment and operation of Australian
government funded research projects in this area, such as the institutional repository
project (ARROW) and two projects on researcher workflow and data management
(DART and ARCHER).
Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW –
http://arrow.edu.au/) is a consortium consisting of Monash University (lead
institution), together with the University of New South Wales, Swinburne University of
Technology, and the National Library of Australia. This project aimed to identify and
test software or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories that
would contain e-prints, electronic theses, e-research and electronic journals. The
project has partnered with a commercial software developer (VTLS Inc.) to develop a
number of open source software modules and VITAL, a licensed commercial offering
built on top of these modules. The current offering provides a rich product on top of
VALA2008 Conference 2
the Fedora open source repository platform (Lagoze et. al. 2006). Fifteen of the
thirty-nine universities in Australia have licensed the VITAL software solution to
support an institutional repository. For more details about ARROW, see Payne and
Treloar (2006) and Treloar and Groenewegen (2007).