6. Conclusions
When the ARROW philosophy was initially conceived it was thought that a single
institutional repository that was integrated, interoperable and flexible would provide
the best platform to support teaching and research at Monash.
The single repository approach, while initially attractive, has been found to suffer
from a range of implementation challenges and fails to provide adequate
management solutions for data generated by researchers over the entire research
lifecycle. These challenges can be best addressed when considered in terms of the
data curation continua. The ARROW, DART and ARCHER projects have seen the
evolution of this concept into a more nuanced understanding of the different types of
content that would need to be managed, and the different audiences and uses for
that content. This has led to an acceptance that multiple, albeit interoperable,
repositories would be better.
One set of decisions about what to do for each of the continua leads to three
different sorts of repository domains. Monash University is calling these research,
collaboration and public repositories respectively. A further management concept,
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the curation boundary, provides a mechanism for determining when and how objects
can be moved between the domains.
As knowledge about institutional and data management repositories evolves over the
next few years, these ideas will be further explored, by Monash and many other
institutions.