What DRIVER is

DRIVER, the "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" project is conducted by an EC funded consortium that is building an organisational and technological framework for a pan-European data-layer, enabling the advanced use of content-resources in research and higher education. DRIVER develops a service-infrastructure and a data-infrastructure. Both are designed to orchestrate existing resources and services of the repository landscape.

DRIVER as data-infrastructure

The data-infrastructure relies on locally hosted resources such as scientific publications that are collected in digital repositories of institutions and research organisations. These resources will be harvested by DRIVER and aggregated at the European level. In order to ensure a high quality of the aggregation, DRIVER will provide any means possible to harmonise and validate it. DRIVER will respect the provenance of resources by "branding" them with information of the local repository. DRIVER will further point to the local repository when a resource is downloaded instead of providing the resource itself. DRIVER will make its data available for re-use via OAI-PMH to all partners in the DRIVER network of content providers.

The current DRIVER information space

The starting phase of DRIVER has laid the cornerstones for a rich and ambitious pan-European repository infrastructure. The landscape of digital repositories is multifaceted with respect to different countries, different resources such as text, data or multimedia, different technological platforms, different metadata policies etc. But there is also a common ground that applies to large parts of this landscape: the major resource-type provided by digital repositories is text and the major approach for offering these textual resources is the Open-Archives-Initiative Protocol for Metadata-Harvesting. Therefore, the current phase of DRIVER is focusing on textual resources that can be harvested with OAI-PMH.