ARROW HERDC Working Group final report

The HERDC Working Group is pleased to present its final report. We hope it will assist institutional repository and research office managers in universities to work together to determine the best way to integrate the HERDC and institutional repository data collection, storage and reporting processes. The Working Group found that no one system or workflow will suit every university in Australia. The report provides a framework for universities to decide the best solution for their environment and will assist the institutional repository community to work on solutions together and learn from each other. Specifically, the report identifies the issues to be addressed across five areas: the organisation, the collection process, the data, the content that needs to be collected, and the software; presents four broad models that may be adopted; critically analyses the models; recommends metadata elements that may be used for HERDC-specific data; provides a checklist of tasks that a university must undertake to reach a workable solution; and includes a case study that illustrates the decision-making path one university used to decide on the most efficient solution. After reading this report, we hope you will be able to recognise the competing workload priorities that need to be addressed, to decide on appropriate workflows, to choose the best way to synchronise data between the institutional repository and research office systems, and have the basis for useful discussion on user interface design.