This Development Project is carried out within
within the
Virtual Libraries Project.
The aims of the project is to expand the online digital library of UN
research reports, which was developed within in 2004-2005, by
including more UNU centres/programmes and other UN agencies as
providers of research materials for the repository, in order to
provide a global view of the research activities within the UN.
The project originated from a proposal made at CONDIR 25 to develop an
on-line repository of
UNU
research materials, possibly to be
extended to other
UN
agencies.
The RUN project started on December 2003 with the selection and
adaptation of the open source library package DSpace and the creation
of a
prototype,
which has been so far populated with UNU reports from
IAS,
IIST,
INTECH and
WIDER.
Recently
UNRISD
joined the repository, providing meta-data of their research reports.
The initial populating of the repository has been handled by
requesting data, as pdf files or whatever other format, and meta-data
(authors, title, abstract, keywords, etc.) in whatever form it was
currently held and converting it to the required format, which also
needed some extensions in order to cater for the needs of particular
collections.
All data is held on a web server maintained by UNU-IIST and located
in Macao.
This centralised implementation will allow the repository to act as
an archive for long-term protection of the data and provide robust and
efficient access for users.
Materials are organised into "communities".
Each community contains materials from a single UN agency and is
partitioned into "collections".
Collections can be browsed and searched, and global search is also
possible.
Search is on some of the meta-data associated with each
entry.
There are currently two communities available:
UNU and UNRISD.
UNU is partitioned into 4 collections,
UNU-IAS, UNU-IIST, UNU-INTECH and UNU-WIDER.
Each collection can now be managed separately, with the data extended
and edited remotely using on-line forms by the organisation that owns it.