About SORRT

The SORRT project addresses and promotes the sustainability of research object repositories.

These repositories (unlike the single institutional model) are created for the specific purposes and needs of the communities they serve and are increasingly recognised as fundamental infrastructures that facilitate e-research activity. They provide source data for research (and research-led teaching and learning) and are highly functional for their user community. They support multiple formats, require high levels of interoperability within a distributed environment, and are often cross-institutional and collaborative.

Sustainability in such an environment is a complex issue. The Sydney project seeks to address this at a fundamental level by providing a model, middleware and tools which researchers can easily adopt or adapt to create, share and manage a functional repository in a sustainable form.

To define the University of Sydney contribution to the APSR project we have adopted the name Sustainable Object Repositories for Research and Teaching (SORRT).

SORRT will:

• Develop, test, document and propose a generic sustainable model within the OAIS framework which can be used for the creation and management of interoperable discipline-based object repositories. The elements in this model include: a generic architectural framework; core open technical standards; common core and discipline specific metadata; common harvesting/access protocols; tools for processing new or generated content within the model; common archiving protocols or strategies; tools for managing archiving and storage. This model is being developed in association with APSR partners NLA and APAC. The model will be promoted and extended nationally after testing.
• Develop interoperability middleware and tools that will be open standard and licence compliant for testing within the test-bed repositories and existing open standards compliant data repositories. These products will have a generic branding within the SORRT project.
• Investigate and document robust business models required to ensure institutional or government commitment to organisational sustainability and continuity.
• Address issues around citability and publication of new knowledge generated from these repositories.

SORRT is working within, and drawing upon, the broad context of communities addressing these issues including the FRODO projects and international initiatives such as the Digital Curation Centre in the UK.