Hello CRIS, can a Library Software solution help you?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present how Brocade, a Library Information Management System, is used to set up an institutional repository and how this repository fits in and contributes to the development of a virtual CRIS system for the University of Antwerp. We focus on both organizational and technical challenges.Although not initially our intention, during the process of continuously optimizing the repository and fulfilling different needs, we ended up with a solution that is able to support research information management in various ways. An example of such an optimization was adding the possibility to describe projects in Brocade, an addition that was needed to make the repository OpenAire compliant. Storing more detailed information about affiliations in order to better allocate publications to research groups is another example.The repository of the University of Antwerp captures related metadata about scientific output (publications, non-written output and datasets), researchers, projects and organisations. The repository is fed automatically with metadata from bibliographic, human resources and research databases. The database today gives an overview and/or contains metadata of about 130,000 repository items, 6,500 researchers, 17,000 projects and 400 organisations. Full text documents are archived in the repository for the majority of peer-reviewed bibliographic items and made open access available where possible.By demonstrating how Brocade in relation with other applications is used for research information management at the university of Antwerp we conclude that it is possible to serve CERIF and CRIS needs by adapting existing systems and make them interoperable