The Digital Repository of Ireland

Abstract

The Digital Repository of Ireland is a trusted digital repository that contributes to a national digital infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences in Ireland. Although trusted digital repositories are not mainstream application in the domain of science gateways and the social sciences are not the usual domain for a science gateway we argue in this paper that DRI has many of the principal characteristics of a science gateway and that the domain of social science will benefit in the future from the same advantages that other more numerical-based disciplines reap from science gateways. In addition to offering tools to ingest vast amounts of heterogeneous data sets, a trusted digital repository must offer specific functionalities regarding persistence and trustworthiness of the stored data sets. Trusted digital repositories must maintain the information for a long period and this entails precise and at times difficult choices in the architecture and implementation details. Another facet in which DRI (and most TDRs) differ from mainstream science gateways is the relationship between data and metadata, in many science gateways, metadata is created from the automated analysis of data sets, while in DRI much of the metadata is manually defined by specialised users. Furthermore, as the data sets are heterogeneous in nature, the metadata used for their description is of crucial importance. In this paper we argue that TDRs such as DRI, will play an increasingly important role in the future of the social science community and that they constitute the modern equivalent of the great libraries of the past, places in which knowledge was kept and preserved to be available to researchers of the present and the future. Furthermore, although DRI is far from being the only Trusted Digital Repository available, we argue that certaing design decision such as the support of multiple metadata standards and its modular nature, make it an interesting example of a flexible TDR.