Interoperability Between Institutional and Data Repositories: a Pilot Project at MIT

Abstract

Academic libraries are working in new areas to support the publishing activities of their institution’s faculty members, including helping them to manage and archive research data that they produce. Many institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have multiple locations in which faculty can deposit their data. Yet this distributed arrangement presents challenges for searching, unifying collections, and archiving. In order to foster some interoperability between these multiple data repositories, the MIT Libraries developed a prototype system to bring studies between two such systems, DSpace and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science Dataverse Network, by enabling the harvesting and replication of metadata and content across the two systems. This paper will discuss the motivation for this project, details and challenges of the system, and future goals for enhancing interoperability among the two systems.