Background

TARDIS is one of a cluster of complementary projects funded by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme (FAIR). Projects are clustered around the core areas of E-Prints, E-Theses, Intellectual Property Rights, Museums and Images and Institutional Portals with the intention of sharing expertise and experience. For further details on the programme and the clusters see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair

The FAIR e-Prints cluster includes:

• TARDIS Targetting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure - at the University of Southampton
• University of Southampton Libraries
• eprints.org (IAM group in Electronics and Computer Science)
• Information Systems Services
• SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access)
• University of Nottingham (lead partner)
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Glasgow
• Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York ('White Rose' partnership)
• University of Oxford
• British Library
• Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)
• e-Prints UK
• Resource Discovery Network (lead partner)
• University of Southampton - OpCit and eprints.org
• OCLC Office of Research
• HaIRST ( Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed)
• University of Strathclyde (lead partner)
• University of St. Andrews
• Napier University
• Glasgow Colleges Group

The UK's FAIR programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a simple mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to be harvested into services. In the e-Prints community this is realised through data providers who mount the e-Prints (and who could be based in institutions, in subject groupings, or in some other way), and who disclose their metadata to a service provider, which again could be based in institutions, or could be subject based, regional, national or international. The vision here is of a complex web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available through service providers to the whole community of learning.