Farewell to the TARDis Project - back to the future!!

The TARDis Project has now come to an end. There will be no further major updates to this site but it will be maintained until at least 2008. All project materials will be deposited into the University of Southampton Research Repository. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk (e-Prints Soton)

The TARDis Project has now evolved into a University funded service, maintained by the Southampton University Library in partnership with the Information Systems Service and the School of Electronic and Computer Science.

The Final Report, and Completion Report for this project are available in e-Prints Soton.

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TARDIS was 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). At the start of our project, Institutional repositories were being recognised as an important strategic development around the world (Lynch, Clifford A. (2003) "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7 http://www.arl.org/newsltr/226/ir.html). The UK is in the forefront of this movement with many research-led universities joining in creating their own institutional repositories for research (see for example the SHERPA project)

TARDIS built a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional repository – the University of Southampton Research Repository (called, in short, e-Prints Soton at http://eprints.soton.ac.uk) - to leverage the research created within Southampton University, using both author self-archiving and assisted deposit. It developed by working closely with individual schools and groups building on from their current practices. Useful background is provided by the presentations and papers listed at http://tardis.eprints.org/papers/.

The repository contains publication records with full text where possible – leading towards our goal of open access to the university's research.

Consideration was given to including all types of research output in a variety of formats. It is based firmly on the experience of building pilot archives in both the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and in the School of Electronics and Computer Science whose own publications database will be amalgamated (see http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk).

While developing the archive, TARDIS was specifically feeding back into the pioneering EPrints software (http://software.eprints.org/) developed within the prestigious Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group in the University of Southampton. We worked to provide ease of use by archive administrators and end users. Strategies and documentation addressed technological, cultural and organisational issues and the development of the e-Print archive concept for use in wider applications.

The technical and management issues relating to electronic authentication are also being addressed in a related JISC funded project led by Information Support Services (ISS) at the University of Southampton and using the TARDIS archive as the test bed.