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).
TARDIS will be building a sustainable multidisciplinary institutional archive of e-Prints to leverage the research created within Southampton University using both self-archiving and mediated deposit.
Consideration will be 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 Ocean and Earth Sciences and in Electronics and Computer Science.
While developing the archive, TARDIS will be 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. Looking at the adaptive process, we will be gearing it to provide ease of use by archive administrators and end users. Strategies and documentation will address 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 will also be 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.