Project Background

The Kiwi Research Information Service and the nzresearch.org.nz website grew out of a project at The National Library of New Zealand called the National Research Discovery System Project (the "Nerds Project" to its friends). It was a highly collaborative project, with contributions from other research projects and institutions all around New Zealand.

Coda, OARiNZ, and Ira

Coda, Ira and OARiNZ are collaborative projects to develop institutional repositories for research outputs at tertiary institutions. Between them, they represent 20 different universities and polytechnics, who were the National Library.s initial collaborators.

	"coda, An Institutional Repository for the New Zealand ITP Sector is a DigitalCommons project that highlights university scholarship of various types (working papers, journal articles, dissertations and theses, etc.)." (http://www.coda.ac.nz/)
	"The purpose of the Institutional Repositories Aotearoa Project is to make available ... research outputs created by staff and students of the three partner institutions through the implementation of open access institutional repositories..." (http://www.ira.auckland.ac.nz/)
	The Open Access Repositories in New Zealand (OARiNZ) project will design and build the infrastructure necessary to connect all of New Zealand's digital research repositories that meet standards for interoperability and access." (http://www.oarinz.ac.nz/

All three projects were funded by the New Zealand Government through the Tertiary Education Commission's eLearning Collaborative Development Fund.

The New Zealand Institutional Repositories mailing list

One of the first milestones for the National Research Discovery System Project was to set up the New Zealand Institutional Repositories mailing list (nzir-l) and open it up to all institutional repository administrators.

The mailing list quickly attracted contributors from all New Zealand's universities and most of its polytechnics, who made valuable contributions to the shape of the project, and travelled to Wellington to attend project meetings, collaborate on a set of metadata guidelines, help define the website requirements, and advise the National Research Discovery System Project.