Technology

The Kiwi Research Information Service uses open standards and open software whenever possible.

Institutional Repositories in New Zealand

Institutional repositories is "a type of digital repository that is designed to collect the work of a particular institution" (UIUC Scholarly Communication). Many New Zealand institutions are implementing institutional repositories to protect and preserve their research outputs.

There are several different types of institutional repository software in use in New Zealand, including Eprints (University of Otago), DSpace (the other Unievrsities) and Fedora (Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology and the Open Polytechnic). In addition, the DigitalCommons hosted service is used by many of the other institutions. This website uses the OAI-PMH standard to harvest metadata from all of these sources.

For more information of institutional repositories in New Zealand, including a short history, see the OARiNZ Knowledge Base created and maintained by Victoria University of Wellington and the OARiNZ Project.

The New Zealand Institutional Repositories mailing list (nzir-l) is a forum for discussing issues related to technical and administrative aspects of institutional repositories, and also for the discussion of this website.

Metadata Harvesting with PKP Harvester

The nzresearch.org.nz website is built on the PKP Harvester Software (version 2.0.1), with numerous modifications and localisations.

The Public Knowledge Project developed the arvester as part of the PKP "Open Systems" suite of open access publishing applications. It supports OAI-PMH and other metadata harvesting methods, and stores harvested metadata in a relational database.

The OARiNZ project developed several PKP Harvester plugins and modules that are used on this website, including the SRU plugin and OAI-PMH server plugins. OARiNZ also helped develop the OAI-PMH harvester validation system.

The National Library of New Zealand design and developed several additional plugins with assistance from coda, Ira and OARiNZ. These include:

  • The homepage, and the system look-and-feel;
  • The click-through counter and "Popular Records" pages;
  • The "Recent Records" sidebars;
  • Static text pages, like the about pages and help pages;
  • Updates to the harvester to validate harvested metadata and to generate NZIR Internal and Administrative metadata. This included new harvester plugins and XSL transformation files; and
  • Background scripts to perform nightly harvests.

The nzresearch.org.nz source code has been offered back to the Public Knowledge Project for inclusion in later versions of the PKP Harvester software.