University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science)

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and the DuraSpace organization (formerly DSpace and the Fedora Commons) are partnering on the Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI) project. The principal focus of PoDRI is to investigate the feasibility of interoperability mechanisms between repositories at the policy level. There is a growing trend toward cross-repository integration, driven by the need for scalable, open, and distributed environments, in which content can be leveraged in a variety of storage spaces. The research project focuses on the integration of an object model and a policy-aware distributed data model with Fedora and iRODS as representative open source software for each model. Project partners, including UNC’s Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center comprise the key architects and developers of Fedora and the iRODS data grid middleware as well as the design and development team of the Carolina Digital Repository, UNC Libraries’ institutional repository, which is based on an integrated Fedora/iRODS infrastructure. The findings and validation work of this project will benefit the library, archival, and museum communities through identification of cross-repository patterns for interoperability.