DRIVER is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public. Access the network of freely accessible digital repositories with content across academic disciplines with over 1,000,000 scientific publications, found in journal articles, dissertations, books, lectures, reports, etc., harvested regularly from more than 250 repositories, from 29 countries.
DRIVER has established a network of relevant experts and Open Access repositories. DRIVER-II will consolidate these efforts and transform the initial testbed into a fully functional, state-of-the art service, extending the network to a larger confederation of repositories. It aims to optimise the way the e-Infrastructure is used to store knowledge, add value to primary research data and information making secondary research more effective, provide a valuable asset for industry, and help bridging research and education.
The objectives of DRIVER-II, the second phase of the project, include efforts to expand, enrich, and strengthen the results of DRIVER, in the following areas:
- strategic geographic and community expansion by means of the DRIVER confederation
- establish a robust, scalable repository infrastructure accompanied by an open source software package D-Net
- broader coverage of content through the use of enhanced publications
- advanced end-user functionality to support scientific exploration of complex digital objects
- larger outreach and advocacy programs
- continued repository support
- guidelines for interoperability in the larger European digital library community
- Open Access to European research materials
The DRIVER D-NET, the infrastructure software, is designed to be open, which means that new service typologies, exposing functionalities not currently available in DRIVER, can be easily integrated with existing services. The DRIVER software can be used in the following scenarios:
- Deploying new services on top of an operational DRIVER infrastructure. Running instances of the DRIVER Infrastructure can be enriched at any point in time with new service instances so as to empower or expand the available functionalities.
- Deployment and configuration of customized portals for designated communities over the DRIVER aggregated data (e.g. a portal over national repositories or over subject-driven content, such as RECOLECTA). Deployment of new aggregation services so as to distribute and delegate harvesting and aggregating activities to specialized DRIVER National or Community Correspondents, carrying out their tasks over an assigned selection of repositories.
- Deploying a new DRIVER infrastructure to serve other service providers and communities. The D-NET v. 1.0 software release is also made available to any organization willing to run independent installations of the DRIVER infrastructure. In this case the interested organization would be responsible of the maintenance of such a system.

DRIVER is a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to create a cohesive, robust and flexible, pan-European infrastructure for digital repositories, offering sophisticated services and functionalities for researchers, administrators and the general public. Access the network of freely accessible digital repositories with content across academic disciplines with over 1,000,000 scientific publications, found in journal articles, dissertations, books, lectures, reports, etc., harvested regularly from more than 250 repositories, from 29 countries.
DRIVER has established a network of relevant experts and Open Access repositories. DRIVER-II will consolidate these efforts and transform the initial testbed into a fully functional, state-of-the art service, extending the network to a larger confederation of repositories. It aims to optimise the way the e-Infrastructure is used to store knowledge, add value to primary research data and information making secondary research more effective, provide a valuable asset for industry, and help bridging research and education.
The objectives of DRIVER-II, the second phase of the project, include efforts to expand, enrich, and strengthen the results of DRIVER, in the following areas:
- strategic geographic and community expansion by means of the DRIVER confederation
- establish a robust, scalable repository infrastructure accompanied by an open source software package D-Net
- broader coverage of content through the use of enhanced publications
- advanced end-user functionality to support scientific exploration of complex digital objects
- larger outreach and advocacy programs
- continued repository support
- guidelines for interoperability in the larger European digital library community
- Open Access to European research materials
The DRIVER D-NET, the infrastructure software, is designed to be open, which means that new service typologies, exposing functionalities not currently available in DRIVER, can be easily integrated with existing services. The DRIVER software can be used in the following scenarios:
- Deploying new services on top of an operational DRIVER infrastructure. Running instances of the DRIVER Infrastructure can be enriched at any point in time with new service instances so as to empower or expand the available functionalities.
- Deployment and configuration of customized portals for designated communities over the DRIVER aggregated data (e.g. a portal over national repositories or over subject-driven content, such as RECOLECTA). Deployment of new aggregation services so as to distribute and delegate harvesting and aggregating activities to specialized DRIVER National or Community Correspondents, carrying out their tasks over an assigned selection of repositories.
- Deploying a new DRIVER infrastructure to serve other service providers and communities. The D-NET v. 1.0 software release is also made available to any organization willing to run independent installations of the DRIVER infrastructure. In this case the interested organization would be responsible of the maintenance of such a system.