Building a national trusted digital repository for SSH data

The Digital Repository of Ireland is an interactive national trusted digital repository for contemporary and historical, social and cultural data held by Irish institutions; providing a central internet access point and interactive multimedia tools, for use by the public, students and scholars. It is a four-year exchequer funded project, comprising six Irish academic partners, and is supported by the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland (NAI) and the Irish national broadcaster RTÃ137;. A key task is to link together and preserve the rich data held by Irish institutions, provide a central internet access point and interactive multimedia tools. Enabling access and reuse to research data is a central challenge. This paper outlines how the key challenges and lessons learned in the process of building this national repository. It argues that a process of qualitative interviews conducted by DRI allowed us to develop a complex understanding of the barriers which might limit the ability of data to be shared. An unexpected outcome of this process was it facilitated community engagement. This assisted in developing the relations of trust which are so key to overcoming barriers to access and data sharing.