University of Ballarat Selects VITAL

David Groenewegen ARROW Project Manager Monash University Library Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia +61 3 9905 4563 david.groenewegen@lib.monash.edu.au

Blacksburg, VA - VTLS and the Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) Project are pleased to announce that University of Ballarat has selected and will be installing VITAL as the basis for its repository services.

The University, located in the city of Ballarat in the state of Victoria, Australia, has six campuses making them a key provider of post-secondary education for central and western Victoria. The University has a student population of over 22,000. It provides educational and training programs from apprenticeships, certificates and diplomas from undergraduate degrees to post-graduate diplomas and research degrees.

With the addition of University of Ballarat, there are now sixteen Australian academic institutions running VITAL.

VITAL is the premier institutional repository product from VTLS and uses the open source digital object repository FEDORA™. FEDORA™ was originally conceived and designed at Cornell University with funding from the National Science Foundation. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding the open-source FEDORA™ that is jointly being developed by the University of Virginia and Cornell University.

ARROW is a national project funded by the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training under the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability initiative. The ARROW project is creating solutions to support best-practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and electronic publishing. These repositories manage a wide range of digital content types. The original ARROW consortium consists of Monash University as the lead institution, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of New South Wales and the National Library of Australia.

Note: The FEDORA™ product developed by UVA and Cornell is not to be confused with Linux's Red Hat Fedora product.

About University of Ballarat

More information about the University of Ballarat can be found at http://www.balllarat.edu.au/about/.

About Backing Australia's Ability

More information about the Australian Government's Backing Australia's Ability - Building Our Future Through Science and Innovation initiative can be found at http://backingaus.innovation.gov.au.

About ARROW

More information about the ARROW Project and participating institutions can be found at http://arrow.edu.au.