On 16 and 17 January 2008, DRIVER II successfully carried out its first Summit in Goettingen, Germany. Approximately 100 invited representatives from the European Community, including representatives of the European Commission, over 20 spokespersons of European repository initiatives as well as experts in different repository related fields from Europe, the U.S., Canada and South Africa came together to discuss their experiences and concrete actions with respect to the further building of cross-country repository infrastructures.

The first DRIVER Summit was a successful milestone on the way to building a professional, active repository community. Over the course of 2008, DRIVER II will invite various stakeholders to support DRIVER in an advisory capacity and to prepare the building of a Confederation, by exploring models of and potential liaisons with, existing organisations and initiatives (like SPARC, LIBER, the European Digital Library, Alliance for Permanent Access, etc.).

 

About DRIVER II:
The EC-funded DRIVER II project is leading the way as the largest initiative of its kind in helping to enhance repository development worldwide. Its main objective is to build a virtual, European scale network of existing institutional repositories using technology that will manage the physically distributed repositories as one large scale virtual content source.

The full report is available here, and the presentations of the speakers can be found here.