A consortial repository for Colorado

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) has announced a consortial OA repository.  From the October 20 announcement:

The Board of Directors of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries has approved initial funding for a consortium-wide digital repository project at its October 19, 2006 meeting. The project will use the Fedora open source software which was selected after a long evaluation process by the Institutional Repository Implementation Team, chaired by John Culshaw from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Alliance Digital Repository (ADR) project allows the participating member libraries to develop a shared technical and development infrastructure to store, preserve and disseminate a whole variety of digital objects including images, text, audio, video, learning objects, data sets or any other kind of material. The project will make use of open source tools developed by others in order to fast track functionality. As new software is developed as part of the project it will also be made available to the open source community....

Each library will have its own local branding and view of the system. However, the development of a collaborative platform will allow libraries to save a substantial amount over each doing independent development.

The ADR project will bring two new staff into the consortium office, a project director and programmer. In addition, the Alliance will provide substantial in kind support from existing staff.

The Alliance is also hoping to work with other consortia and libraries interested in digital repository development and is in discussion with other possible partners.