September '09 - Enovation has won the Irish Universities Association (IUA) tender to develop a national open access portal for the seven Universities in Ireland. The goal of the project is to increase the profile and visibility of Irish research by providing a single access point for all research output.

“We are attempting to increase the impact of individual researchers, the research done in each University, and the aggregate for the Irish national purpose,” said Paul Sheehan, director of library services at Dublin City University.

Part of a three year project which kicked off in 2007, phase one focused on setting up and populating local institutional repositories in each of the Universities by March 2008. Phase two involves setting up the national portal to aggregate all the output by December 2009. Enovation won the tender based on strong industry and repository expertise, having implemented the DSpace solution in many Irish Universities during phase one of the project. Key deliverables for Enovation include:

- A dynamic user interface
- Specific data field requirements
- Faceted browsing and searching, including multi-format RSS feeds
- Accessibility, speed and performance
- Interoperability between the portal and other Research Ireland services

Commenting on the project Gary Mahon, sales director at Enovation Solutions: “We are working towards the December 2009 deadline and looking forward to delivering a unique national portal that will gather Irish research in one place for the first time”.