Building a Research Data Registry for the UK

The UK Research Data (Metadata) Registry (UKRDR) Pilot Project, funded by Jisc, is implementing a prototype registry for the research data assets created by UK researchers. The vision for the registry is to allow a single search to query the holdings of all UK data centres and institutional data repositories at once. We anticipate this will be useful not only for researchers working in disciplines without a dedicated data centre, or across disciplines, but also for funders and university administrators to track the outputs of research projects. In the first phase of the project, we set up a prototype registry using software written for ANDS' Research Data Australia, and used it to harvest metadata from nine data centres and nine institutional data repositories. We reflect on this experience, and what it tells us about the feasibility and value of developing the prototype into a full service.