Scholaris is a national shared repository service that provides hosted infrastructure and support for Canadian institutional repositories. The service is managed by Scholars Portal and developed by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), University of Toronto Libraries (UTL), regional consortia, expert groups and members of the Canadian institutional repository community.

Website

The Scholaris website is live! 

As a national shared repository service, Scholaris leverages local expertise to facilitate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, and increase the discoverability and impact of Canadian research excellence. The newly launched Scholaris website provides information about the service, developing partners, pricing, FAQs, and participating institutions, beginning with our pilot schools and first two Early Adopter cohorts. 

Early Adopters

In fall 2023, the Scholaris team began working with two pilot schools, Ontario Tech University and the University of Toronto. As of May 30, 2024, the production site for Ontario Tech University’s Scholaris instance is live. The production site for the University of Toronto’s Scholaris instance is expected to go live later this summer. 

In addition to the pilot schools, an Early Adopter program is rolling out, beginning with two cohorts. 

For the first cohort we are working with institutions that have existing DSpace repositories or are looking to create an institutional repository. Several schools in this cohort either have bilingual mandates or operate entirely in French, which provides the opportunity to scope out planned bilingual service offerings. Work with schools in the first cohort will begin in summer 2024. 

The second cohort includes schools that have institutional repositories using software other than DSpace. Work with this cohort will give us a good sense of the repository landscape outside DSpace and will help to inform decisions and processes around migrating external content, customizations, and integrations. This will also include work with expert groups to develop a recommended metadata model for mapping items to DSpace. Work with the second cohort is expected to begin in fall-winter 2024. 

Cohort 1 Participating Schools: 

• Bishop's University
• Université de Montréal
• Laurentian University
• Cape Breton University
• Mount Allison University
• Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 
• St. Francis Xavier University
• Université de Moncton

Cohort 2 Participating Schools: 

• Memorial University 
• University of Alberta
• University of Calgary
• University of Manitoba
• Université de Sherbrooke

While the first two cohorts are now full, we are already planning ahead for future cohorts. If your institution is interested in participating in Scholaris, please complete the expression of interest form. If you would like to discuss participation before submitting this form, please reach out to the Scholaris team by emailing info [at] scholaris.ca.

For more information about the shared national repository service, visit scholaris.ca.