"Fortress-like Relationships": Trusted partnerships and NIOPA at Queen's University Belfast.

The Library at Queen’s University Belfast has created a unique open access digital archive of official publications that has an international audience: this includes material from legislatures, central government and agencies. This is called the Northern Ireland Official Publications Archive, (NIOPA). Collection development guidelines and metadata capture are agreed with the British Library under contract to preserve digital works under the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013. Digital assets are harvested from departmental, agency, Northern Ireland Assembly and other official websites and added to the Archive for long-term preservation using DSpace open-source software. Discoverability is enhanced by agreed metadata standards that are transformed from dc to MARC format and cascaded to multiple legal deposit libraries. The records are also discoverable via OCLC. Essential to the working of this Archive are fortress-like relationships with a range of partner organisations (British Library and associated Legal Deposit libraries), and stakeholders (156 official governmental bodies and universities). The relationships are foundational, predicated upon necessary and legal obligation, fundamental to the future-proofing the Archive and resulting in synchronous activities and procedures. This has created an impressive cross-institutional and multi-agency model of collaboration which has been the gateway for subsequent projects, activities and investigations. This paper outlines the genesis of these relationships, how they began and fruitfully developed, and will provide a helpful case study for other organisations seeking to commence projects and cement alliances by answering the following questions: How does an organisation take the first steps to establishing collaboration? How does one align working practices? How does one secure trusted partners? What role do contracts and legal frameworks play in a multi-modal organisational setting that crosses political and legal jurisdictions?