Dr James Bourne¹ is the project leader of a team investigating advanced propulsion systems for aeronautical engineering. The primary goal of this five-year project is to develop scramjet engines that can operate in low-velocity conditions without the need of an auxiliary booster system.

James wants his team to remain highly competitive and be research leaders in their field, and part of this realising this goal is being actively aware of both national and global developments.

He is a subscriber to the Global Registries service: a portal allowing for discovery of research data collections within institutions and repositories across the entire world. He is informed, via an RSS or Atom feed, of new and updated data collections in the fields nominated in his watch-list. Notifications are also sent to his email account.

James takes full advantage of the ‘register locally and discover globally’ philosophy of the Global Registries initiative. He publishes his own team’s research data collections to his local institution’s data facility, who in turn ‘registers’ the collection with a local node of the Global Registries network. Consequently, these collections appear in Google search results and researchers worldwide contact him for access. Indeed, a ‘community’ of investigators is beginning to form around the datasets held in the Global Registries network.

The services provided by the Global Registries have equipped James and his team with the tools to become research leaders, and to respond rapidly to new information and opportunities.

¹ James Bourne is a fictional persona, as are all others described here. Image Disclaimer: All images of people are sourced from Flickr under the Creative Commons licence and are for illustrative purposes only.