TARDIS (formerly an acronym for 'The Australian Repositories for Diffraction ImageS' was initially created by Ashley Buckle and Steve Androulakis within a protein crystallography/molecular biology lab at Monash University. Its original purpose was for the storage and dissemination of public datasets containing raw crystallography data (known as 'diffraction images'), along with rich metadata for search and persistent handles for citation in publications. Storage was and remains federated, meaning the public index, TARDIS.edu.au contains no data itself and merely points to data stored in external labs and institutions.

At the beginning of 2010, the Australian Synchrotron and VeRSI collaborated with Monash University to bring two new TARDIS-related products to life - Synchrotron-TARDIS and MyTARDIS. Synchrotron-TARDIS was designed specifically to work with internal synchrotron systems such as their authorisation system, data transfer mechanisms and metadata extraction software, collectively known under the heading of VBL (Virtual Beam Line) services. The result is a repository hosted at the Australian Synchrotron that allows anyone with a synchrotron login to access their macromolecular crystallography data collected off its instruments with the full capabilities available to TARDIS.edu.au.

By leveraging VBL services within the synchrotron, private data was able to be sent securely to instances of what's known as MyTARDIS, an institutional repository for the storage of private, raw data. Scientists can log into their university instance, download their data from locally-hosted storage, share data and search it at will. They also have the ability to make data public, with the bonus of the entries being consumed by ANDS' Research Data Australia.

Recent contributions to the MyTARDIS codebase have been towards increased support for more types of scientific data, easier ways of depositing data, advanced sharing, and the bringing together of the public TARDIS.edu.au and synchrotron-TARDIS into the common MyTARDIS codebase.

For more information on the TARDIS project please contact Associate Professor Ashley Buckle.