Staff Development Festival

Leeds Met is a University of Festivals, we are often told, and the next fortnight will be the Staff Development Festival which will provide a unique opportunity to promote The Repository.  And I’m going Scuba diving, albeit in a swimming pool.

All the repository pieces are now in place and I intend to demo the search interface and the repository proper, presenting it as a semi-blank canvas that now needs to be painted upon by the University community.  I’ve already had some feedback from Jonathan Long, Director of the Carnegie Research Institute and a member of the consultancy group who would like a search to return formal Harvard references for each item emphasising that one of the reasons for setting up the repository is to increase the number of citations – the interface is just ‘out of the box’ at the moment and returning results in the manner of the IRISS interface – I’ll gather input over the next fortnight and Mike should be able to do some customisation when we have a clearer idea of what people want.  I might even have a go myself although, with no knowledge of php, I can’t make head nor tail of the site files, my web skills having stalled at basic HTML, CSS and (very basic) Java Script.  Mike has already added browse functionality which is, for the moment, based on faculty structure – I’ve set up a collection within intraLibrary for each faculty and it is these that Mike is using to generate the results although it should also be possible to use metadata fields – I think we will map DC ’subject’ onto LOM ‘keyword’.  It might be tricky to incorporate numbers of records after browse links and I’m waiting to see what Mike has to say on this.

Anyway, for now, I have 5 citations per faculty which is adequate for initial demonstrations and I’m working on some full text content – several of the citations I’ve uploaded are RoMEO green/yellow so it’s just a matter of getting hold of author versions.

As for promotional material, I’ve ordered a big purple recoil stand similar to that for the Library and I’ve three info sheets to print up in quantity:

The Repository is an introduction to the project and to IRs specifying our dual remit for the Leeds Met repository.

Open Access: What’s in it for you? emphasises the evidence that OA increases citation (using a graph from Steve Lawrence’s seminal article Online or Invisible? (2001) which is a bit out of date but by far the clearest visual representation I have been able to find.)

And

Copyright presents a very simple flowchart of the (self)-archiving process.

I shall also try to put together a narrated presentation to run when I’m not there.  A couple of lap-tops and we’re away!

Incidentally, here is a link to the search interface:

http://repos-dev.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php

(Currently only accessible from a Leeds Met IP)

Getting there, slowly but surely

The Repository is really starting to take shape; the search interface has now been installed on a development server (as discussed previously, we are using the IRISS SRU client) and is returning very satisfying results on my test content. Now we can start adding the extra functionality (browse, advanced search) – well Mike T can at any rate, and my more technically inclined colleagues – and then to customise the look and feel, though Mike has already added an enormous Leeds Met Rose!

Ongoing development of the interface will also feed into PERSoNA – in a meeting today with John and Mike, Wendy and I discussed one initial approach being to embed the search box/additional search functionality from the interface into a google app (feeding into Leeds Met’s developing partnership with Google) or some kind of generic plug-in or widget. I’ll try to expand on this at some point on PERSoNA News and ask for some pertinent blog input from John and Mike.

And I’ve uploaded my first research paper! A colleague in the library has a paper published in the Reference Services Review – which is a subsidiary of Emerald – and RoMEO green; Do Academic Enquiry Services Scare Students? (This link to the Emerald full text, not the author’s version in The Repository.)

At the moment I am very much focussed on the Staff Development Festival in September and have also been uploading citation information for demonstration purposes – I hope to use the Festival to encourage folk to supply full text copies of their research papers which can then be uploaded in line with publishers’ copyright transfer agreements and we can finally start building that representative body of content. I’ve set up a basic taxonomy within intraLibrary based on Leeds Met faculties and intend to upload 5-10 citations per faculty which I’m linking through to publishers’ abstract pages where possible. This should give us the opportunity to review metadata and get a preliminary idea of the workflow as well as illustrating to people why they might want to release copies of their work from behind subscription barriers (look, there can be links to your work all over the web but you can’t get any further than the abstract without a subscription fee.) The final choice of taxonomy should also be informed by demonstrations to academic staff – we already know that the steering group does not want to base it on faculties as the major organisational structure.

Mike has said that he can do some very preliminary customisation of the search interface before the festival to illustrate how the external browse functionality might work – this will be based on the taxonomies as they currently appear within intraLibrary and, given the short amount of time, will be for demonstration purposes only and probably won’t return dynamic results but should give people the opportunity to visualise the interface and comment on its development.

Adapting intraLibrary

intraLibrary is designed as a learning object repository and it is only now becoming clear just what is involved so that the platform will also function as an Open Access repository of research.

Access to learning objects is generally federated. For example, in order to access resources in JORUM it is neccessary to authenticate via Athens (soon to be Shibboleth) or by a UK Access Management Federation log-in mechanism and, so far as I know, it is not possible to search the repository externally via a search engine. As the very point of an Open Access repository is to make research discoverable and accessible on the public internet this is obviously not desirable! It is, I think, relatively straightforward to expose metadata out to search engines via the OAI-PMH but the majority of search engines no longer support the protocol and we really need to allow the full text to be crawled by Googlebot and other search engine spiders which, I suspect, will not be able to get past the authentication gateway (need more info on this). Moreover, if an external user does come to the repository via Google it will not be possible for them to search content without first authenticating into the system – not very open. Notwithstanding the fact that about 80% of traffic comes to a repository via search engines (assuming they can index content in the first place) we obviously also want an accessible search interface aswell.

The potential solution to these problems that I am currently investigating is to use a seperate, web-based SRU interface which sits outside the repository and is accessible on the public internet.

As part of the CD-LOR project Intrallect have already developed a basic SRU interface which, in turn, has been substantially improved by a third party – IRISS interface here – who have made the code available under an open source licence. The IRISS interface is still fairly basic and does not incorporate all of the functionality that we require – it is essentially a search box only and, for example, would not facilitate browsing the research collection by faculty. It should be reasonably straightforward to customise the interface to incorporate the functionality that we require; we essentially need a series of hyperlinks that map onto the internal repository structure and that will return the appropriate queries. I also need to clarify if such an approach will enable Googlebot and other search engine spiders to crawl the full text thus making the content searchable on the open web.

For each object, intraLibrary generates a public URL which can be linked to directly – on the open web and with no need for authentication. However, a further issue is that, due to the way that intraLibrary works, a query return (either from a search engine or the SRU interface) will link directly to the resource itself – i.e. a PDF of a research article will open immediately in the browser window. When facilitating Open Access to research this is undesirable for several reasons and we require some sort of “landing screen” that can provide context and basic information (abstract, copyright info, whether the paper has been refereed); indeed, there will often be a legal requirement to provide copyright information with many publishers also stipulating that there must also be a link to the published version of the paper. Precisely how we will resolve this issue is yet to be determined; it might be possible to embed a link to the PDF into some sort of HTML template and have this template returned at the public URL?

Watch this space…

By working closely with Intrallect and with a little ingenuity I am confident that these issues will be resolved and that we have, in intraLibrary, an excellent solution to our diverse needs.