Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS

My report on the “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” event organised by the Welsh Repository Network and supported by JISC and ARMA back in May has now been published:

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/wrn-repos-2010-05-rpt/

JISC Innovation Forum 2010 (JIF2010)

I’m exhibiting at JIF2010 next week at Royal Holloway University of London and looking forward to it, not least for reasons of nostalgia as I graduated from RHUL in 1996 (BA English Lit) and haven’t really been back in over a decade.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t the most conscientious of students, exhibiting at the time a degree of post-adolescent rebellion and fancying myself as some sort of undergraduate libertine (if we re-define libertine as someone who stays in bed all day and drinks a bit too much beer).

While it’s all too easy to cast a repository manager as Byronic Hero (revolt against society, pursuit of individual goals, romantic expression and the constant experience of strong emotion)  I now get up early and have worked considerably harder over the past 3 years (nearly) on our various JISC projects at Leeds Met than for my degree and arguably know more about Open Access and repositories than I ever did about the canon of English Literature – there’s a lesson here I think – if you don’t work hard at University you might end up as an (un-Byronic) repository manager!

Our JISC projects, in chronological order, are the Repository Start-up itself, Streamline, PERSoNA, Unicycle and Bibliosight and Dawn has put together a fantastic poster for my exhibition stand featuring a time-line and showing how these 5 projects relate to one another – it also includes our current ACErep project which is funded by HEFCE rather than JISC but which very much builds on our JISC supported projects (click for larger image):

DepoST revisited

The DepoST – Deposit Show and Tell Meeting – was held last October at the University of London Student Union. The aim of the event was “to identify deposit tools (and perhaps combinations of tools) that would clearly benefit repository users if they could be taken up easily and with confidence, and to plot a path for those tools toward widespread and sustainable take-up.”

I was not actually at the event myself but have long been interested in implementing a user-friendly SWORD client; there has also been recent interest from UKCoRR colleagues so I thought it would be useful to revisit DepoST and try to establish which of the various tools that were demoed at the event have since become “going concerns” and, if so, how repository managers can go about exploiting them.

I have contacted several of the developers who showed their wares back in the Autumn as well as reviewing on-line information; the full list of demoes at the event is as follows:

(1) DepositAir IE Demonstrator - Julian Cheal, SUE/SIS Systems Developer, UKOLN
(2) ePrints 3 Upload Handler plugin – Dave Tarrant, Postgraduate researcher, University of Southampton
(3) PDFMetaExtractor - Pat McSweeney, ePrints project developer, University of Southampton
(4) ICE – Integrated Content Environment - Peter Sefton, eScholarship Tech Team Manager, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
(5) Dashboard deposit in ‘Publications’ product – Richard Jones, Symplectic Limited
(6) Email-based deposit plugin for SWORD – Alex Strelnikov, UKOLN
(7) Mendeley – Jan Reichelt, Mendeley
(8) The Open Access Repository Junction – Ian Stuart, Software Engineer, EDINA
(9) Drag & Drop Deposit Tool – Joe Lambert, University of Southampton
(10) GAip desktop curation tool – Viv Cothey, Gloucestershire Archives
(11) Map a WebDav or FTP drive directly into ePrints 3.2 – Tim Brody, EPrints WebDav, University of Southampton
(12) EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) – Theo Andrew & Fred Howell, The Open Access Repository, EDINA
(13) EasyDeposit configurable deposit client – Stuart Lewis, IT Innovations Analyst & Developer, University of Auckland Library
(14) WordDeposit – Alex Wade, Director for Scholarly Communication, Microsoft External Research
(15) sWordInbox - Seb Francois, University of Southampton
(16) Xerte online authoring toolkit and Xpert deposit tool X- Julian Tenney and Patrick Lockey, Xerte, University of Nottingham
(17) Copyright Licensing Applications using SWORD for Moodle (CLASM) – James Ballard & Richard Davis, University of London
(18) Names Project – Dan Needham, University of Manchester & Alan Danskin, British Library

DepositAir IE Demonstrator is an Adobe AIR application which borrows its look and feel from the Flickr Uploadr. The user drags and drops the files to deposit from the source folder to the application which auto-populates metadata fields such as title, ISSN, publisher, author name, and then sends the files and metadata to http://dspace.swordapp.org/jspui/. Lack of resources has meant that it hasn’t been fully developed since DepoST and the code has not yet been released to the community; Julian has indicated that he could release the code if people would find it useful.

ePrints 3 Upload Handler plugin works with Microsoft Word 2007 and Powerpoint to extract metadata and media during the deposit process. The plug-in is included in EPrints 3.2; there is a 5 minute demo at http://www.eprints.org/software/training/3.2/videos/word_addin-only.swf

Although the current extraction process is in-line, the plan is to make it an unobtrusive background operation; as I understand it, this work is pending subject to funding.

PDFMetaExtractor searches the user’s computer for PDFs and then intelligently extracts metadata as well as keywords specified within the document. Patrick has been unable to develop the tool as far as he would like though EPrints issued a developer bounty at Dev8D which was taken up by John Harrison – see http://code.google.com/p/pdfssa4met/. Patrick’s original implementation allows extraction of title, abstract, number of pages and the references section from a pdf with a reasonably high level of accuracy and sometimes a string of authors. John Harrison’s extension allows titles, dates, pages, and a sometimes authors to be extracted from the references section which, in theory, should allow some reasonable assumptions about who cites who within a repository.

ICE – Integrated Content Environment – http://ice.usq.edu.au/- is a sophisticated suite of tools that integrates with Openoffice and Word to convert content produced on a word-processor into “usable, self-contained course web sites in IMS package format”. It comprises a toolbar add-on for Openoffice and Word to easily structure and format a document and convert to HTML/PDF and distribute to the web via the open source Subversion revision control system. There are a number of use cases described on the website including integrating (an EPrints) repository with the authoring workflow to produce “research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.”

My understanding is that SWORD deposit only currently works with EPrints – see http://techteam.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/procedure-configure-ice-to-eprints/ for technical implementation – Peter has said that the ICE team are working on making SWORD deposit much easier in the future.

See also ICE-Theorem – End to end semantically aware eResearch infrastructure for theses

Dashboard deposit in ‘Publications’ product – http://www.symplectic.co.uk/products/publications.html – Symplectic is a commercial research management system – this tool to link the repository module of the Symplectic Publications Management System to a repository is compatible with all major digital repository technologies. Users can upload full text documents and supporting information directly from the Symplectic Publications interface; copyright guidance is collected automatically from SHERPA/RoMEO and made available to users.

The University of Leeds are currently in the process of implementing Symplectic – http://wrro.blogspot.com/2009/08/symplectic-eprints-link-testing.html - and are optimistic it will improve ease of deposit and the volume of content deposited.

Email-based deposit plugin for SWORD – I haven’t been able to contact Alex or find out anything more than what was posted on http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/ which is a shame as it sounds like a simple and effective solution – if anyone knows more please let me know.

Mendeley – http://www.mendeley.com/ – not strictly a repository deposit tool, Mendeley is a combination of a slick iTunes-esque desktop client working in conjunction with a social networking website; researchers use the desktop client to organise their research, annotating PDF’s, sorting, tagging etc and can use the web to collaborate with fellow researchers with shared and public collections. It is also possible to automatically generate bibliographic references in Word.

Mendelay has been described as Last.fm for researchers and certainly has the potential to affect the research workflow in interesting ways which could, in turn, impact on repository workflows. Mendelay is a venture capitalist funded start-up and particularly noteworthy, I think, is its slick implementation and sophisticated web 2.0 functionality compared with some of the other repository tools out there.

The Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) – http://edina.ac.uk/projects/oa-rj/ aims to scope, build and test a deposit broker tool to assist open access deposit into, and interoperability between, existing repository services; currently multiple-authored journal articles are deposited singly in either an institutional, funder or subject-based repository and the primarily aim is to simplify the repository deposit workflow for multiple-authored journal articles; OA-RJ will therefore offer an API that supports redirect and deposit of research outputs into multiple repositories.
OA-RJ is currently working on delivering a proof-of-concept service for two multiple deposit use cases:

• Journal publishers depositing content directly into institutional repositories.
• Subject repositories depositing content into institutional repositories.

There is a project blog at http://oarepojunction.wordpress.com/

Drag & Drop deposit tool takes a strong end user perspective for a simple tool to reduce the workload involved with submitting to a repository. I haven’t been able to discover anything new about this tool beyond what is on the blog at http://blog.mspace.fm/2009/10/13/jisc-depost-meetup/ and which describes the demo prototype that extracts metadata from a PDF (i.e. no SWORD integration as yet) and how the developers would seek to integrate with other project demos at DepoST.

GAip desktop curation tool – Again, I haven’t been able to discover anything other than what was posted on http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/, specifically that this tool stood out for addressing archive and repository materials other than academic research papers. The Gloucestershire Archives deals with physical materials as well as digital records, and faces the problem of taking “a 100-year view”.  The intended user for GAip is an archivist rather than the creator or author.

Map a WebDAV or FTP drive directly into ePrints 3.2 – there is a screencast demo of this tool at http://files.eprints.org/451/ but Tim has indicated that development work has pretty much been abandoned due to problems with WebDAV itself but that he might think about picking it up again if Operating Systems had reliable DAV implementations.

EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) – The presentation at DepoST – see http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2009-10-11&c=fwHrIkD8#page1 – was a proof of concept middleware that links the Depot and http://publicationslist.org/, a web site for researchers to build a web page listing their publications with the goal of making batch deposits easier, by handling multiple queries for metadata from web-based resources like PubMed, Web of Science, and personal databases such as EndNote, Reference Manager, BibTeX etc.

The follow-on from EM-Loader uses harvesting from publications lists rather than pushing into a repository via SWORD which avoids researchers having to be involved in a submission at all – it just fetches new stuff to put in the right place in the repository, and researchers just maintain their own list using the normal http://publicationslist.org/ gui (with auto-fetch from pubmed, web of science, endnote etc)

Integration is currently with DSpace only but it should be straightforward to also integrate with EPrints.

The full report is available at http://publicationslist.org/em-loader/emloader-report-intro.html

(This sounds particularly interesting and I plan to look at it more closely when I get a chance.)

EasyDeposit - http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/ – is an open source SWORD client creation toolkit to create customised SWORD deposit web interfaces from within your browser – this is one of the most fully realised of the tools from the event as well as being one of the best suited to my own immediate requirements from a SWORD client and which I looked at it in detail in a previous post.

WordDeposit – http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/authoring/ – is an add-in for Word 2007 that enables metadata to be captured and stored at the authoring stage and enables semantic information to be preserved through the publishing process, which is essential for enabling search and semantic analysis once the articles are archived in a repository. It is SWORD enabled and Alex has indicated that Microsoft External Research are currently working on an updated release that will also make it easier for authors to add new/multiple SWORD end-points and to deposit to multiple repositories.

sWordinbox as I understand it has evolved into two separate plug-ins for EPrints – neither of which actually uses SWORD; one uses XML-RPC to post to a blog at deposit time. The other is a widget that allows uploads to EPrints from anywhere:

• Post To Blog plug-in – http://files.eprints.org/482/ – allows people to send their publications to their blog. It integrates into EPrints’ Manage Deposits screen and is displayed as an action you can perform on any of your publications. To test/use you need a blog account (eg on WordPress…), and your blog provider must support the XMLRPC standard.
• EPrints Remote Uploader plug-in – http://files.eprints.org/483/ – allows publications to be remotely created from web pages by adding a single line of HTML to include the Remote Uploader onto their pages. Any user can then select a file, set a title and send this information to the repository. Authentication is carried out by the “classic HTTP dialog box”, in order to minimize phishing attacks.  It looks like this:

EPrints Remote Uploader "Widget" allows deposit into EPrints from anywhere on the web.

Xerte online authoring toolkit and Xpert deposit tool – Aimed at content other than research publications, Xerte - http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/ - is an open source suite of tools to rapidly develop richly interactive learning content. Content created in Xerte can be deposited into Xpert- http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/, a searchable distributed repository compiled by harvesting content from the publishing institution via RSS feed. The aim is to make learning content available for re-use, re-purposing and adaptation.

In order to deposit into Xpert it is simply necessary to submit a valid RSS feed via the form at http://xpert.nottingham.ac.uk/feedsubmit.php

Copyright Licensing Applications using SWORD for Moodle (CLASM) – http://clasm.ulcc.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page – also aimed at teaching and learning materials rather than research outputs, CLASM has developed a SWORD plug-in for the Open Source VLE, Moodle so that objects in the VLE can be easily deposited into a SWORD enabled repository.

The project has now completed and there is a succinct summary – including caveats around limitations of interoperability offered by the SWORD library- at http://clasm.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/02/15/working-with-sword-and-moodle/

Names Project - http://names.mimas.ac.uk/ - focused on the critical issue of author disambiguation rather than deposit workflow, the Names Project is developing a pilot name authority system and uses data from Zetoc, British Library and contextual information from research documents to build a database of all UK research authors to uniquely identify individuals and institutions. A public beta API is available for testing.

EasyDeposit – the SWORD client creation toolkit

One of the reasons that SWORD has not been more widely adopted, I think, is due to technical barriers for repository managers, so I was very excited when Stuart Lewis released EasyDeposit, an open source SWORD client creation toolkit – http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/.

I’ve had a few problems installing EasyDeposit due to institutional server configuration but Stuart has very kindly set up a test install for me to play with as well as pointing me towards another working configuration of EasyDeposit that collects meta-data from the DOI which could be a Godsend for repository managers.

On logging in to the Administrative interface, the administrator can edit the welcome screen content, header, footer or CSS so I was able to add some (very basic) branding to the interface:

N.B. The Admin interface also allows you to Configure deposit steps with a variety of options that I found slightly mind-boggling!

The first step is to Connect to a Repository. EasyDeposit is pre-configured with SWORD service document URLs for test installs of all the major SWORD enabled repository systems – DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and intraLibrary (see http://www.swordapp.org/sword/demonstrators); the user is also able to enter an alternative service document URL for their own repository:

Thus armed with a valid service document and an active repository account, the user is ready to begin a deposit. At least in theory but I should have known that it wouldn’t be so easy after all and it turned out that I was unable to deposit to intraLibrary because EasyDeposit only currently supports METS containing SWAP/Dublin core (supported by DSpace / EPrints / Fedora) whereas intraLibrary only supports IMSCP – more on this later.

I’m not yet able to test with my own repository then but manfully swallowed my disappointment and set up an account with the DSpace SWORD 1.3 Demo installation and connected successfully to the repository at http://dspace.swordapp.org/jspui whereupon I was asked to Select a Collection (available collections will depend on how a particular repository is configured of course):

I chose to deposit into the Research Materials collection and was presented with a form to Describe my Item with basic metadata (Title, Author(s), Abstract, Type of Item, Peer reviewed, Bibliographic citation, Existing URL):

Next I choose up to 5 files from my local hard-drive:

Then I Verify the information before clicking to indicate that I understand and agree and to Deposit:

And finally I am presented with confirmation of my deposit and a URL handle (which doesn’t actually link and throws an error, not sure why – perhaps related to the test installation?).  I was, however, able to find my deposit in the DSpace test installation:

http://dspace.swordapp.org/jspui/handle/123456789/626

TA DA!

EasyDeposit is a fantastic tool; Stuart has developed a user-friendly, web-based SWORD client that is a great starting point for repository managers. With a little bit of technical know-how it should also be fairly straightforward to customise; like Open Search, it’s written in PHP so Mike should be able to adapt it to our specific requirements.

(For those that are interested, there is another great demo implementation at http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/example/doi/ that automatically populates metadata from a DOI (the stuff that dreams are made of!)

Customisation for our specific requirements isn’t by any means trivial, however, not least because intraLibrary is based on IEEE LOM metadata and does not support METS – only IMSCP – and  Stuart has suggested that he may need to add a basic IMSCP packager to the core PHP SWORD library in order to facilitate deposit to intraLibrary…unless we just use EasyDeposit to deposit pre-packaged IMSCP packages (file[s] + an imsmanifest.xml) rather than collect files/metadata and make a package from them…

In addition, we are using intraLibrary to manage both research material and Learning Objects/Open Educational Resources with each type of resource utilising quite different Application Profiles. Our first priority is actually likely to be Learning Objects rather than research material (we are currently working with two partner institutions on a project to discover and deposit resources into multiple repositories- see http://acerep.wordpress.com/; it’s early days but I always knew that metadata was likely to be a stumbling block - especially given that the three institutions all use different repository platforms – all are using commercial LO platforms rather than Fedoro/EPrints/DSpace).  In this case I would think that we may want to deposit pre-packaged IMSCP packages rather than requiring the deposit tool to create packages from metadata and files (though whether this will actually work depends on the functionality of the other institutions’ software – yet to be established!)

Having said that, I am keen to implement a web-based SWORD deposit for research material and also, perhaps, electronic theses which was one of the initial drivers for EasyDeposit; a system that allowed theses to be deposited but without users having to know what a repository is, or how to use one, and would not require thousands of accounts left in a repository that deposited a single thesis then left the institution (all the deposits can be performed with a single username and password).

Four JISC repository infrastructure projects

I was contacted this week by Evidence Base at Birmingham City University who are conducting a “short lightweight review” of four key repository infrastructure projects, preliminary to a larger evaluation of the IE programme as a whole, and are talking to JISC programme managers and project managers as well as seeking views from lowly repository managers like me!

The four projects I was asked to discuss were:

Repository Search (UK Institutional Repository Search- IRS) – http://www.intute.ac.uk/irs/
Repository Support Project (RSP) – http://www.rsp.ac.uk
Repository Junction (Open Access – Repository Junction – OA -RJ) – http://edina.ac.uk/projects/oa-rj/ and
Repository Aggregation (RepUK) – http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/repuk/

Now I like to think I’ve got my ear to the ground and I was immediately struck that I was only actually familiar with two of these projects (the intute IR search and, of course, the good old RSP).  So I followed the links for the other two projects to learn what I could – both of which, in my view, need to be very much more high profile than they are currently (though they do both have another 12 months to run until 31st March 2011.)  My ensuing discussion with the lady from Evidence Base was more around the conceptual value of all four projects.

OA-RJ

I expect that OA-RJ in particular will gain traction over the coming months, not least because it is referenced in the current JISC Grant Funding Call Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research.

The purpose of the project is to scope, build and test a deposit broker tool to assist open access deposit into, and interoperability between, existing repository services; currently multiple-authored journal articles are deposited singly in either an institutional, funder or subject-based repository and the primarily aim is to simplify the repository deposit workflow for multiple-authored journal articles; OA-RJ will therefore offer an API that supports redirect and deposit of research outputs into multiple repositories.

RepUK

I was particularly interested in RepUK and IRS as I have for some time been a little non-plussed by our collective, continued obsession with the woefully under-used OAI-PMH and both these projects are using the protocol (I think!).

There is not a huge amount of information on the RepUK website but the paragraph below gives a flavour of the project:

“The interest in exploiting the content to be found in institutional repositories is growing. At the same time, there is a range of possible uses for a central cache of metadata records held by institutional repositories. Most notably, with a recent emphasis on ‘rapid innovation’, there exists an opportunity to position this aggregation of data to support research and development generally in the fields of metadata and/or repositories. Rapid innovation projects which require a corpus of metadata to work with will benefit from this readily available data-store, avoiding the resource-intensive overhead of developing their own harvesting and aggregation solution.”

RepUK also invokes Lorcan Dempsey’s concept of ‘concentration’ in a Web 2.0 environment as a “major characteristic of our network experience” involving “major gravitational hubs” that “concentrate data, users (as providers and consumers), and communications and computational capacity” and posits that “a central cache of metadata records held by institutional repositories” in this way, exposed by a simple, RESTful API, would allow the community to start building value added services around this (hopefully) high quality metadata.

UK Institutional Repository Search (IRS)

This service has come to the end of its funded period as a JISC project but is being maintained at a basic level by Mimas. I presume that it is using OAI-PMH* to cross-search UK IRs and offers “conceptual search” and “text mining search”**. With the best will in the world, it is difficult to see how this facility can compete with the likes of Google in its current incarnation

* May be conceptual search used OAI-PMH but “text mining” is more Google style?
** At least it did but the text mining search was broken and was giving a “Bad Gateway” yesterday – it now appears to have been rerouted to the “conceptual search” only, presumably while it is fixed.

---

Google, of course, withdrew support for OAI-PMH back in April 2008 and though I’m aware of a few harvesters around like OAIster, even OpenDoar uses a Google custom search – http://www.opendoar.org/search.php, not OAI-PMH, to search repository content.

I can offer only anecdotal evidence but I’m pretty sure that your average academic will tend towards Google/Google Scholar to source research on the open web and has no idea about the OAI-PMH which simply isn’t widely used enough to justify our ongoing fixation.  The  reasons for this are severalfold and represent, to some extent, the protocol’s pedegree (that dates back to the earliest days of the open access and institutional repository movements) and the associated investment by the community, in software specification for example; also from a recognition of the limitations of Google for academic purposes and the undoubted potential of OAI-PMH (though this potential has arguably been watered down by so many repositories also carrying metadata only records rather than exclusively full text.)

RSP

When I was new to repositories I found the RSP absolutely invaluable as a source of information and support, they came to a soft launch of our repository back in 2008 which was really useful to give colleagues a little bit of a wider view of the repository landscape in the UK. I must confess that I haven’t been back to the RSP website for a while and I was pleasantly surprised that there is now a great deal more content covering everything from a primer on the OAI-PMH to advice and resources for successful advocacy.  I was also reminded that the RSP do outreach visits and I may well consider giving them a call – it would certainly be useful to get an objective perspective on some of the issues we continue to face with repository development here at Leeds Met.

I’m not naive, of course, to the reasons for JISC conducting these project evaluations and they clearly want to think carefully about where future investment can most effectively be made; I was asked a few leading questions around how the RSP still meets the needs of the community (I think they do!) and how they might adapt their approach to meet shifting requirements – the start-ups are all but finished I think but, no doubt, new people are coming into the sector all the time who will most certainly benefit from the clear information and support of the RSP.  I also speculated somewhat idly whether the website could be a bit more dynamic and, well, Web 2.0 – they do have a presence on Twitter – @RepoSupport – but I couldn’t find it from the website and I don’t think it feeds there.  I even wondered whether a social network style site using ning or elgg might work….just a thought.

Resource discovery at Leeds Met Library

Just a quick plug for a new Leeds Met blog investigating Resource Discovery and Federated Searching systems for Leeds Met Library:

http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/

It is, er, blogged by my colleague @DebbieMN but will also include contributions from other library staff and recently, for example, our graduate trainee has posted about his first impressions of Serial Solution’s Summon which is billed as a “web-scale discovery service” that “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/)

I also attended the Summon demo last week and was pretty impressed by the Google style simplicity of the search interface – which I suspect will be very popular with students – though some of my librarian colleagues did express reservations about the potential impact on information literacy and were keen to see the advanced search functionality; it is still important to teach more sophisticated information retrieval skills even if students are likely just to head to the simple search box of Google (or Summon)!

One aspect I was particularly interested in was the apparent ease with which Summon can be configured to search an institutional repository – functionality that the University of Huddersfield, who are now running Summon, have already implemented to search their EPrints repository – Huddersfield’s @daveyp tweeted this example using the name of their repository manager @graham_stone – http://hud.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=graham+stone

UKCoRR Meeting Leicester

On Friday Wendy and I trekked across the frozen wastes of Northern Britain to Leicester (which I have now looked up on a map and discovered is pretty much slap bang in the middle of Albion).  I had missed the last UKCoRR meeting back in August ’09 due to gestational issues and was looking forward to catching up with repository-managing colleagues, some of whom were familiar faces, some of whom I recognised only by name and some of whose aquaintance was entirely novel – indicative of the growing repository community in the UK with the membership of UKCoRR now getting on for 200 souls.  The meeting was well attended which is especially exciting given that the Council is unfunded and operates only by the dedication of its Committee and the good-will of its members, a paragon of which was our host Gareth Johnson who kept a live blog of proceedings at http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/ukcorr-meeting-university-of-leicester/.

I was due on at 11:50, hopefully to demostrate the Bibliosight prototype, and Gareth and I had been liaising with Thomson Reuters in order to have IP authentication to access the service; I was there early and, with trepidation, tested the prototype on the presentation PC and….it didn’t work.  Nor could I gain access to the wireless network to pore over emails in order to resolve the problem so I decided, instead, to have a cup of tea and rely on my Blue Peter style contingency – here’s one I prepared earlier.

The running order is below – presentations from the event will appear on the UKCoRR blog in due course so I’ll link to them from here as and when:

• Chair’s Activities – Jenny Delasalle, UKCoRR Chair
• Aberystwyth University, CADAIR and Me – Nicky Cashman, UKCoRR Secretary
• The Bibliosight Project: Querying Web of Science from the Desktop – Nick Sheppard, Leeds Metropolitan University (presentation below.)
• The Repository Scene at Leicester – Gareth Johnson, University of Leicester
• Web & Publicity Update – Dominic Tate, UKCoRR Web & Publicity Officer
• Welsh Repository Network: Services and Support – Hannah Payne, Aberystwyth University*
• Advanced RoMEO – Jane Smith & Peter Millington, University of Nottingham
• Copyright and Repositories Workshop – Nicky Cashman, Aberystwyth University

*  Hannah also showed us some learning objects produced by WRN and there are plans to create several more.

Bibliosight (UKCoRR presentation):

Gareth has done a pretty good summary over at The UoL Library Blog so here I really just want to follow up after my own presentation, with reference to the R4R project and JournalTOCsAPI, and also perhaps note one or two particular points that caught my interest through the day.

There is a screen-cast of the Bibliosight prototype at http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/bibliosight/video/; as I mentioned, the R4R project has also developed a prototype to perform a similar task and Les Carr posted to the list last week emphasising that the major issue from their point of view is duplicate avoidance / reconciliation and that he and the R4R team would be looking for guidance from repository managers around how we already tackle this issue.  We didn’t really have time to discuss these issues on Friday and I’ll just reiterate Les’ on-list invitation to please post any initial feed-back there which will also help the project team to focus their questions.

The other questions and issues I asked folk to consider were:

• Different workflows relevant to:
  • Backfilling a repository with a one-off download
  • Ongoing use to populate repository

• Other uses for records downloaded from WoS?

• Other datastreams to populate a repository:
  • UK PubMedCentral, arXiv
  • sources that better serve the arts, humanities and social sciences

• WoS records become available some time after publication*

• Duplicate records/ambiguous relations with existing records?

• Implications for a repository’s mission/reputation if balance of content changed by large number of WoS-derived records

*  One of our use cases was to use Web Services as an alerting service in a similar manner as proposed by JournalTOCsAPI but the advantage in that case, as Jenny emphasised when she mentioned her involvement with the project at the top of the day, is that the data is immediately available, via the API, as soon as it is published, whereas, in the case of Web Services, there will be a delay while data is harvested/re-keyed by Web of Science.

We also briefly considered another question that had already arisen on the list from Hannah Payne of the Welsh Repository Network around acknowledging the source of WoS data in repository records with the vague consensus that acknowledgement should go in the rights field; it was pointed out that, in the UK, metadata does not carry any copyright restrictions but I think the issue is purely about acknowledging WoS as the source of the data – there are some issues around this to clarify, however, as we are given to understand that abstracts are not made available via Web Services as WoS are not able to grant a license for reuse even though it seems that a license may not actually be necessary (see last post).

Anyway, I hope these issues are taken up in more detail either here or on the UKCoRR discussion list.

Other interesting issues that came up during the day and that deserve fuller posts of their own in the fullness of time were:

• CRIS (Current Research Information Systems)
• Institutional mandates for etheses (relates to developing ETHoS service)
• Forthcoming report on the economics of Open Access from Alma Swann
• Integrating repositories with the REF (WRN is planning a repository and CRIS event right here in sunny Leeds using the Rose Bowl, our world-class conference facility – TBA)
• Advanced RoMEO and ongoing developments to the service

I really enjoyed the day and thank you to everyone involved.  Looking forward to the next meeting!

Would you like UKOER with that?

Yesterday I had a chat with the learning technologist from Innovation North (faculty) about all things repository and, more specifically, UniCycle – he also brought along a faculty colleague who is exploring the best way of disseminating laboratory training videos to students via the VLE.

intraLibrary can’t stream video and I candidly pointed out that if the only requirement was to make these video tutorials available to students through the VLE then the planet eStream server would be by far the simplest solution – just upload the video to eStream and drop the URL into an X-stream module.  Job done.  However, there is no reason we can’t also catalogue the URL in intraLibrary and there are several potential benefits to doing so not least for ukoer – depending on IPR and licencing considerations of course, more on that in a minute.

The only question that gives me slight pause for thought is the wisdom of effectively double-cataloguing the same resource in two systems – when I was initially exploring planet eStream some time ago, it was pointed out that eStream is already a fully searchable resource and there was some resistance to double-cataloguing in this way as being inelegant.  The issues are perhaps similar to the question I raised in a previous post about making ukoer available both via a local repository and JorumOpen. However, as far as I can tell, metadata attached to resources in eStream is extremely limited so why not add standardised ukoer metadata and link out to them from intralibrary – is there any practical reason why this is a bad idea?

Inelegance notwithstanding, other potential benefits of this approach are being able to search for eStream video via the VLE PowerLink and the concommitant advantage that resources catalogued in the repository aren’t restricted to an individual X-stream module.  In theory, of course, there is nothing to stop a tech-savvy tutor linking out to eStream – or YouTube for that matter – to their hearts content, from the VLE, via email or from anywhere else that takes their fancy – in practice, however, they need to be able to search for a wide range of resources from a single, simple interface that is well established in the institutional infrastructure and that clearly identifies ownership and licensing – that isn’t the eStream server, or likely to be (nor is it currently the repository.  Yet.  But I’m working on it!)

I asked my “guest” (hostage?) what limitations, if any, faculty would like to place on access – would they wish to ensure that it was, in fact, only available to students within a specific module of X-stream or would they consider wider dissemination across the institution/sector?  As I rattled on it became clear, and quite understandably, that my hostage hadn’t thought about this in any great depth and indicated that they were questions to be discussed at faculty level…

Would they consider licensing for reuse under Creative Commons?  Er…what’s Creative Commons?

So, apologies to the hapless soul who just wanted to disseminate some video and found himself in my office being harangued about repositories, PowerLinks, OER, IPR and Creative Commons but this is exactly the type of interaction we need to be having with colleagues across the institution who have their own specific requirements for disseminating digital teaching and learning materials and from where we can start building cultural change for ukoer from the ground up.

Edinburgh repository fringe – links

I wasn’t able to attend the Edinburgh repository fringe but have been scouring the blogosphere for info – unlike the real Edinburgh fringe there doesn’t seem to be much mainstream media coverage, not even a late night slot on Channel 4.

I haven’t found masses beyond the main website and the event wiki – http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page – though may be I’m jumping the gun a little.

The best live blogging seems to be on the jisc-datashare blog

Posts are tagged #repofringe09:  http://jisc-datashare.blogspot.com/search/label/%23repofringe09

The only other posts I’ve found so far are:

Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/07/31/repository-fringe-2009/

And

The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog – http://blog.okfn.org/2009/07/31/open-data-session-at-repository-fringe-2009/

For pics there is also a flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/repofringe09/

First post

Well we finally have our project website on-line: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/

The site gives a brief overview of Institutional Repositories, Open Access and Self Archiving along with general background information specific to our project at Leeds Metropolitan University. It’s also the first port of call if you would like to contact us.

It’s still very early days for us; over the next couple of weeks we hope to have decided upon our software partner who will implement the repository platform for us. We are having presentations from Digital Commons, EPrints, Open Repository, Digitool, IntraLibrary and Harvest Road. Phew!

Digital Commons, in fact, have already impressed us with a remote demonstration from California – the wonders of modern technology! Though a web-conference isn’t plain sailing with lots of “Hello, can you hear me!” and people talking over one another.

We will have spoken to everyone by the 23rd of January and they’ll all go into a hat for the big decision.

Metaphorically speaking. The decision making process will, of course, be rigorous and based on empirical data.

Then we can get down to the serious business of customising the software and, most serious of all, populating the repository with “a representative body of content”. The most important work thereafter will be the ongoing advocacy campaign to the University research community and over the coming months I hope to develop contacts with faculty research committees and with individuals.

So, if you are already convinced of the benefits of self-archiving into an Institutional Repository please contact me and help me spread the word…

Nick