Open Metrics for Open Repositories at OR2012

Next week I’m looking forward to visiting Edinburgh for the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2012) and delivering my very first Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat apparently) a presentation format based on 20 slides of 20 seconds.

“Open Metrics for Open Repositories” is based on the unpublished paper written with Brian Kelly, Jenny Delasalle, Mark Dewey, Owen Stephens, Gareth Johnson and Stephanie Taylor available from http://opus.bath.ac.uk/30226/

Open Metrics for Open Repositories at OR2012

View more PowerPoint from Nick Sheppard

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Closing the ukoer circle?

The titular Unicycle of our phase 1 ukoer project at Leeds Met referred to “a prototype mechanism for the export and import of open educational resources” that would seek to “share OER materials with…HE community via JORUM”.

To recap, under the ukoer programme, it was mandated that all resources released by an institutional project must also be made available from the national repository service Jorum. The method used by most phase 1 projects was harvest of metadata only by RSS, however, in our case, we were unable to produce an RSS feed in the necessary format and in lieu of OAI-PMH which was not supported by Jorum, the requirement was fulfilled by a full IMSCP transfer – I simply uploaded a zip file of all resources that the JORUM tech folk were able to ingest directly into DSpace. At the time this was seen as the ideal solution for Jorum which, as a “repository”, should seek to preserve actual files rather than just URIs pointing to resources elsewhere. However, it meant that our files were duplicated in both repositories and that our repository would inevitably be eclipsed by Jorum in search engine results. I’ve explored these implications elsewhere and they have also cropped up as part of the ACErep project and I have become convinced that a better solution for us would be for metadata only to be harvested (or possibly deposited by SWORD*) including a URI in our institutional repository.

(Our OAI-PMH is already harvested by the Xpert repository at Nottingham University)

As ukoer folk will be aware, the management of Jorum is currently undergoing substantive restructuring; hitherto a joint project between EDINA and MIMAS, from 1st August 2011, the service will be managed exclusively by MIMAS and will liaise more closely with the NDLR – http://www.ndlr.ie/ – in Ireland (also based on DSpace) and utilising a common, Open Source code-base.

One of the likely early developments from this is that Jorum will soon support OAI-PMH – the protocol is already supported by the NDLR running on a more current version of DSpace – allowing us, I hope, to revisit how our resources (metadata only) are ingested into Jorum. In addition, MIMAS will be putting further development efforts into enhancing the Jorum API which has already been identified as a pre-requisite for both our ACErep project and the PORSCHE project at Newcastle University.

* SWORD deposit (metadata only) into Jorum in tandem with file deposit into a local repository should be technically possible I think and would potentially have the benefit of records being available immediately from the API rather than the inevitable delay associated with harvest (Xpert harvests overnight).

This evolving national infrastructure is obviously essential to advocacy around Open Educational Resources; the development, release, use and reuse of OER at an institutional level and will necessarily underpin developing institutional infrastructures. For example, in conjunction with promotional activities here at Leeds Met and technical developments from Intrallect – notably a desktop SWORD client (beta) that can capture core ukoer metadata and deposit to our intraLibrary installation – I hope that we can close the ukoer circle such that teaching staff can source their own OER from Jorum, Xpert or other institutional or subject source – reuse and/or repurpose under the terms of Creative Commons and redeposit back into our local repository and thence automatically to Jorum / Xpert / other syndicated OER services (e.g. Learning Registry) via OAI-PMH and / or SWORD.

Interviewed at OER Hack Day

Nick Sheppard at DevCSI’s OER Hack Day from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Musings on the developing OER infrastructure

I had an interesting conversation last week with two colleagues from the Faculty of Business and Law, both of whom are intimately involved with the delivery of Technology Enhanced learning. In a nutshell they were concerned that neither our institutional nor the national infrastructure currently comes close to meeting their requirements in terms of (subject specific) OER, especially in view of strategic drivers at Leeds Met around the use of OER in curriculum development.

One of the issues that arose and that has certainly been mentioned elsewhere, was that they would want additional metadata, about module and level for example. I emphasised that Unicycle – indeed all of the first phase of ukoer – were pilot projects and, as discussed on this blog during the project, a lightweight Application Profile in line with CETIS guidelines for the ukoer programme was used to ensure interoperability with Jorum. From an institutional or faculty perspective, I don’t think it would be technically difficult to, say, have a separate collection for FBL with any additional metadata that could be presented through a faculty specific portal; the resources could go in two collections so they would also sit in the main OER collection with a cut-down application profile from where they would be harvested by Jorum / Xpert etc. Workflows notwithstanding…I’ll get to that…

At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, I’m becoming increasingly determined that local, institutional OER infrastructures need to develop much more closely with the national infrastructure which needs to be able to manage whatever metadata we throw at it. My ideal scenario is pretty straightforward really, at least in principle, if not practice:

• We can manage OER in our repository with whatever metadata our users require; this would include everything currently in the Application Profile but may also include, for example, module/level or additional subject specific taxonomies
• The national service will harvest (all) metadata from our repository by OAI-PMH and ensure that it is *all* searchable from an open API allowing the development of bespoke / subject specific web-sites
• This approach will have the benefit of digital assets being preserved in one location (our own institutional repository) while providing several points of access (our repository interface, Jorum interface/widget, Xpert, multiple APIs)
• Our institutional repository and bespoke web-sites (using either our own API or that of the national service) will “piggyback” on Jorum’s Google pagerank thereby improving discoverability

I am aware that this particular scenario is perhaps oriented around my own requirements, nevertheless, it is based on well established repository technology and would be extensible to other institutional (OER) repositories.

Exposing OER content from @LeedsMetRepo to be reliably harvested by Jorum or Xpert is only part of the picture, however.  My workflows, to be frank, are somewhat esoteric, mediated by me and one or two colleagues, not scalable and unlikely to pass the repository-manager-hit-by-a-bus test. There are several tools that I am interested in exploring in this context outlined below:

MEDEV open educational resources good practice risk assessment toolkit (development version)

This is a hybrid of several tools that began life as part of the OOER project under phase 1 of ukoer and allows you to upload a resource, add metadata via a web-form, apply an appropriate licence, run your resource through the MEDEV open educational resources risk assessment toolkit (beta) and (this is the good though yet to be implemented bit)  syndicate the metadata (only?) to several locations including Jorum / Xpert (and a local repository?)

Sign up to have a go and help with testing at www.medev.ac.uk/oer/signup

SWORD / EasyDeposit

I must confess I have a minor obsession with SWORD and there is no doubt that it offers enormous potential for simplifying repository workflow. As part of the development work on ACErep and with a little help from its developer @stuartlewis, we have now tested EasyDeposit – http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/ – and successfully posted a METS package to the Jorum development server. We should also be able to configure the client to deposit to @LeedsMetRepo (though this will require us to write an IMS content packager for EasyDeposit – see here for more info)

Of course, I’m inclined to think that the best solution for us is to have the digital asset in @LeedsMetRepo with just a metadata record in Jorum…as outlined above, harvest may be the way to go but may it also be worth exploring a SWORD client that simultaneously pushes the full content package into @LeedsMetRepo and metadata only into Jorum?

Xerte

Another issue, I think, is the difficulty folk have actually creating high-quality interactive OERs and the need for an institutionally-supported easy-to-use authoring tool which is where Xerte – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/ – might come in – “a server-based suite of tools for content authors. Elearning materials can be authored quickly and easily using browser-based tools, with no programming required. Xerte Online Toolkits is aimed at content authors, who will assemble content using simple wizards. Content authors can easily collaborate on projects. Xerte Online Toolkits can be extended by developers using Xerte.”

I’ve already approached our Info Technology service to enquire about having Xerte installed at Leeds Met and I hope to have a test implementation at some point in the not-too-distant future.

VLE integration

Would more sophisticated VLE integration help OER really take off? We currently have a “PowerLink” in BlackBoard which just comprises a simple search box for keyword or simple-string searching i.e. it’s not terribly useful unless you already know what it there. As well as much more sophisticated search of local and national repositories it would be great to be able to deposit back into a repository from a VLE as explored by the MrCute for Moodle projects (1 and 2) – http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute/.  I don’t know of any comparable work with BlackBoard…or whether the MrCute code could be implemented in that (commercial) environment.

The developmental overheads for all of these tools are considerable – there are no quick fixes I’m afraid. I was quite interested in some discussion at the JISC conference last week – session recording here – that there is evidence that open release acts to improve the quality of institutional teaching resources and ultimately what we should be aiming for is to promote institutional release via our repository and associated tools alongside discovery using aggregations like Jorum/Xpert

Metadata and Me

I’ve been invited to speak on Friday at an event in York – The Metadata Forum – Metadata For Complex Objects and will be focussing on our ukoer project Unicycle which utilised a fairly lightweight Application Profile based on programme recommendations from CETIS – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/

N.B. Worth reviewing these in the context of CETIS’ updated recommendations for phase 2 – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2010/12/03/oer-2-technical-requirements/ (Resource description)

I’ll also be considering questions of interoperability and a few ideas we are exploring in the context of our ACErep project around the possibility of building value added services on centralised repositories of harvested data.

Slides reviewed below:

Slide 3 – Lightening bio

I’ve included this as my (lack of) professional background in the area strikes me as relevant for good or ill – I’ve only been working with repositories/metadata since October 2007 and everything I have learned has been on the job, so to speak.  I am not a qualified librarian or professional cataloguer (shambrarian at best) and I think this has had both benefits and drawbacks; I am *ahem* unrestricted by formal theory and have also needed to find my way through a great deal of esoteric jargon often to gain some fairly basic understanding   –  ultimately, I think this has necessarily resulted in a pragmatic approach and a willingness to take advice!

Slide 4 – Context – Repository Projects at Leeds Met

Repository projects at Leeds Met, in chronological order, are the Repository Start-up itself, Streamline, PERSoNA, Unicycle, Bibliosight – all funded by JISC – and  our current ACErep project which is funded by HEFCE.

Our repository platform is intraLibrary which uses IEEE LOM metadata.

(click for larger image)

Slide 5 – UKOER project – Unicycle

• Funded under JISC ukoer (phase 1)
• Develop process by which staff able to contribute to and draw upon a central repository of OER
• Very granular approach to OER
• “Resources” rather than “Courseware”
• Simple Application Profile – ukoer guidelines
• Mediated deposit
• Leeds Met repository, Jorum Open and other suitable outlets

Slide 6 – An Application Profile for UKOER

• Discussion coordinated by CETIS  http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/03/30/metadata-guidelines-for-the-oer-programme/
• Keep it simple
• Mandatory fields
• Recommended fields
• Individual projects should think about their own metadata requirements
• Interoperability

Slide 7 – Mandatory metadata

• Programme tag – ukoer
• Author / owner / contributor
• Date
• URL
• Title
• Technical Information

(Licence info soon became mandatory!)

Slide 7 – Recommended metadata

• Language
• Subject classifications
• Keywords
• Tags
• Comments
• Description

Slide 9 – Example ukoer record

http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2076&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources

Slide 10 – Interoperability?

• Leeds Met – intraLibrary (IEEE LOM)
• JorumOpen – DSpace (Dublin Core)
• Harvest ukoer projects by RSS (link only)
• Bulk upload of IMS Content Package (Resource + imsmanifest.xml)
• Virtual Maths resource in JorumOpen
• Little point in metadata not supported by Jorum (or is there?)

Slide 11 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Search across multiple platforms for ALPS resources
• Download resource from any of the platforms into the working arena of their choice
• Adapt existing resource to suit local use
• Deposit original/adapted resource into one or more of the repositories maintained by CETL partners

Slide 12 – ALPS CETL repository project (ACErep)

• Different software uses different metadata standards/Application Profiles
• ALPS may require different metadata than UKOER
• Explicit priority from user group: resources presented in context of specific learning/assessment outcomes
• Can Jorum accommodate this?

Slide 13 – The solution – Xpert?

• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/
• Distributed repository of e-learning resources
• Harvest by RSS and OAI-PMH
• APIs available – Xpert Labs
• http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/labs/

Slide 14 – Harvest OAI-PMH/search using Xpert API

Slide 15 – Possible scenario for SWORD deposit

Slide 16 – SWORD and metadata

• intraLibrary accepts IMSCP by SWORD
• JorumOpen (DSpace) accepts METS by SWORD
• Digirep – no SWORD yet (expect IMSCP)
• LUDOS – no SWORD yet (expect METS)
• Need to package metadata as IMSCP and METS

Xpert vs Jorum?

Xpert – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/ – at Nottingham University is a “distributed repository of e-learning resources” and contains metadata and resources for almost 70,000 learning objects from over 3000 providers. Recently the project has released some interesting tools in the form of Xpert labs including APIs to return CC licensed OER in a variety of data formats and a basic SDK (Software Development Kit).  There is also a code snippet to add Xpert search to your site like this – http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/xpert.html.

As a manager of an OER repository I am chiefly interested in assembling and preserving a collection of high quality assessment, learning and teaching material from my institution that can be discovered and reused effectively by teachers/lecturers in UK HE (and globally) and have been able to work with @Xpert_project to ensure that an OAI-PMH feed from our repository is harvested by the service – this took a little bit of code-tinkering (thanks to @patlockley) as our metadata incorporates multiple <dc:identifier> fields the first of which holds the OAI ID with the second holding the location URL – the end result from Xpert is a nice record of our ukoer including a properly formatted description, the URL for the CC license and, as I’ve just noticed,  related resources – for instance, the search below returns 4 component parts of a SCORM package that I added yesterday (that, in its complete state, would not run in our VLE – a SCORM 1.2 LMS – as the large number of JavaScript variables exceeds what is possible under version 1.2  resulting in an error after slide 6 – it plays fine in intraLibrary though). I also used this opportunity to experiment with intraLibrary’s “linked resources” functionality which Xpert can display from the XML return:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/scoreresults.php?keywords=leedsmet&search_all.x=69&search_all.y=18&search_all=all&ukoer=on

What is missing, however, is any indication that this resource emanates from Leeds Met – think I’ll need to add a <dc:publisher> field to fix this – currently we only provide <dc:creator> which Xpert maps to author; this also means that our institution does not appear in Advanced Search under Institution…

It’s probably too much to ask Pat to add the link URLs using <lom:identifier></lom:identifier> as I hope to do from Open Search (and Xpert labs does include an API specifically to return related objects using the base url http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ adding a list of comma separated keywords, then a number of results you’d like to return to the end of this URL e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/related/ukoer,5.)

As these are SCORM packages, though, I would like to add a link to download the package itself which could then be imported into a VLE…once again this is functionality that we are yet to incorporate into Open Search and they currently just play directly in the browser or they can be linked directly from Blackboard using our PowerLink but the necessary URL to download the package is in the SRU and OAI-PMH returns:

<package:packageType>scorm</package:packageType>
<package:packageTypeVersion>1.2</package:packageTypeVersion>
<package:packageDownloadLocator>http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary?command=open-package-download&learning_object_key=i06n105033t.zip</package:packageDownloadLocator>

These resources then, made live yesterday afternoon, are already available from Xpert; they will also,  eventually, find their way into Jorum Open but this requires further intervention from me – we’re not using the Jorum RSS harvest for technical reasons but I don’t *think* that facility could perform a daily update harvest in the same way as OAI-PMH. I’m still working on the workflow for regularly packaging my IMSCPs and publishing them as a .zip for the kindly folk at Jorum to harvest from Open Search (there has, in any case, not been much new added since the end of the Unicycle project – http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/view_record.php?identifier=2845&SearchGroup=Open+Educational+Resources).  When our processes are fully embedded in institutional practice I anticipate putting up an archive say every month; of course this will have the “advantage” of preserving the full IMSCP in JorumOpen rather than just the metadata and the link which is all that is harvested by Xpert but I don’t think this is a particular concern for *me* as I am responsible for my own preservation via our own formal repository platform (this building on the discussion from my last post.)

Xpert grew out of JISC Rapid Innovation funding last year which perhaps goes some way to explaining the (arguably) more agile development compared to Jorum (who I really don’t wish to be disparaging towards – I think the @jorumteam have done a fantastic job in the past 12 months and the national service is really taking shape; they obviously have a more formal remit than Xpert and have responded very positively to a wide array of stakeholders as evidenced in their recently published Road-map – they have also been very helpful to me and Unicycle on a personal/project level and this post is more about bigging-up the small guy than doing down the big-guy!)

JorumOpen currently holds an impressive 10 and a half thousand  OERs catalogued as HE – still a fraction of the size of Xpert (is sheer size actually likely to become an issue when searching for suitable OERs in either service?)  In addition, a large proportion of these records (how many?) are likely to be metadata/link only as they have been harvested by RSS which presents potential issues for preservation (see last post)…in any case, all credit to Xpert who have developed a responsive service that goes a long way to it’s stated aim of “delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources” and providing real value to the (global) HE community to boot!

OER repositories and preservation – the elephant (not in) the room?

Way back at the beginning of the ukoer programme there were discussions around including a link to a resource in JorumOpen rather than the file itself; Gareth Waller emphasised on my post at the time that “having a chain of URLs does not present any technical problems in the sense that the end resource can still be found, the problems only appear when the link chain breaks (either via a bad URL or a server not responding).” He also emphasised that “if the physical resource is submitted into Jorum, we may be able to offer enhanced searching to the end user for that particular item e.g. full text search on a pdf. If a link is submitted, we can only allow the user to search on the metadata associated with the resource.”

The issue has cropped up again recently on the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list where @lescarr makes the point that, of the recently announced six winners in the Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition, which are all discoverable from Jorum, none are actually deposited in the national oer repository – just metadata records with a web link to the location elsewhere on the web.  Les goes on to emphasise that, while this is perfectly useful, “one of the raisons d’etre of repositories is to provide persistent, safe access to valuable material”.

There was a lot of discussion throughout the ukoer programme around the pros and cons of duplicating resources in Jorum as opposed to simply linking to resources held in other repositories/on institutional or third-party websites and also on the development of tools to harvest metadata via RSS and OAI with different projects having different preferences depending on the tools they were using and the types of resources they were releasing (see http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/12/09/oer-rss-and-jorumopen/).  Responding to a clear demand from the ukoer community who understandably did not wish to dual deposit both locally and into the national repository, Jorum therefore developed a tool to harvest metadata via RSS (which I presume is why many records are metadata only).

Our Unicycle project, in fact, as one of the ukoer projects using a formal repository platform that makes it straightforward to export resources as IMS content packages,  is one of the few projects, I think, to actually bulk upload our OERs to Jorum – however, many of the resources in our repository are themselves metadata records only that point to an external resource on leedmet.ac.uk, YouTube, joebloggs.com or wherever which clearly carries implications for preservation…Our OERs are also harvested by the xpert repository at Nottingham using OAI-PMH. Xpert is “a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources…to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use.”  As such, there are no resources in Xpert per se, just links to resources harvested from various feeds – which means, of course, that it cannot have preservation as one of its raisons d’etre (I recently learned during a twitter conversation with the repository itself that xpert use a 404 checker that checks all their links once a week and deletes any that are broken.)

The ukoer programme was necessarily none-proscriptive around technology (apart from mandating “deposit” in Jorum Open) and, as made clear in @kavubob‘s series of posts The use of…in the ukoer programme a wide range of tools and platforms were used including but by no means limited to formal repositories  – Web 2.0 technologies in particular lent themselves to the programme, even for projects like our own that did use a formal repository we were often simply curating resources on external web-sites (Web 2.0 is third party pretty much by definition and a well established source of anxiety for preservationists).  What, then, are the implications for preservation of OERs and is it an elephant that we will struggle to keep in the room?  To what extent does it matter if an individual resource, perhaps poorly curated, disappears from a specific web-location; if it has been “released into the wild” under Creative Commons (and it’s any good) then there is a good chance it has already been reused or duplicated elsewhere – perhaps disaggregated or modified (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)?

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).

Unicycle project completed (and some unfinished business)

Our ukoer project Unicycle completed at the end of April 2010 – Simon has now submitted the report to JISC which I shall link to from here when it is published.

The main aim of the project has been to build a ‘unicycle’: a prototype mechanism for the export and import of open educational resources at Leeds Metropolitan University and increase the release of open educational resources (OER) from Leeds Met into the further and higher education communities.

The image below links to a presentation that Simon delivered at OER10 at Clare College Cambridge (22nd – 24th March 2010) (PDF format)

Unicycle, like the JISC ukoer programme as a whole, was very much a pilot project and as Repository Development Officer I was mainly involved with, well, repository development rather than wider institutional policy and process development; technical infrastructure, however, is obviously an integral aspect of ukoer both at an institutional level and, by definition, across the wider information environment so programme and project have certainly informed ongoing repository development here at Leeds Met.

(By no means all ukoer projects use repositories and the variegated technologies across the programme are explored in a series of recent posts by John Robertson of CETIS – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/johnr/category/ukoer/.)

…and the unfinished business

It has been particularly interesting working with Jorum – as a national repository service it is a condition of funding that all projects funded under ukoer must also make their resources available via JorumOpen which is an ongoing challenge; it became apparent very early in the programme that folk did not particularly relish the prospect of duplicating their workload by uploading and cataloguing resources in two locations and Jorum has investigated several methods for harvesting institutionally held collections and/or bulk upload of resources.

There are two methods that have so far been implemented:

RSS

RSS was explored quite early in the programme as a potential technology for metadata harvesting and has the benefit that it is relatively simple to implement.   Jorum have incorporated an RSS reader into the modified DSpace repository that is used for JorumOpen and projects are able to submit an RSS feed for harvest as long as that feed meets certain criteria (e.g. Only a RSS version 2 feed is currently supported/the feed should include a UK Eng&Wales v2 CC).

There are also several caveats to harvesting in this way:

• The feed is not continually polled for new content. Normal feed readers, continually poll the feed and any new items are displayed. The current functionality simply reads the feed when it is deposited – if the same feed is submitted again, it will store duplicates.
• The file data of a resource in the feed is not stored in JorumOpen. A link is simply created pointing to the resource as indicated by the RSS feed (the “link” element).
• Items within a feed are not auto classified within Jorum. In other words, every item in a feed is stored within a single collection as chosen by the admin user i.e. a top level JACS or LearnDirect classification. Having individual feed for each classification such as the OpenLearn model would ensure that items are classified correctly as these feeds can be deposited separately.

The default RSS generated by intraLibrary contains just title and description fields and is therefore not suitable for deposit using this method. It may be possible to programmatically generate an appropriate feed containing the required data but bulk upload of IMS content packages represents a much easier method for us that also has the advantage of depositing the resource itself in to JorumOpen rather than just the metadata.

Note:  Some of the issues around using RSS to harvest metadata in this way are explored in more detail in a paper by Jorum Technical manager Gareth Waller

Bulk upload of IMS content packages

It is relatively straightforward in intraLibrary to bulk-export IMS content packages to generate a .zip file up to a maximum of 100MB at a time.  Each .zip in turn contains multiple .zip files for each resource which contains the file (unless it’s a URL) and the IMS manifest with all the metadata, in the format specified by Jorum.

We are not quite home and dry just yet and have run into a few problems associated with the different metadata standards utilised by our own intraLibrary (UK LOM) and Jorum’s DSpace (DC); packages consisting of web resources from intraLibrary are not parsed because the packager implementation expects a web link to be in a certain metadata element in the manifest but intraLibrary places the link in a different element so any web resource exported from intraLibrary will not be ingested successfully (the metadata record will appear in DSpace but the web link is missing.) In addition to this, multiple authors and author VCARD metadata from our packages was not in the format expected by the Jorum packager which can result in resources marked as “Unknown Author”.

All is not lost, however,  and Jorum plan to introduce a code change to programmatically manipulate the packaged metadata before ingest so that the web-link is in the correct field and the author vCARD is in the suitable format for DSpace; Jorum also have an intraLibrary repository from which they may wish to bulk export records in the future.

Other issues and niggles

There are several other issues and niggles that I have become aware of through Unicycle – some relatively easy to fix, others less so.  I’ll just list a few of them here and aim to explore further in future posts:

1. Several formats raise issues for reuse:
   • Flash: we have several Flash resources comprising multiple .swf that can-not easily be linked in intraLibrary so are just uploaded as a zip
   • Respondus: A proprietary WebCT file format that must be exported to WebCT/Blackboard from Respondus software
   • webct.assessment: Another proprietary WebCT file format (as .zip) that simply does not work in WebCT/Blackboard when it is downloaded from intraLibrary (though the original.zip is fine – may be due to a modified imsmanifest.xml)
2. Managing packages:  Currently the majority of our OER are single files; in order to preview SCORM packages etc we may require some major changes to the SRU functionality of Open Search (may want multiple download links for example.)
3. Comments and tags:  IntraLibrary does support user generated tags and comments as well as an Amazon style star rating system; however, it is only possible to access these facilities when logged into the system and not via SRU which means that comments, tags or star-rating cannot be added or retrieved from the Open Search interface.
4. Workflows:  Not terribly satisfactory, especially if we want folk uploading their own OERs rather than the fully mediated process we have followed for Unicycle.  Ideally we would like a very straightforward SWORD tool.