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“Open Metrics for Open Repositories” is based on the unpublished paper written with Brian Kelly, Jenny Delasalle, Mark Dewey, Owen Stephens, Gareth Johnson and Stephanie Taylor available from http://opus.bath.ac.uk/30226/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

Extending the CRIS model to a ukoer workflow?

One of the conclusions of the Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group (RPAG), which advised the JISC Repositories Programmes between 2005 and  2009,  was that teaching materials had not been well served by attempting to integrate them into institutional repositories as they had very different workflows and requirements to scholarly works and other research outputs (thanks to Lorna Campbell – citation needed.)

It is still the case, I think, that research management infrastructure is generally further developed than that for OER including Open Access repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) most often commercial software implementations of Atira Pure, Symplectic Elements and Avedas Converis. Typically these systems are dynamically populated with records from the institutional HR database and are designed to allow staff to manage their own research profile. Arguably this reflects the greater prestige, real or perceived, still implicit in research activity compared with teaching and learning. Associated to this, academic libraries are primarily focussed on access to research materials and historically have not been closely involved with the management of teaching materials which, where they are available digitally, are often in virtual learning environments (VLEs) to which the library may not have access (Robertson 2010) and may be poorly integrated into the users’ view of library resources (Hirst, 2009)

At Leeds Metropolitan University we have established a “blended” repository comprising both research and OER and have worked closely with Jorum (the national OER repository in the UK) to ensure both that openly licenced material from across the sector can be “harvested” into our local repository and that institutional OER can be automatically disseminated to the national service. In addition, the library has implemented the EBSCO Discovery Service which provides a mechanism to explore a wide range of library resources including the library catalogue, electronic databases and, crucially, the repository meaning we are able to configure the respective systems to enable library users to utilise the main library search facility to discover a wide range of openly licenced material from across the UK Higher Education sector (see previous post). Finally, in order to make it easier to maintain a constant, up-to-date picture of research activity across the University we have also recently implemented Symplectic Elements which automatically retrieves bibliographic data from citation databases and enables files to be uploaded directly to the repository. Records can also be imported (e.g. from EndNote) or manually entered; resource type and metadata can be easily configured for sub-sets of users and the system can pass any MIME type to the repository which means in principle it can be extended for use by teaching and learning staff (who may not be research active) to curate OER and offer an easy deposit mechanism to the local repository and subsequently to Jorum.

This approach could have several benefits, particularly for non-research intensive institutions in a difficult economic environment for Higher Education, providing an OER workflow that is closely related to that for research and deriving greater value for money from the investment in technical infrastructure which in turn will also have the potential to increase the esteem, recognition and reward associated with openly licenced teaching and learning resources.

Discovering ukoer at Leeds Metropolitan

Recently I blogged over at http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/discovering-the-leeds-metropolitan-university-repository/ about integrating the repository with the EBSCO Discovery Service and I just wanted to expand a little, specifically in the context of OER and the (perpetually) developing infrastructure that I hope will ultimately result in OER from across the sector being discoverable from EDS…

…a long term objective is also to ensure that the repository is well embedded in the institutional infrastructure and that relevant resources are easily discoverable, both within and without, by our own students and staff as well as scholars in the wider world, whatever discovery tools they may use and whatever their level of information literacy.

The EBSCO Discovery Service provides a mechanism, a one-stop-shop or library search engine, to explore a wide range of Library resources including the Library catalogue and electronic databases and we have been able to liaise with EBSCO to add the repository as a searchable target.

Currently the repository includes just ukoer released by staff at Leeds Metropolitan; the most recent version of intraLibrary, however, developed as part of the PORSCHE project, and due by the end of the month, includes the facility to harvest metadata from other OER repositories, particularly Jorum, so that we can search from our local search interface and from EDS:

An institutional tangram – musings on developing an integrated research management system

“The tangram (Chinese: 七巧板; pinyin: qī qiǎo bǎn; literally “seven boards of skill”) is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only an outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which may not overlap.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram

Having implemented an institutional repository at Leeds Metropolitan and learning by experience some of the difficulties associated with advocacy around the use of that repository (both for OA research and OER) I have become all too aware “that repositories are ‘lonely and isolated’; still very much under-used and not sufficiently linked to other university systems”. So said JISC’s Andy McGregor at an event called “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” in May 2010 at Leeds Metropolitan (see my report for Ariadne here). This quote is still relevant, though  perhaps a little less so than when I heard it nearly 2 years ago, thanks to the ongoing work of JISC and particularly the RSP. In any case, the event was a revelation for me and I have coveted a so called Current Research Information Management systems (or CRIS for short) ever since!

And now, in Symplectic Elements, I have one…or at least the components of one (click on image for full size.)

The finished tangram? (click on image for full size)

It’s a puzzle though. A tangram if you will…one with considerably more than seven pieces:

intraLibrary, Symplectic, institutional website, University Research Office (URO), faculty research administrators, The Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic staff, web-developers, bibliographic information, research outputs, Open Educational Resources (OER)…

In fact, this may well not be all the pieces…pretty sure a few have been pushed down the back of the settee. I’ll look for them later.

Anyway, tortured metaphors aside, I have become increasingly aware that working in a large institution, in a role that encompasses technology and institutional policy (though I’m not, by any means, a policy maker…or indeed a real techie) is largely about communication and getting the right people, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time! Absorb policy and technical requirements from senior stakeholders and communicate those requirements to the proper techies – while also trying to ensure any motivating passions of one’s own don’t get lost along the way – Open Access to research and Open Education in my case.

For various reasons, individual user accounts have never been implemented for our repository and historically it has been administered centrally from the Library. In Symplectic we now have a system that is populated with central HR data; all staff will have an account they can access with their standard user name and password from where they can manage their own research profile including uploading full-text outputs directly to the repository*. In addition, administration by the University Research Office and faculty research administrators will be more easily centralised (particularly for the REF).

* In actual fact this functionality is not yet available in lieu of development work from Intrallect to capture the Atom feed from Symplectic and transform with XSLT to a suitable format for intraLibrary. I think.

One of the clever bits of functionality used to sell the software is automatic retrieval of bibliographic data from online citation databases – we are currently running against various APIs, Web of Science (lite), PubMed and arXiv – but I think this may actually be a bit of a red-herring for an institution like Leeds Metropolitan – at least until more (preferably free) data sources are available (JournalToCs API please!); early testing has shown, at best, it will only retrieve a subset of (the types of) outputs that we will need to record and it will be necessary to manually import existing records (e.g. EndNote) as well as implementing other administrative procedures at faculty level to capture information at the point of publication, especially for book-items, monographs, conference material, reports and grey literature.

More important, I think, to ensure that academic staff actually engage with the software rather than just seeing it as a tool for administrators, is to re-use the data to generate a list of research outputs – a dynamic bibliography – on a personal web-profile which has the potential to dramatically increase the visibility of research including Open Access to full-text.

Developing staff profiles of this type has been something of an obsession of mine for a while; we explored doing so from the repository (using SRU and email address as a Unique Identifier) and did develop a working prototype. Symplectic, however, integrated with central HR data and with its more sophisticated API, should make it much easier, at least from a technical perspective, and we are currently liaising with the central web-team to develop something similar to this example from Keele University – http://www.keele.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/mormerod/ (like us, Keele run Symplectic alongside intraLibrary.)

N.B. From the Symplectic interface, a user is able to “favourite” a research record and a flag comes out in the xml from the API which I understand is used on this page to display “Selected Publications”. DOI is also available from the API to link to the published version and if a user uploads full-text to the repository from Symplectic, this link is also in the xml – the first two records on this page include links to the full-text in Keele’s intraLibrary repository.

Our own Library web-dev Mike Taylor has been looking at the Symplectic API in detail and has put together a couple of prototype pages on a development server and after a meeting this week with a representative of the central web-team I’m reasonably confident we can move forward with this work fairly quickly…though there’s still a bit of a chicken & egg situation in populating the Symplectic database to then be re-surfaced via the API in this way.

There is also the question of whether we might alter our repository policy to become full-text only; one limitation of repositories across UK HE from an original conception (in the arXiv mould) of holding, disseminating and preserving full-text research outputs, is that they have in effect become “diluted” by metadata records for which it has not (yet) been possible to procure full-text or copyright does not permit deposit and “hybrid” repositories like ours, of full-text and metadata typically contain more metadata records than full-text (see figures from the RSP survey here). As I have argued on the UKCoRR blog, I think is makes sense to separate a bibliographic database (in Symplectic) from full-text only in a repository.

N.B. As Symplectic does not have the same search functionality as the repository, this approach has the potential disadvantage that it makes it more difficult to search across the entire corpus of research records (though one potential solution may be along the lines of that implemented by City Research Online which, in my view is rapidly becoming an exemplar of a research management system (Symplectic) + full-text repository (EPrints). Another good example is  St Andrews (PURE + DSpace) who presented a case study at “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” (video here.)

And what of OER? Along with our EasyDeposit SWORD interface, using OER to resource the refocus the undergraduate curriculum and the soon to be released intraLibrary 3.5 that will enable us to harvest OER from other repositories…for now I think they may be the bits down the back of the settee…

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.

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!

British Library special collection: ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport

Hylton, K. (2008) 'Race' and Sport: Critical Race Theory. Routledge.

Dr. Kevin Hylton, Course Leader – MA Sport, Leisure and Equity here at Leeds Met, is working with the British Library to assemble a special collection of material around ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport.  Dr Hylton has already collaborated with the British Library on their website Sport & Society – the Summer Olympics and Paralympics through the lens of Social Science which includes a synopsis of his book ‘Race’ and Sport: Critical Race Theory published by Routledge and which “takes on the controversial subject of racial attitudes in sport and beyond. With sport as his primary focus, Hylton unpacks the central concepts of race, ethnicity, social constructionism and racialisation, and helps the reader navigate the complicated issues and debates that surround the study of race in sport.”

The new collection will be archived at www.webarchive.org.uk which, under the auspices of the BL, aims “to collect and permanently preserve the UK web” – more info here – and the Public Call states that “we hope that the ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Sport Collection will provide a valuable resource for researchers now and in the future.”

As far as I understand, Dr. Hylton is currently at the stage of identifying suitable material for the archive and asked me whether it was possible to cross-search UK Institutional Repositories to discover relevant full-text research material in this area (having, on numerous occasions, had the [mis]fortune to hear my advocacy on Open Access and repositories!).  As far as I am aware there are two services currently available – the UK Institutional Repository Search from MIMAS and the custom Google Search at OpenDoar (I’d be interested to know of any others) and some preliminary searches yielded a few relevant results – though there is no way of specifying full-text only, of course, which means many results are bib records only.

It’s perhaps still a moot point whether there is real value to a fully functional IR cross-search tool (in the style of http://rian.ie/en for Irish repositories) and the MIMAS and OpenDoar tools are described respectively as “demonstrator” and “beta” but, as Dr. Hylton’s interest supports, I’m inclined to think that such a tool, properly promoted and combined with a fully realised system of Green OA would indeed benefit the academic community, especially since Google abandoned support for OAI-PMH; I do think it would be necessary, somehow, to be able to filter by full text however which perhaps keeps the idea moot for now…

In the meantime, if anyone does have appropriate full text material archived in their repository please let us know and/or pass the call on to interested colleagues.

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.

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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.