DigitalKoans

A paper by researchers from the National Library of Medicine ("Testing the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive") finds that DSpace can support an archive with a million items. The tested system "is built upon MIT's DSpace software (Version 1.4), with some modifications and enhancements to better facilitate batch based processing."

Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

We conclude that the version of DSpace used in SPER (with MySQL database) shows acceptable ingest performance for a million-item archive. . . .

The experimental results shown here pertain to items with mostly one or two monochrome TIFF images, though a few items have up to 100 images. However, a number of inferences may be derived from these results.

• No real problems were found in ingesting a million items to the archive, using a Sun X4500 server machine, in terms of either performance or reliability of the SPER/DSpace software architecture and implementation. . . .
• With the increase in archive size, the average ingest time of an item increases in a smooth and predictable way.
• With increasing number of TIFF images, the ingest time (per item) increases by three to four percent for each additional image.
• If color TIFF images were used, the ingest times would increase slightly due to the overhead of copying additional data to the upload area, and to the archive's asset storage. However, other archival overheads should not change.

JISC's Information Environment team is using IdeaScale to crowdsource a definition of repositories.

The Texas Digital Library is hosting the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. The first issue is now available.

Articles in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research are freely available in the PDF format, and they are under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The journal is edited by Jeremiah Spence, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Communication.

The Texas Digital Library also hosts the Journal of Digital Information. Articles in the Journal of Digital Information are freely available in the PDF or HTML formats, and authors retain the copyright to them. Supported by the Texas A&M University Libraries, it is edited by Cliff McKnight, Professor of Information Studies at Loughborough University, and Scott Phillips, Research and Development Coordinator at the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Initiatives department.

DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) has added the MyDriver service, which allows registered users to create both saved searches that trigger new content alerts via e-mail and personal search filters. It also allows registered users to join communities.

The JISC-funded Names Project is working toward the development of a prototype name authority service for UK repositories that "will reliably and uniquely identify individuals and institutions."

The Names Project has just released the Software Requirements Specification for the Names Project Prototype.

Read more about the project at "What’s in a Name? Prototyping a Name Authority Service for UK Repositories."

SPARC Europe and DRIVER have signed a Memorandum of Agreement to collaborate on promoting digital repositories in Europe.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC Europe and DRIVER today confirmed a need for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories, in systems providing access to texts, data or other types of content. DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories. SPARC Europe and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a common, pan-European data and service infrastructure based on digital repositories. . . .

Collaboration between SPARC Europe and DRIVER is framed by their joint support for an Open Access model for repositories in research institutions. They will present a common lobby at a national and international level to leverage change through the scholarly community within respective institutions and countries. Their reciprocal support will ensure wider access to standards for interoperability between repositories, and the adoption of emerging technical standards to facilitate open archiving. This agreement demonstrates their joint commitment to promote a European network of repositories offering access to research outputs across institutional and national boundaries.

David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, said "Europe is well placed to take a leading role internationally in the development of institutional repositories. A combination of institutional interest, progressive polices from funding bodies, and strong support from the European Commission creates the perfect conditions to foster an open research environment. DRIVER is a key component in underpinning the European repository infrastructure and we are very pleased to cement our already close relationship by signing this agreement."

An interview with Brad McLean, DSpace Foundation's New Technology Director, has been published in the latest issue of NewSpace.

The Australian National University has released its Harvester Service.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Harvester Service is a proxy harvester for processing and routing OAI-PMH Data Provider responses to various applications. It is intended it be used for integration with other applications requiring a harvesting service.

Building on the work of the SWORD Project, the EM-Loader project will build software that allows authors to use the metadata from PublicationsList.org to deposit works in the Depot.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We will show proof of concept at an early stage by building a web service module that connects two existing services: the Depot, the JISC repository for researchers who do not have other provision; and PublicationsList.org, a service for researchers to build a web page listing their publications. Instead of recreating interoperability standards from scratch, the project has adopted and expanded the SWORD Deposit API.

In our revised approach we suggest that depositing papers into repositories can be made easier and rewarding for researchers by concentrating initially on compiling a personal publications list with complete metadata and then performing a batch submission to the repository.

Traditionally stage 1—compiling a personal bibliography—is by manual entry, but this can be made much easier with batch search and select of items from citation databases such as Web of Science and PubMed, and import from personal bibliography tools such as BibTeX, EndNote and Reference Manager. Full text of papers can be uploaded and attached to metadata in stage 2 (typically in PDF or DOC formats).

Functionality for stages 1 and 2 already exists and is provided to this project through PublicationsList.org. The main focus of our project activity is to build the workflow to enable all the structured metadata to be forwarded to the appropriate repository, alongside the associated digital object (full text) where available.

Read more about it at: EM-Loader and the EM-Loader proposal.

(Thanks to Open Access News.)

The Repositories Support Project has released three repository planning checklists:

• Building Repositories Checklists
• Expanding Content Checklist
• Increasing Usage Checklist