Tim Donohue, Research Programmer at IDEALS, has made his "Making DSpace 1.5 Your Own: Customizations via Overlays" presentation available on SlideShare.

JISC has released the Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the project Web site that describes the project:

The Institutional Repository has become the established technology deployed at universities and other institutions to enable scholars to self-archive their research outputs; the PERSoNA team will be embedding social networking tools which allow chat, tagging and bookmarking (amongst other things) within the repository, and encouraging users to comment on their use of our repository and make recommendations amongst each other leading to the onward discovery of further resources.

Presentations from the ALA Annual 2009 Collecting for Digital Repositories session are now available. (Thanks to Digital & Scholarly).

• Institutional Repositories, Paul Royster
• Building a Life Sciences Journal Archive: Collection Development and Management of PubMedCentral, Dianne McCutcheon
• Collecting for Digital Repositories: Data Perspective, Sayeed Choudhury

Also see the session's annotated bibliography.

In reaction to arXiv’s moderation policies, physicist Philip Gibbs has launched viXra.org, which will not place deposit restrictions on submissions.

Read more about it at "Fledgling Site Challenges arXiv Server."

Presentations from the CNI Spring 2009 Task Force Meeting are now available.

• David S.H. Rosenthal's "How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents?" (video)
• Plenaries
• Project Briefings
• Closing Plenary Session

Digital Repository Federation (DRF) in Japan has released The DRF (Digital Repository Federation) Report during 2006-2008.

Here's an excerpt:

Hokkaido University/Chiba University/Kanazawa University have organized Digital Repository Federation (DRF: 25 universities and 58 universities participated in 2006 and 2007, respectively) and worked on cooperation activities with support from CSI (Cyber Science Infrastructure)in order to form an IR community for IR promotion.

Main activities are:

1. Construction of mailing list for information exchange on IR/Open Access and Wiki.
2. Workshop for IR/Open Access
3. International symposium for IR/Open Access
4. International survey on cooperation model for IR
5. Discussion on ideal future IR community

In "Direct from MS Word to DSpace via SWORD," Stuart Lewis describes how to get documents into DSpace from Word via SWORD and a custom DSpace ingester.

Here's an excerpt:

This complete end to end process allows you to create Word templates, and to mark them up with required and optional fields. It also allows you to embed details of the SWORD deposit repository URL (so the users do not need to know what it is) within the template for easy deposit. This could be used for example for a journal editor to provide a template and a deposit location for new paper submissions all-in-one.

Sun has launched its Enterprise-Wide Digital Repository and Archive solution.

Here's an excerpt from Enterprise-Wide Digital Repositories and Archives:

The result is a solution which is more than the sum of its parts. Drupal with Islandora provides an easy, powerful way to create customized Web sites with an organization's own unique content and branding and offers fine control over access to collections and individual data assets. Adding the Fedora Repository provides durability to the content while also enabling seamless sharing of content with other applications. The Sun Open Archive Framework’s Preservation Software layer adds robust storage protection and data handling combined with powerful management tools, while Sun Open Storage delivers the most cost effective and easily deployed storage available. Together these components get customers up and running fast with the assurance they will be able to grow and evolve the system gracefully, protecting investments.

Read more about it at "New Fedora-based Solution Offerings from Sun and its Partners."

Hugh Glaser, Ian Millard, and Les Carr have self-archived "RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

RKBExplorer (http://rkbexplorer.com/) is a system for publishing Linked Data to Semantic Web standards, also providing a browser that allows users to explore this interlinked Web of Data, primarily in the domain of scientific endeavour. As part of the activity, we have harvested the metadata from a number of the larger ePrints repositories into http://eprints.rkbexplorer.com, and republished it as Linked Data. This allows the RKBExplorer browser to present a unified view of these repositories and related data from other sources such as dblp and dbpedia (a Semantic Web version of Wikipedia). Users can thus investigate concepts related to the ePrints people and articles, such as related people, projects and institutions.

Alma Swan has self-archived her presentation "Keynote: Remember Repositories? They Were All the Rage" in The ECS EPrints Repository.

Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Travis Brooks have self-archived "Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

Laurent Romary and Chris Armbruster have self-archived "Beyond Institutional Repositories" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

The current system of so-called institutional repositories, even if it has been a sensible response at an earlier stage, may not answer the needs of the scholarly community, scientific communication and accompanied stakeholders in a sustainable way. However, having a robust repository infrastructure is essential to academic work. Yet, current institutional solutions, even when networked in a country or across Europe, have largely failed to deliver. Consequently, a new path for a more robust infrastructure and larger repositories is explored to create superior services that support the academy. A future organization of publication repositories is advocated that is based upon macroscopic academic settings providing a critical mass of interest as well as organizational coherence. Such a macro-unit may be geographical (a coherent national scheme), institutional (a large research organization or a consortium thereof) or thematic (a specific research field organizing itself in the domain of publication repositories).

The argument proceeds as follows: firstly, while institutional open access mandates have brought some content into open access, the important mandates are those of the funders and these are best supported by a single infrastructure and large repositories, which incidentally enhances the value of the collection (while a transfer to institutional repositories would diminish the value). Secondly, we compare and contrast a system based on central research publication repositories with the notion of a network of institutional repositories to illustrate that across central dimensions of any repository solution the institutional model is more cumbersome and less likely to achieve a high level of service. Next, three key functions of publication repositories are reconsidered, namely a) the fast and wide dissemination of results; b) the preservation of the record; and c) digital curation for dissemination and preservation. Fourth, repositories and their ecologies are explored with the overriding aim of enhancing content and enhancing usage. Fifth, a target scheme is sketched, including some examples. In closing, a look at the evolutionary road ahead is offered.