Presentations from the SPARC 2010 Digital Repositories Meeting are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Reputation management systems," "new spin on Open Access," "stretching knowledge bases," "exposing reality," and "valuing knowledge exchange at the institutional level" were just a few of the ways participants in the SPARC 2010 Digital Repositories Meeting expressed their vision for advancing repository advocacy into the fuller fabric of the Open Access movement. The sentiment is one outcome of the gathering, jointly hosted by SPARC, SPARC Japan/NII, and SPARC Europe, in Baltimore on November 8 & 9, 2010. SPARC has today released summaries, slides, and video from the event.

The SPARC digital repositories meetings have played an integral part in advancing the potential of open online repositories to expand the dissemination of scholarship and transform scholarly communication. First held in 2004, the meeting is regularly hosted in the UK or Europe, Japan, and North America, draws hundreds of participants from around the globe, and has helped set the stage for key developments over the past six years. This time, participants indicated the need for a broader meeting and discussion, which highlight repositories in the full Open Access context.

"Repositories are core components of the Open Access movement," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "They’re deeply integrated with policy moves and at the forefront of managing Open Access to materials above and beyond the scholarly literature—not to mention author rights management and other aspects. It just makes sense that conversations about repository advocacy take place alongside moves to create policies. SPARC's next biennial meeting, in 2012, will aim to meet this need, and we look forward to working with our members to figure out the best approach."

The 2010 meeting set forth to explore four key trends: Repository-based publishing strategies, Global repository networks, Open data, and Making the case for financial sustainability. These panel discussions were supplemented with an Innovation Fair, where new technologies, strategies, and approaches were highlighted, and a Sponsor Showcase.

| Digital Scholarship |

David E. Millard et al. have self-archived "MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key part of this work has been the development of an extension for the EPrints repository platform, called MePrints, that enables configurable profile pages, and works alongside existing extensions such as IRStats and SNEEP in order to give users live feeds about repository events that matter to them. Through these deployments we have discovered that more sophisticated profile pages give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit. This increases the visibility of the repository and encourages more deposits.

| Digital Scholarship |

An institutional repository is a digital repository specific to a single institution that contains diverse types of digital works that deal with the disciplines associated with that institution.

Version three of the Institutional Repository Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship as an XHTML website with live links to many included works. It primarily includes published articles, books, and technical reports. A limited number of conference papers and unpublished e-prints are also included. All included works are in English. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

The bibliography has the following sections (all sections have been updated):

1 General
2 Country and Regional Institutional Repository Surveys
3 Multiple-Institution Repositories
4 Specific Institutional Repositories
5 Institutional Repository Digital Preservation Issues
6 Institutional Repository Library Issues
7 Institutional Repository Metadata Issues
8 Institutional Repository Open Access Policies
9 Institutional Repository R&D Projects
10 Institutional Repository Research Studies
11 Institutional Repository Software
12 Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author

The following recent Digital Scholarship publication may also be of interest:

• Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (a paperback, a PDF file, and an XHTML website)

See also: Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications.

The University of Rochester has released IR+ 2.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The new version has many new features and updates. These include:

• OAI-PMH harvestable
• Dublin Core mapping features for Identifiers and contributors
• Improved batch metadata manipulation – automated re-indexing enhancements (changing control lists forces re-indexing of all items that use changed data)
• Sponsor browsing / statistics
• Paging and Sorting for contributor pages
• Improved Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for better indexing of researcher pages and content within the repository
• Researcher page interface enhancements
• Content type listing and filtering at the repository and collection levels
• Content type counts at the repository and collection levels
• Increased download information and removal options for more accurate download counts
• Updated Help, Installation and User manuals
• RSS feeds for Collections/Contributor Pages
• Upgraded pdf/word/excel/power point text extraction libraries
• Updated user account management features
• Submission performance enhancements
• Improved home page module placement
• Improved change tracking

| Digital Scholarship |

The New Review of Academic Librarianship has published a special issue on dissemination models in scholarly communication. All of the articles are open access.

Here's a selection of articles

• Authors' Awareness and Attitudes Toward Open Access Repositories
• Case Study: Re-Engineering an Institutional Repository to Engage Users
• The Economists Online Subject Repository—Using Institutional Repositories as the Foundation For International Open Access Growth
• From Service Providers to Content Producers: New Opportunities For Libraries in Collaborative Open Access Book Publishing
• Institutional Repository Interaction With Research Users: A Review of Current Practice
• Open Access and Humanities and Social Science Monograph Publishing
• Project Management and Institutional Repositories: A Case Study at University College Dublin Library

| Digital Scholarship |

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) project has released a series of tutorial videos.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

1. An Introduction to SWORD: Gives an overview of SWORD, the rationale behind its creation, and details of the first three funded SWORD projects
2. SWORD Use Cases: Provides an introduction to use cases, and examines some of the use cases that SWORD can be used for
3. How SWORD Works: A high level overview of the SWORD protocol, lightly touching on a few technical details in order to explain how it works
4. SWORD Clients: The reasons for needing SWORD clients are shown, followed by a tour of some of the current SWORD clients
5. Create Your Own SWORD Client: An overview of the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation toolkit, including the chance to try it out

Digital videos from the Repository Fringe 2010 meeting are now available.

JISC has released SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle.

Here's an excerpt:

SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases.

Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez have self-archived their presentation "Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories" in DigitalCommons@CalPoly.

Here's an excerpt:

Most survey respondents reported providing mediated deposit (material is deposited on behalf of the author by a third party, usually someone associated with the IR), whether it is completely mediated by the library or whether the author, in partnership with the library, deposits their work. The only respondents to report author self-deposit as the primary method of IR deposit were in Australia and Europe.

DuraSpace has announced its new Registered Service Provider Program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization announced its new Registered Service Provider Program to establish partnerships with companies that provide support services to institutions using the DSpace and Fedora digital repository software.

The new program will establish an network of service providers offering a range of services including customer support, technical consulting, software development, and systems integration. The program will benefit universities, libraries, museums, research institutions, and others that require support in building or maintaining repository-based systems built with DSpace, Fedora, and related open source and commercial technologies.

Registered Service Providers will be easily identified. They will be featured on the DuraSpace web site (duraspace.org) and relevant project websites, with contact information and a profile of their service offerings. Providers will also exhibit their affiliation with DuraSpace by displaying the special DuraSpace Service Provider Logo on their marketing materials and websites.

Registered Service Providers share the DuraSpace commitment to ensuring that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Service Providers are active participants in open source software communities and are committed to providing expertise and technical consulting to enable customers to achieve their goals with open technologies.

The BibApp development team has released BibApp 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

BibApp is a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on your campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it is easy to see what publications can be placed on the Web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional repository.

BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus.

BibApp is the result of a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois (https://www.informatics.illinois.edu/icubed/) provided generous funding for the development of the 1.0 release of BibApp.

BibApp is a Ruby on Rails application, coupled with the Solr/Lucene search engine, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its datastore. It uses open standards and protocols such as OpenURL and SWORD and automatically pulls in data from third party sources such as Google Books and the Sherpa/Romeo publisher policy database. BibApp imports publication data in RIS, MEDLINE and Refworks XML bibliography formats and exports data in several citation formats (APA, Chicago, IEEE, MLA, more) via CiteProc. BibApp also provides a web services API for delivering data as XML, YML, JSON, and RDF. BibApp is released under a University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php).

RIAN, Ireland’s national open access portal, has been launched by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Ireland’s new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research goes live today. RIAN – http://www.rian.ie will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.