Category: Digital Repositories

"14 Million Books & 6 Million Visitors: HathiTrust Growth and Usage in 2016"

HathiTrust has released 14 Million Books & 6 Million Visitors: HathiTrust Growth and Usage in 2016 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The HathiTrust collection continues to grow steadily. As of January 1st, 2017, there are 14,816,187 volumes in the collection. Over one million volumes were added to the collection over the course of the preceding year, scanned from the library collections of 39 contributors. . . .

Within the HathiTrust certified trusted repository, 38% of the collection is available to users to access in full view, and the remaining 62% is made available in other ways: all users can search across and within those limited view books; researchers can now perform transformational, non-consumptive research within these books; and users with print disabilities can access the full text.

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"A Metadata-Driven Approach to Data Repository Design"

Matthew J. Harvey, Andrew McLean, and Henry S. Rzep have published "A Metadata-Driven Approach to Data Repository Design" in the Journal of Cheminformatics.

Here's an excerpt:

The design and use of a metadata-driven data repository for research data management is described. Metadata is collected automatically during the submission process whenever possible and is registered with DataCite in accordance with their current metadata schema, in exchange for a persistent digital object identifier. Two examples of data preview are illustrated, including the demonstration of a method for integration with commercial software that confers rich domain-specific data analytics without introducing customisation into the repository itself.

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"DPLA and Library of Congress Announce New Collaboration"

The Digital Public Library of America has released "DPLA and Library of Congress Announce New Collaboration."

Here's an excerpt:

The Library of Congress today signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Digital Public Library of America to become a Content Hub and will ultimately share a significant portion of its rich digital resources with DPLA's database of digital content records.

The first batch of records will include 5,000 items from three major Library of Congress map collections—the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and panoramic maps.

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"Overly Honest Data Repository Development"

Colleen Fallaw et al. have published "Overly Honest Data Repository Development" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

After a year of development, the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has launched a repository, called the Illinois Data Bank (https://databank.illinois.edu/), to provide Illinois researchers with a free, self-serve publishing platform that centralizes, preserves, and provides persistent and reliable access to Illinois research data. This article presents a holistic view of development by discussing our overarching technical, policy, and interface strategies. By openly presenting our design decisions, the rationales behind those decisions, and associated challenges this paper aims to contribute to the library community's work to develop repository services that meet growing data preservation and sharing needs.

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"Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories"

Patrick Obrien et al. have published "Undercounting File Downloads from Institutional Repositories" in the Journal of Library Administration.

Here's an excerpt:

A primary impact metric for institutional repositories (IR) is the number of file downloads, which are commonly measured through third-party Web analytics software. Google Analytics, a free service used by most academic libraries, relies on HTML page tagging to log visitor activity on Google's servers. However, Web aggregators such as Google Scholar link directly to high value content (usually PDF files), bypassing the HTML page and failing to register these direct access events. This article presents evidence of a study of four institutions demonstrating that the majority of IR activity is not counted by page tagging Web analytics software, and proposes a practical solution for significantly improving the reporting relevancy and accuracy of IR performance metrics using Google Analytics.

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"Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy at the University of California"

Stephen Abrams et al. have published "Dash: Data Sharing Made Easy at the University of California" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

While the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library supports a growing roster of innovative curation services for University use, most were intended originally to meet the needs of institutional information professionals, such as librarians, archivists, and curators. In order to address the new curation concerns of individual scholars, UC3 realized that it needed to deploy new systems and services optimized for stakeholders with widely divergent experiences, expertise, and expectations. This led to the development of Dash, an online data publication service making campus data sharing easy. While Dash gives the appearance of being a full-fledged repository, in actuality it is only a lightweight overlay layer that sits on top of standards-compliant repositories, such as UC3's existing Merritt curation repository. The Dash service offers intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces for dataset submission, description, publication, and discovery. By imposing minimal prescriptive eligibility and submission requirements; automating and hiding the mechanical details of DOI assignment, data packaging, and repository deposit; and featuring a streamlined, self-service user experience that can be integrated easily into scholarly workflows, Dash is an important new service offering with which UC scholars can meet their RDM obligations.

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"Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?"

Richard Poynder has published "Q&A with CNI's Clifford Lynch: Time to Re-think the Institutional Repository?" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

Moreover, today we can see that the interoperability promised by OAI-PMH has not really materialised, few third-party service providers have emerged, and content duplication has not been avoided. And to the exasperation of green OA advocates, author self-archiving has remained a minority sport, with researchers reluctant to take on the task of depositing their papers in their institutional repository. Given this, some believe the IR now faces an existential threat.

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"Scraping Scientific Web Repositories: Challenges and Solutions for Automated Content Extraction"

Philipp Meschenmoser, Norman Meuschke, Manuel Hotz, and Bela Gipp have published "Scraping Scientific Web Repositories: Challenges and Solutions for Automated Content Extraction" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Many researchers are interested in accessing the underlying scientometric raw data to increase the transparency of these systems. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and present strategies to programmatically access such data in scientific Web repositories. We demonstrate the strategies as part of an open source tool (MIT license) that allows research performance comparisons based on Google Scholar data.

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"TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available"

DuraSpace has released "TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available."

Here's an excerpt:

The third release candidate of 6.0 is now available for download and testing. 6.0-RC3 (Release Candidate #3) is a pre-release of 6.0, and we hope that the 6.0 final release will follow closely in its footsteps. . . .

We believe the 6.0 release is nearly production-ready, but could use your help in verifying there's nothing we've overlooked.

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"Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier’s SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused of Copyright Crackdown"

Mike Masnick has published "Just as Open Competitor to Elsevier's SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused of Copyright Crackdown" in Techdirt.

Here's an excerpt:

And perhaps this [SocArXiv announcement]came just in time, because just as that happened, Stephen Henderson, a law professor, noted that SSRN took down his paper saying that they didn't think he retained the copyright to it.

See also: "SocArXiv Debuts, as SSRN acquisition Comes Under Scrutiny."

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"Developing SocArXiv—A New Open Archive of the Social Sciences to Challenge the Outdated Journal System"

Philip Cohen has published "Developing SocArXiv—A New Open Archive of the Social Sciences to Challenge the Outdated Journal System" in LSE Impact.

Here's an excerpt:

But there remains a need for a new general, open-access, open-source, paper server for the social sciences, one that encourages linking and sharing data and code, that serves its research to an open metadata system, and that provides the foundation for a post-publication review system. I hope that SocArXiv will enable us to save research from the journal system. Once it's built, anyone will be able to use it to organize their own peer-review community, to select and publish papers (though not exclusively), to review and comment on each other's work – and to discover, cite, value, and share research unimpeded. We will be able to do this because of a partnership with the Center for Open Science (which is already developing a new preprint server) and SHARE ("a free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle"). We are also supported by the University of Maryland, which hosts the initiative.

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"Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries"

Shea-Tinn Yeh et al. have published "Deploying Islandora as a Digital Repository Platform: a Multifaceted Experience at the University of Denver Libraries" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The Library Technology Department at the University of Denver was tasked with implementing an Islandora open-source framework for its Special Collections Department because the current host was being retired. Although Islandora's front-end is tailored for librarians, its back-end is complex, and built upon many subsystems. A failure in any of the subsystems guarantees a domino effect and a chain reaction which can obfuscate the root cause of the issue. Though product documentation and support communication channels exist, many of the problems we faced were unique to our specific hardware and software configuration. The development team had to learn fast, and be innovative, agile, and systematic in order to work with such a complicated system. This article describes the tactics used in this repository development effort, as well as the library's stakeholder relationship management.

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"Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?"

Massimiliano Assante et al. have published "Are Scientific Data Repositories Coping with Research Data Publishing?" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This study analyses the solutions offered by generalist scientific data repositories, i.e., repositories supporting the deposition of any type of research data. These repositories cannot make any assumption on the application domain. They are actually called to face with the almost open ended typologies of data used in science. The current practices promoted by such repositories are analysed with respect to eight key aspects of data publishing, i.e., dataset formatting, documentation, licensing, publication costs, validation, availability, discovery and access, and citation. From this analysis it emerges that these repositories implement well consolidated practices and pragmatic solutions for literature repositories. These practices and solutions can not totally meet the needs of management and use of datasets resources, especially in a context where rapid technological changes continuously open new exploitation prospects.

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DuraSpace and LYRASIS Boards Approve "Intent to Merge"

The DuraSpace and LYRASIS Boards have approved an "Intent to Merge".

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The respective boards unanimously approved an "Intent to Merge", which means the organizations, having done a careful initial investigation, will move into a public phase to consider an official plan and pathway for the potential coming together, including a full analysis of member benefits. The decision to eventually come together is not yet final. In this public phase of investigation, each organization seeks feedback from members of their organizations and will investigate carefully the value of all services, projects, membership models and organizational cultures to ensure a smooth transition for members of both organizations should a merger agreement occur.

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"The Role of arXiv, RePEc, SSRN and PMC in Formal Scholarly Communication"

Xuemei Li has self-archived "The Role of arXiv, RePEc, SSRN and PMC in Formal Scholarly Communication."

Here's an excerpt:

The four major Subject Repositories (SRs), arXiv, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central (PMC), are all important within their disciplines but no previous study has systematically compared how often they are cited in academic publications. In response, this article reports an analysis of citations to SRs from Scopus publications, 2000 to 2013.

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"PLOS Recommended Data Repositories"

Daniella Lowenberg has published "PLOS Recommended Data Repositories" in EveryOne.

Here's an excerpt:

In line with our updated Data Policy, we are pleased to announce a PLOS Data Repository Recommendation Guide.

To support the selection of data repositories for authors, PLOS has identified a set of established repositories, which are recognized and trusted within their respective communities. To develop the list, we consulted with editors, organizations running data repositories, and other publishers in order to cover the breadth of disciplines and subject areas published by PLOS.

| New: Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 5 | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

DSpace@MIT Tops 3 Million Downloads

MIT's DSpace@MIT repository has had over 3 million downloads as of the end of April.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Open Access Articles Collection in DSpace@MIT now contains over 16,600 articles, which collectively were downloaded over 90,000 times in April.

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"Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents"

Devan Rays Donaldson has self-archived "Development of a Scale for Measuring Perceptions of Trustworthiness for Digitized Archival Documents."

Here's an excerpt:

This dissertation advances scholarship on trustworthiness in three ways. First, it revises an existing conceptual model for trustworthiness perception. Second, it creates an original measurement model for digitized archival document trustworthiness perception-the Digitized Archival Document Trustworthiness Scale (DADTS). Third, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the concept of trustworthiness by providing measurement of the concept in a way that is sensitive to its nuances.

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"Global Scholarship: The Role of Subject Repositories in Advancing Research from the Developing World"

Julia Kelly and Linda Eells have published "Global Scholarship: The Role of Subject Repositories in Advancing Research from the Developing World" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

While subject repositories successfully fill a scholarly communication niche in particular disciplines, they have not been recognized for the important role they play in promoting global scholarship. Repositories such as AgEcon Search make valuable and unique contributions by increasing publishing options for researchers and thus exposing and distributing research produced in the developing world.

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IMLS Releases Four National Digital Platform Grant Proposals

IMLS has released four national digital platform grant proposals for projects it awarded grants to.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Fostering a New National Library Network through a Community-­Based, Connected Repository System (LG-70-15-0006): The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace will foster a greatly expanded network of open-access, content-hosting "hubs" that will enable discovery and interoperability, as well as the reuse of digital resources by people from this country and around the world. The three partners will engage in a major development of the community-driven open source Hydra project to provide these hubs with a new all-in-one solution, which will also allow countless other institutions to easily join the national digital platform.
  • Museum Hub for Open Content (LG-70-15-0002): ARTstor, in collaboration with the El Paso Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Staten Island Museum, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will create and implement software to enable museums to contribute digital image collections for open public access. The project will lower barriers to museum contributions to the DPLA by producing enhanced metadata tools, intellectual property rights decision support tools, and a direct-to-DPLA publishing capacity.
  • Combining Social Media Storytelling with Web Archives (LG-71-15-0077): Old Dominion University and the Internet Archive will collaborate to develop tools and techniques for integrating "storytelling" social media and web archiving. The partners will use information retrieval techniques to (semi-)automatically generate stories summarizing a collection and mine existing public stories as a basis for librarians, archivists, and curators to create collections about breaking events.
  • Repository Services for Accessible Course Content (LG-72-15-0009): This planning project, led by Tufts University, will bring together experts from disability services, including librarians, IT professionals, advocates, and legal counsel, to develop work plans for shared infrastructure, within which universities can support their students with disabilities. The intention is to create specifications and a business model that will complement existing platforms and services.

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"5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?"

Rick Anderson has published "5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

A week or so ago, a monumental thing happened: the number of public-domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository topped 5 million. And since no one (including HathiTrust, so far) seems to be making a very big deal about this, it seems like a good moment both to recap the achievements of HathiTrust and to consider a few of its implications for the future of reading and scholarship.

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"Availability and Accessibility in an Open Access Institutional Repository: A Case Study"

Jongwook Lee et al. have published "Availability and Accessibility in an Open Access Institutional Repository: A Case Study" in Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository makes papers available and accessible on the open Web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the institutional repository at Florida State University. . . .

Overall, the results confirm the contribution of the institutional repository in making papers available and accessible. The results also reveal some impediments to the success of open access, including impediments linked to contractual arrangements between authors and publishers, impediments linked to policies, practices and technologies governing the repository itself, and the low level of faculty participation in the repository.

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"ADS: The Next Generation Search Platform"

Alberto Accomazzi et al. have self-archived "ADS: The Next Generation Search Platform."

Here's an excerpt:

Starting in 2011, the ADS started to systematically collect, parse and index full-text documents for all the major publications in Physics and Astronomy as well as many smaller Astronomy journals and arXiv e-prints, for a total of over 3.5 million papers. Our citation coverage has doubled since 2010 and now consists of over 70 million citations. We are normalizing the affiliation information in our records and, in collaboration with the CfA library and NASA, we have started collecting and linking funding sources with papers in our system. . . . We have rolled out and are now enhancing a new high-performance search engine capable of performing full-text as well as metadata searches using an intuitive query language which supports fielded, unfielded and functional searches. We are currently able to index acknowledgments, affiliations, citations, funding sources, and to the extent that these metadata are available to us they are now searchable under our new platform. The ADS private library system is being enhanced to support reading groups, collaborative editing of lists of papers, tagging, and a variety of privacy settings when managing one's paper collection.

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"What Factors Influence Where Researchers Deposit their Data? A Survey of Researchers Submitting to Data Repositories"

Shea Swauger and Todd J. Vision have published "What Factors Influence Where Researchers Deposit their Data? A Survey of Researchers Submitting to Data Repositories" in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Here's an excerpt:

In order to better understand the factors that most influence where researchers deposit their data when they have a choice, we collected survey data from researchers who deposited phylogenetic data in either the TreeBASE or Dryad data repositories. Respondents were asked to rank the relative importance of eight possible factors. We found that factors differed in importance for both TreeBASE and Dryad, and that the rankings differed subtly but significantly between TreeBASE and Dryad users. On average, TreeBASE users ranked the domain specialization of the repository highest, while Dryad users ranked as equal highest their trust in the persistence of the repository and the ease of its data submission process. Interestingly, respondents (particularly Dryad users) were strongly divided as to whether being directed to choose a particular repository by a journal policy or funding agency was among the most or least important factors. Some users reported depositing their data in multiple repositories and archiving their data voluntarily.

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COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability

COAR has released COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability.

Here's an excerpt:

Scholarly communication is undergoing fundamental changes, in particular with new requirements for open access to research outputs, new forms of peer-review, and alternative methods for measuring impact. In parallel, technical developments, especially in communication and interface technologies facilitate bi-directional data exchange across related applications and systems. The aim of this roadmap is to identify important trends and their associated action points in order for the repository community to determine priorities for further investments in interoperability.

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