Category: Digital Repositories

eScholarship Relaunched with New Services and Enhanced Functionality

The California Digital Library has relaunched eScholarship with new services and enhanced functionality.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Previously known as UC's eScholarship Repository, the new eScholarship offers a robust scholarly publishing platform that enables departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.

"Our relaunch of eScholarship reflects the enormous value we see in recasting the institutional repository as an open access publisher," says Catherine Mitchell, Director of the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library. "There is significant need across the University of California campuses for a sustainable infrastructure to support the publication and dissemination of research. In our efforts to respond to this need, we have watched our institutional repository evolve into a dynamic platform for the original publication of scholarly work." . . .

The relaunch of eScholarship brings new opportunities for digital publishing to the University of California and offers substantially improved services for previously supported publication types. Books published in eScholarship are now eligible for a combined digital/print publication service, courtesy of UC Publishing Services (UCPubS), a joint program of UC Press and the California Digital Library. In addition, eScholarship now offers conference lifecycle support, including mechanisms for proposal submission, program display, and the ultimate publication of proceedings.

Much of the site redesign has been focused on improving the quality of access to eScholarship publications. The site is optimized for Google searches; PDFs can be viewed in their entirety without download; and research can be shared easily through third party social networking sites and RSS feeds. Likewise, the ability to locate relevant scholarship within the new site is greatly improved as a result of the implementation of:

  1. a highly developed similar items finder
  2. visual snippets of keywords within documents (KWIC Pics) accessible from the search results page
  3. facets for narrowing search results by UC campus, discipline, and peer review– status
  4. keyword search capability within documents

Digital Videos: Presentations from Access 2009 Conference

Presentations from the Access 2009 Conference are now available. Digital videos and presentation slides (if available) are synched.

Here's a quick selection:

  1. Dan Chudnov, "Repository Development at the Library of Congress"
  2. Cory Doctorow, "Copyright vs Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: The State of Play in the Global Copyfight"
  3. Mark Jordan & Brian Owen, "COPPUL's LOCKSS Private Network / Software Lifecycles & Sustainability: a PKP and reSearcher Update"
  4. Dorthea Salo, "Representing and Managing the Data Deluge"
  5. Roy Tennant, "Inspecting the Elephant: Characterizing the Hathi Trust Collection"

ETD Self-Archiving Tools: ICE-TheOREM Final Report

JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

"Repository Metadata: Approaches and Challenges"

John W. Chapman, David Reynolds, and Sarah L. Shreeves have self-archived "Repository Metadata: Approaches and Challenges" in IDEALS.

Here's an excerpt:

Many institutional repositories have pursued a mixed metadata environment, relying on description by multiple workflows. Strategies may include metadata converted from other systems, metadata elicited from the document creator or manager, and metadata created by library or repository staff. Additional editing or proofing may or may not occur. The mixed environment brings challenges of creation, management, and access. In this article, repository efforts at three major universities are discussed. All three repositories run on the DSpace software package, and the opportunities and limitations of that system will be examined. The authors discuss local strategies in light of current thinking on metadata creation, user behavior, and the aggregation of heterogeneous metadata. The contrasts between the mission of each repository effort will show the importance of local customization, while the experience of all three institutions forms the basis for recommendations on strategies of benefit to a wide range of librarians and repository planners.

Stevan Harnad on "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates"

Stevan Harnad has self-archived the text of his "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates" presentation in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics

"Getting Started with Fedora"

Fedora Commons has released "Getting Started with Fedora."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The "Getting Started with Fedora" Guide is designed to offer new users, or potential users, a basic understanding of the Fedora architecture and the core repository management software, along with some general ideas about how to use it. Whether you want to adopt one of the existing Fedora-based solutions or develop you own, this general introduction should be useful to you.

Embedding Repositories in Research Management Systems: Final Report

JISC has released Embedding Repositories in Research Management Systems: Final Report. (See JISC's "Research Information Management" page for more information on research management systems.)

Here's an excerpt:

The main finding from our research is the variety of disparate "systems" (i.e. both technology and process) in use. Management information is derived from many different systems and processes: HR; student administration (e.g. SITS); finance; research support; and information services/library.

A number of universities use business intelligence software such as Cognos or Oracle Discoverer for monitoring activity and performance, and for resource allocation and forecasting. However, some rely on tools as simple as a series of complex interlinked spreadsheets.

The role of institutional repositories is still small. IRs are near-universal, but mainly lack critical mass of content. Publications and research expertise databases are widespread and are the main research assessment management tool for many HEIs: few of these connect to the IR, although in a small number of cases the two are linked.

We could find no implementations of a research management system with embedded repository; further, where both RMS and IRs do exist within the same HEI they are not well-integrated.

Georgia Tech Library Awarded $857,005 Grant to Build Statewide Digital Repository

The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center has been awarded a $857,005 grant for its "The GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital Content" project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Georgia Tech, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide digital repository to provide access to scholarly works and research information. The principal investigator on the grant is Tyler Walters, Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center; the co-PI is P. Toby Graham, Director, Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries.

The scholarly works and research information to be held by the GKR are materials such as:

Annual Reports; Audio/Video Recordings; Conference Papers; Electronic Theses and Dissertations; Instructional Materials; Lecture Series and Symposia Materials; Newsletters; Pre-Prints/Post-Prints; Proceedings; Research and Technical Reports; Web Sites; White Papers; and Working Papers.

The GKR program has five activities that it will complete during the grant:

  1. Conduct a survey and focus groups of the USG librarians' and faculty's usage and perceptions of digital repositories.
  2. Establish a service to host individual repositories for four participating USG institutions (Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Albany State University, College of Coastal Georgia)
  3. Build a central, searchable web site and database from all eight GKR-related digital repositories, featuring the GKR-developed repository collection mapping tool. This will be done by harvesting database records from all eight GKR-related digital repositories (the four hosted repositories mentioned above, plus existing repositories at Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Valdosta State University).
  4. Establish repository-related services for the GKR partners: copyright assistance, digitization, content submission into their repository, and digital preservation
  5. Design and offer to a nationwide audience a symposium and workshop on managing statewide and consortial repositories. The goal of the training program is to increase the number of digital repositories operating in the U.S. and the number of information professionals with the knowledge and skills to manage repositories consortially.

SWORD PHP Library Version 0.9

The SWORD PHP library version 0.9 has been released. SWORD is "a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another. It stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol (known as APP or ATOMPUB)."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Changed swordappservicedocument to build the servcedocument from the xml response rather than having the swordappclient do the work. This allows the service document to be parsed at a later time.
  • Changed the swordappclient deposit method to stream the file being deposited straight from disk rather than via memory to avoid using excessive memory and potentially exceeding the PHP memory limit. I’ve successfully tested this against DSpace with deposits of 600MB CD images.
  • Added some validation to the SWAP/METS packager to allow it to cope with filenames and metadata containing ampersands

SWORD2 Project Final Report

JISC has released SWORD2 Project Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The SWORD vision is about 'lowering the barriers to deposit', primarily for depositing content into repositories, and additionally, for depositing into any system which may wish to receive content from remote sources. The SWORD protocol defines a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems. The project and protocol were developed because there was previously no standardised way of doing this. A standard deposit interface allows repository services to be built that can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g. disparate repositories, desktop drag'n'drop tools, or from within standard office applications. SWORD can also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories. There are many other possibilities, including migration of content between repositories and transfer to preservation services. In addition to refining the existing SWORD application profile, the SWORD2 project has developed a number of tools and services to demonstrate these possibilities. It has also been pro-active in promoting SWORD and encouraging uptake within other repositories, services and tools, notably with its adoption into the Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 and with the new Microsoft Zentity repository system .

The core aims of the project were to update the SWORD Protocol, the SWORD repository code libraries in the DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and Intrallect repositories, and the existing reference demonstrators. A Facebook application and validator have also been developed. Advocacy efforts include an e-learning case study, a briefing paper, a new SWORD website, and a range of additional dissemination activities, including conference papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops at a number of national and international conferences and meetings.

Enhanced Ingest to Digital E-Research Repositories: Final Report

JISC has released Enhanced Ingest to Digital E-Research Repositories: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The project developed a demonstrator that implemented an enhanced deposit and ingest process to a digital repository based on Fedora. The process incorporates the SWORD API for deposit, and accepts deposits that contain multiple files (packaged as a zip file). The workflow performs preservation actions (e.g. capturing PREMIS metadata, format migration), extraction of resource discovery metadata (for text-based formats such as PDF, MS Word, HTML), and capture of publisher self-archiving policies (for post-prints). The resources are ingested into the repository following an atomistic model—individual files and directories correspond to individual digital objects, and relationships between them (i.e. the membership relation between files/directories) are represented as RDF statements. The workflow was constructed from a variety of components developed by other projects.

Serials Review Special Issue on Asia-Pacific Repositories

Serials Review has published a special issue on Asia-Pacific repositories.

Here's an selection of article titles:

  • "Exploring Research Data Hosting at the HKUST Institutional Repository"
  • "An Integrative View of the Institutional Repositories in Hong Kong: Strategies and Challenges"
  • "Open Access in Hong Kong—Where Are We Now?"
  • "Promoting the Visibility of Educational Research through an Institutional Repository"
  • "Research Online: Digital Commons as a Publishing Platform at the University of Wollongong, Australia"
  • "Towards Scholarly HTML"

Digital Preservation: Life2 Final Project Report

JISC has released Life2 Final Project Report.

Here's an excerpt:

LIFE Model v2 outlines a fully-revised lifecycle model taking into account feedback from user groups, the Case Studies and the wider digital preservation community.

Generic Preservation Model (GPM) summarises the update to the preservation model with an accompanying spreadsheet. This model allows institutions to estimate potential digital preservation costs for their collections. The GPM fits into the updated LIFE Model.

An Economic Evaluation of LIFE was written by economist Bo-Christer Björk on the approach used for both the first and second phases of LIFE. This independent review validates the LIFE approach for lifecycle costing.

The SHERPA DP Case Study outlines the mapping of the repository services that CeRch provides to the LIFE Model. The SHERPA-LEAP Case Study maps three very different HE repositories to the LIFE Model. Goldsmiths University of London, Royal Holloway University of London and UCL (University College London) each provide exemplars of varying collections. Each institution’s repository is at a different stage of development.

The Newspapers Case Study successfully maps both analogue and digital newspaper collections to the LIFE Model. This success means that LIFE could be developed into a fully-compatible predictive tool across both analogue and digital collections, allowing for comparison both throughout the lifecycles of a collection and across different types of collections.

Digital Preservation: Media Vault Program Interim Report

The Media Vault Program has released Media Vault Program Interim Report.

Here's an excerpt:

All major studies and reports on the sustainability of digital resources point to a multitude of barriers that can be clustered into four factors:

Economic: Who owns the problem, and who benefits from the solutions? Who pays for the services, long-term preservation, development, and curation? . . . .

Technical: Simple services are needed, but they are not simple to build, implement and support in our complex environment. Successful structures that can support digital scholarship must account for user needs, emerging technologies/file formats, adverse working contexts (fieldwork, offline, multi-platform), and should be supported at the enterprise scale. . . .

Political/Organizational: . . . . there are good reasons for the various service provider organizations to innovate on their own, but there is much to gain from working together on common goals and milestones. In fact, where communities have succeeded in softening the boundaries between content producers and consumers, supporters and beneficiaries, significant successes have been achieved. . . .

Social: We live in interesting times . . . and the prevalence of cheap/stolen media has produced an expectation that things should be always available, conveniently packaged, and free. Where some organizations, such as the Long Now Foundation, are hoping to "provide counterpoint to today's "Faster/cheaper" mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking," it may be up to those of us who care deeply about the persistence of research data to step up as the seas continue to change.

Harvard Launches DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) Repository

Harvard has launched its DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) repository. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Harvard's leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.

"DASH is meant to promote openness in general," stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. "It will make the current scholarship of Harvard's faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard's library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth." . . .

DASH has its roots in the February 2008 open-access vote in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In a unanimous decision, FAS adopted a policy stating that

Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

In addition, faculty members committed to providing copies of their manuscripts for distribution, which the DASH repository now enables. Authored by Stuart M. Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science and director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, the policy marked a groundbreaking shift from simply encouraging scholars to consider open access to creating a pro-open-access policy with an "opt out" clause.

"It's the best university policy anywhere," said Peter Suber of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition in Washington, DC, and a fellow of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center and the University's Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). "It shifts the default so Harvard faculty must make their work openly available unless they opt out. The default at most universities is the other way around: you have to choose open access and arrange for all the provisions."

To date, Harvard Law School, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education have joined FAS in supporting a comprehensive policy of open access. DASH fulfills the promise made in these four open-access votes.

Still a beta, DASH is a joint project of the OSC and the Office for Information Systems (OIS), both of which are strategic programs of the Harvard University Library. DASH is based on the open-source DSpace repository platform. Software customizations will continue throughout the coming academic year.

DASH is also intended to serve as a local digital home for a wide and growing array of other scholarly content produced at the University. Non-faculty researchers and students are already afforded deposit privileges, and DASH will eventually have collection spaces for each of the 10 schools at Harvard.

Among the many features the DASH development team has added to its DSpace implementation is the ability to link directly from a faculty author's name in DASH search results to his or her entry in Profiles, a research social networking site developed by Harvard Catalyst. Profiles, which provides a comprehensive view of a researcher's publications and connections within the University research community, currently indexes faculty from the medical and public health schools; its developers hope to expand it to include the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the near future. . . .

DASH currently supports automated embargo lift dates, so that a work can be deposited "dark" and then automatically switch to open access once a publisher's self-archiving embargo has expired. Another noteworthy feature is DASH's PDF header page: when a user downloads a full-text item, DASH generates a header page for the document, giving its provenance and relevant terms of use.

"The terms of use were drafted after a series of conversations with publishers about Harvard's open-access initiatives," said Shieber. "We wanted to give publishers the opportunity to articulate their concerns about Harvard's intended use of content in the repository, and we designed our repository and our practices as responsively as possible. We continue to welcome publisher input and engagement along these lines.

"Our long-term growth strategy for DASH is to integrate it so fully into other faculty tools that self-archiving just becomes second nature. When a Harvard author is updating their profile or the CV on their personal web site, upload-to-DASH will be there, and vice versa. All these loci for sharing information about publications will eventually synchronize with one another. This includes tools that store bibliographic information only, as well as those that provide open access to full text, such as the established subject repositories already used by many of our faculty to disseminate their work. Ultimately, DASH aims to provide as comprehensive and open a view of Harvard research as possible."

Repository Staff and Skills Set Revised

SHERPA has released a revised Repository Staff and Skills Set.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The original document was developed in response to requests the SHERPA core team received for examples of repository job descriptions. The content of the 2009 version is largely unchanged with the main additions being advice on how the document can be used in planning hosted repositories and in the addition of a link to the JISC Recruitment Toolkit released earlier this year.

The original Staff and Skill Set document was not designed to describe the skills set required of a particular repository post but rather is a list of the entire set of skills, knowledge and abilities required for the development and management of a successful institutional repository. Due to requests from the community we provide here a generic job description of a technical repository post. This description was development from actual job advertisements and using advice and templates from the JISC Recruitment Toolkit.

The concise nature of the document continues to be popular and feedback from the community shows that it has been used to develop job descriptions, plan repository development and staffing, seek funding from institutions, renegotiate salaries/job profiles and regrading and in identifying skill gaps and areas for staff training.

Although primarily aimed at the UK repository community, it has also proved useful to the repository community and projects in Australia, Spain and Ireland.

Authority Control for Repositories: Names Project: Final Report

JISC has released the Names Project: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The Names Project began in July 2007. It was funded to investigate requirements for a name authority service for UK repositories. Prototype name authority software has been developed as part of this work and a number of connections have been made with UK stakeholders and with international projects working in a similar space.

EdSpace: An Educationally Focussed Repository for the University of Southampton. Final Report.

JISC has released EdSpace: An Educationally Focussed Repository for the University of Southampton. Final Report..

Here's an excerpt:

For some years, digital content has been stored in our VLE, but the VLE does not encourage sharing or re-use. EdShare is intended to act as the storage for the VLE, storing our everyday teaching materials such as presentations, hand-outs, reading lists, assignments etc., so that they can easily be viewed by others and re-used in whole or part as appropriate.

Important design principles of this share were:

  • Ease of use The share should be open to anyone to access, whether logged-in or not; any logged in member of the university can upload resources and comment on others. The user interface should be simple to use and fully accessible
  • Minimal metadata We acknowledge that requiring metadata is a barrier to use, and that search engines do a large part of the job based on free text. Web 2.0 style recommendations complement the search engines
  • Permanent URLs Every share entered in EdShare, and the description of the resource, are allocated unique and permanent URLs, which can be used to refer to them from external programs – for example VLEs such as Blackboard
  • Open Access to the descriptions, but user controlled access to the content. Anyone in the world can browse or search to discover what items are in EdShare (i.e. they can see the description), but the depositing user can control the visibility of the actual resource. The default is to allow visibility within the university, but it is possible to make the visibility wider (the whole world) or narrower (only my school, or even only the depositor and named collaborators). . . .

EdShare has been implemented as open source software on top of E-Prints, and the team are committed to working with others in supporting other institutions, or cross-institutional disciplinary consortia, to make both the technical and educational changes that we have benefited from.

"Towards Scholarly HTML"

Peter Sefton has posted an e-print of his forthcoming Serials Review article "Towards Scholarly HTML" (dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2009.05.001) on ptsefton.

In an attempt to comply with Elsevier's author agreement, he states:

At the moment that link seems to resolve to an open version of the article, whether or not you have a subscription to the journal but I guess that will change; when it is "published" you will only see the article if you are clicking from inside a network that's on their list of subscribers. If not, you will need money to see it. But I can post the article here with the copyright statement you see below and remind you that you need to use the DOI to cite the paper should you wish to. No naughty linking back here (unless it is to reference these comments I'm adding). And no linking to the version I'm about to put in ePrints. OK? Even though you know that if you do link to the DOI some people may not be able to see the article in the future, don't do it, use the DOI link. There, I think I told you.

Note: the Elsevier version is no longer freely available.

OAI-PMH: MOAI 1.0.6 Released

MOAI 1.0.6 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the MOAI Web page:

MOAI has some interesting features not found in most OAI servers. Besides serving OAI, it can also harvest OAI. This makes it possible for MOAI to work as a pipe, where the OAI data can be reconfigured, cached, and enriched while it passes through the MOAI processing.

More specifically MOAI has the ability to:

  • Harvest data from different kinds of sources
  • Serve many OAI feeds from one MOAI server, each with their own configuration
  • Turn metadata values into OAI sets on the fly, creating new collections
  • Use OAI sets to filter records shown in a feed, configurable for each feed
  • Work easily with relational data (e.g. if an author changes, the publication should also change)
  • Simple and robust authentication through integration with the Apache webserver
  • Serve assets via Apache while still using configurable authentication rules

Web Services and Repositories: Report from an EThOSnet Project Workshop

Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) has released Web Services and Repositories: Report from an EThOSnet project workshop, British Library, 2nd June 2009.

Here's an excerpt:

One of the areas highlighted for potential investigation was the use of Web Services in supporting the delivery of EThOS. Due to staff changes following the start of the project it was not possible to carry out this investigation on the technical level that had been originally hoped. Nevertheless, an initial investigation was carried out to assess options. In considering the role of Web Services in supporting EThOS, it was concluded that it was not possible for the most part to consider the needs of EThOS alone, as using Web Services is primarily about communication between systems. EThOS has been developed on a model of ongoing interaction with institutional repositories, and as such the role of Web Services in supporting these local repository instances is key to the success of EThOS making use of them. Furthermore, given the development of local repositories as systems that need to interact with other systems, either within an institution or outside it, it seemed timely to address this issue to provide guidance to the community as a whole.

A workshop to investigate the potential value and use of Web Services to digital repositories was thus organised to both disseminate and capture information on the possibilities. This report summarises much of the information and conclusions from the workshop, and accompanies the full resources from the day available at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/0031_Web_Services_Day.html.

Confederation of Open Access Repositories to Launch During Open Access Week 2009

In a press release posted to the American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum, D. Peters announced that the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) will launch during Open Access Week 2009. Supported by DRIVER, COAR "aims to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access digital repositories."

Plugins to Import E-Print Metadata from arXiv into an EPrints Repository

The IncReASe (Increasing Repository Content through Automation and Services) project has released four plugins to facilitate importing e-print metadata from arXiv into an EPrints repository.

Here's an excerpt from the plugins' Web page:

Potentially, content in arXiv could provide a "quick win" for repository population. No arXiv depositor we have talked to date has objected to our importing their work into WRRO [White Rose Research Online]. From discussions with arXiv users, we are assuming that local deposit in WRRO with a "push" of data to arXiv may be difficult to achieve—we'd need to demonstrate some clear benefit to the depositor. arXiv serves its community well. A more likely model may be that arXiv users continue to deposit as now but IRs "harvest" data from arXiv (or perhaps arXiv will develop a facility to push material into local IRs).