Category: Digital Repositories

Blog Report on Beyond the Fringe: Repository Fringe 2009

The DataShare blog has been posting summaries of the Beyond the Fringe: Repository Fringe 2009 sessions.

"Experimental DML over Digital Repositories in Japan"

Takao Namiki, Hiraku Kuroda, and Shunsuke Naruse have self-archived "Experimental DML over Digital Repositories in Japan" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper the authors show an overview of Virtual Digital Mathematics Library in Japan (DML-JP), contents of which consist of metadata harvested from institutional repositories in Japan and digital repositories in the world. DML-JP is, in a sense, a subject specific repository which collaborate with various digital repositories. Beyond portal website, DML-JP provides subject-specific metadata through OAI-ORE. By the schema it is enabled that digital repositories can load the rich metadata which were added by mathematicians.

Streamline Integrating Repository Function with Work Practice: Tools to Facilitate Personal E-Administration, Final Report v1.3

JISC has released Streamline Integrating Repository Function with Work Practice: Tools to Facilitate Personal E-Administration, Final Report v1.3.

Here's an excerpt:

The tools developed include an automatic metadata generation tool that completes as much of the metadata as possible, from documentation associated with a learning object, including suggesting key words to the user; and resource discovery tools, which recommend additional resources based on closeness of objects to the original search results. In addition, we contributed to a variety of widgets, developed with the PERSoNA project, to demonstrate the use of social networking tools to promote sharing of resources through the repository.

Open Access Repository Junction Project Funded

EDINA, the JISC National Data Centre based at the University of Edinburgh, has received a JISC grant for the Open Access Repository Junction project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

One of the objectives of the Depot [see the Depot project page] was to devise an unmediated (computer-assisted) reception and referral service, called Repository Junction, which collected information in order to redirect users to existing Institutional Repository (IR) services. This was to support the principal objective of the Depot, which was to provide a repository for author/researchers at institutions that did not (then) have an IR.

The new project aims to develop the Repository Junction from its current simple form contained within the Depot, into a stand-alone broker mechanism which can be easily adopted and integrated by services or projects run by other institutions or organisations.

OA-RJ will primarily look at addressing the problems of repository deposit currently faced by researchers who have written a multi-authored journal article associated with multiple institutions and grant-funding organisations. This project will test the broker model against a number of use case scenarios in ways that we expect to be sufficiently generic that it can be deployed in other repository workflows and environments.

Read more about it at "Open Access Repository Junction."

JISC Final Report—CTREP, Cambridge TETRA Repositories Enhancement Project

JISC has released JISC Final Report—CTREP, Cambridge TETRA Repositories Enhancement Project .

Here's an excerpt:

CTREP created a connector between an Institutional VRE and an Institutional Repository. It is designed to be reusable in a number of different institutions where policy on deposit varies by means of a flexible deposit configuration system. In the process of executing the project:

  • the various stakeholders came to understand institutional cultural differences and address them in such a way that recent projects with a strong Repository and research dissemination/visualisation aspect have been more joined up than would previously have been possible
  • we developed an approach to policy expression designed both to avoid creating unnecessary tension within the institution during its development, and also to be authorable by a wide range of individuals
  • we have sought to record and capture lessons learnt (based, in part on case studies) for future institutionalisation projects
  • we developed a number of techniques which allowed apparent barriers to integration to be overcome by technical-architectural tools
  • we open-sourced the integration
  • we modified our approach to metadata/data binding in light of community feedback and developed a spreadsheet-based automated approach with which contributors felt comfortable, but which required a number of technical obstacles to be overcome through the use of creative programming techniques.

EMBRACE—EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement—Final Report

JISC has released EMBRACE—EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement—Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

EMBRACE (EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement) was an 18-month project led by UCL on behalf of the SHERPA-LEAP (London Eprints Access Project) Consortium, a group of 13 University of London institutions with institutional repositories.

The project had two strands, technical and strategic. In its technical strand, EMBRACE aimed to implement a number of technical improvements to enhance the functionality of the SHERPA-LEAP repositories. In a concurrent strategic strand, EMBRACE set out to investigate the challenges of embedding repositories of digital assets in institutional strategy to ensure repository sustainability.

eSciDoc Infrastructure Version 1.1 Released

Version 1.1 of the eSciDoc Infrastructure has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Improved Ingest with support for pre-set states (e.g., ingest objects in status 'released'). Ingest performance has been improved significantly.
  • Support for user preferences added
  • Group policies extend the existing authorization options and allow for better support of collaborative working environments
  • Support for Japanese character sets in full-text and metadata searches, including the extraction of Japanese text from PDF documents
  • Support for OAI-PMH with dynamic sets based on filters
  • Improved and extended functionality for the Admin Tool, which now comes with a web-based GUI

Here's a brief description of the eSciDoc Core Services, which are part of a larger software suite (see the General Concepts page for further information):

The eSciDoc Core Services form a middleware for e-Research applications. The Core Services encapsulate a repository (Fedora Commons) and implement a broad range of commonly used functionalities. The service-oriented architecture fosters the creation of autonomous services, which can be re-used independently from the rest of the infrastructure. The multi-disciplinary nature of the existing Solutions built on top of the Core Services ensure the coverage of a broad range of generic and discipline-specific requirements.

Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report

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

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

Also see the session's annotated bibliography.

Japanese Repositories: The DRF (Digital Repository Federation) Report during 2006-2008

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

Word + SWORD + Ingester = Word to DSpace Deposit

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 Launches Enterprise-Wide Digital Repository and Archive Solution

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."

“RKBExplorer: Repositories, Linked Data and Research Support”

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.

“Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories”

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.

“Beyond Institutional Repositories”

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.

Fedora Repository 3.2.1 Released

The Fedora Commons has released version 3.2.1 of Fedora Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The current release of Fedora Repository is 3.2.1 is a minor upgrade that addresses a security issue discovered in Fedora 3.2. . . .

Included within is the long-awaited, web-based administrative client, initial integration with the emerging Akubra storage-abstraction layer, many useful bug fixes, and the experimental release of a Fedora decoupled from the familiar 'fedora' context path.

“Repurposing ProQuest Metadata for Batch Ingesting ETDs into an Institutional Repository”

Shawn Averkamp and Joanna Lee have published "Repurposing ProQuest Metadata for Batch Ingesting ETDs into an Institutional Repository" in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes the workflow used by the University of Iowa Libraries to populate their institutional repository and their catalog with the data collected by ProQuest UMI Dissertation Publishing during the submission of students' theses and dissertations. Re-purposing the metadata from ProQuest allowed the University of Iowa Libraries to streamline the process for ingesting theses and dissertations into their institutional repository The article includes a discussion of the benefits and limitations of the workflow described.

Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project

Alma Swan has announced that, as a result of a DRIVER/JISC/SURF March workshop, plans for improving interoperability between repositories are being developed by the Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project in four areas: citation services, interoperable identification systems, repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and repository organization (supporting repositories around the world).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Since the workshop, teams have taken the discussions forward and are developing action plans and project proposals for each topic. Here is an update:

  1. The CITATION SERVICES team now have a draft project proposal available for community review. Please take a look at it give your comments. It is on the project wiki here: http://repinf.pbworks.com/Citation-Services-draft-project-proposal
  2. The wiki also provides an update on all four plans: the team leaders made short presentations on developments at the OAI6 conference last week and their Powerpoint files are on the wiki, along with an Update document summarising the progress and future timelines. Here are the links: Update: http://repinf.pbworks.com/Update-June-09 Powerpoints: links from the front page: http://repinf.pbworks.com/
  3. Finally, the wiki provides extensive background information on repositories in the form of Briefing Materials under a number of headings. These are presented in both text and map form on the wiki, accessible from the links on the wiki front page here: http://repinf.pbworks.com/.

SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7

Stuart Lewis has released the SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This latest version adds two new features:

  • When performing a deposit, the client now sets the 'Content-Disposition:filename' header so that the SWORD server knows what to name the file. . . .
  • When performing a deposit, the optional X-No-Op (pretend to perform the deposit) and X-Verbose (provide a verbose response) headers can now be sent (as per http://www.swordapp.org/docs/sword-profile-1.3.html#b.9.2)