Category: Digital Repositories

Digital Repository Software: VTLS Releases VITAL 4.0

VTLS has released VITAL 4.0, which utilizes the Fedora repository software.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

VITAL provides functions to allow easy access of digital resources by individuals, while enforcing proper curation and management policies for digital resources. Authentication and access control are an integral part of the capabilities of Release 4.0 of VITAL. These capabilities grant access where needed and restrict access where appropriate.

Some new features in Release 4.0 of VITAL include:

  • Access management for users and groups: The VITAL software provides an interface for creating users and groups, assigning users to one or more groups, defining the permissions for each group, and defining the permissions for each object and datastream.
  • Integration with QuikBib (TM): QuikBib (TM) provides researchers with the ability to select from 1000+ citation styles for formatting citations for bibliographies.
  • Authority lists: VITAL functionality has been expanded to include the ability to define certain metadata elements present in the repository as "authorities." This allows repository staff to ensure data consistency.
  • Support for consortia: VITAL functionality has been enhanced to support multiple institutions using a single VITAL instance. In this implementation, support has been added for a single copy of Fedora and a single VITAL Access Portal and allows for different skin modifications and configurations for each individual site.

PIRUS—Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: Final Report

JISC has released PIRUS—Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The four main outputs of the project are:

a. A proof-of-concept COUNTER-compliant XML prototype for an individual article usage report, Article Report 1: Number of successful full-text article downloads, that can be used by both repositories and publishers. In principle this report could be provided for individual authors and for institutions. In practice, the individual author reports are much easier to generate and are a realistic short-term objective, while the reports for institutions and other entities, such as funding agencies, will be more complex and should be regarded as a longer term objective.

b. A tracker code, to be implemented by repositories, that sends a message either to an external party that is responsible for creating and consolidating the usage statistics and for forwarding them to the relevant publisher for consolidation or to the local repository server.

c. A range of Scenarios for the creation, recording and consolidation of individual article usage statistics that will cover the majority of current repository installations. Each repository may select the scenario that corresponds to their technology and implementation.

d. Specifying criteria for a central facility that will create the usage statistics where required (for some categories of repository) and collect and consolidate the usage statistics for others.

Andy Powell on Persistent URIs and Digital Repositories

In “How Uncool? Repository URIs. . .,” Andy Powell analyzes URI structure in 107 repositories to determine whether their items’ URIs are likely to be persistent..

Here's an excerpt:

So what is an uncool URI? An uncool URI is one that is unlikely to be persistent, typically because the person who first assigned it didn’t think hard enough about likely changes in organisational structure, policy or technology and the impact that changes in those areas might have on the persistence of the URI into the future.

University of Rochester Releases New Institutional Repository System, IR Plus

The University of Rochester has released version alpha 0.1 of its new open source institutional repository system, IR Plus. A test version of the system is available, and a discussion group has been established on Google.

Here are the documentation links:

Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln

JISC has released Lirolem. A Virtual Studio/Institutional Repository for the University of Lincoln: Final Project Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The primary aim of the Lirolem project was initially to build a repository capable of handling the material that was generated by the students of the Lincoln School of Architecture, with a view to using it as teaching material in future years. A second aim was to provide an Institutional Repository that was capable of handling research materials in a variety of formats. . . .

The principal output of the project has been the establishment of the Lincoln Institutional Repository (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk) in which all members of the University are able to deposit material. A review process is in place, whereby members of the project team can assess the quality of submissions and either make them live in the Repository, or return them to the original author with suggestions for improvement. The Repository facilitates the deposit of full text material, or metadata only records. The public release of full text material can be embargoed for public release for a period of time to comply with publishers’ requirements, or if preferred this material can be made available to registered users of the Repository

Other outputs have been the production of Service Usage Model Document, which describes the services that the Repository uses, the production of user guides and the production of a conference paper, which was delivered at the MACE conference in Venice, 20-21 September 2008, briefing papers for management on Open Access, interim and completion reports to JISC and a project wiki that contains all these documents which is available at http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Institutional_Repository.

Automatic Metadata Generation for Repositories: MetaTools: Final Report

JISC has released MetaTools: Final Report .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Automatic metadata generation has sometimes been posited as a solution to the 'metadata bottleneck' that repositories and portals are facing as they struggle to provide resource discovery metadata for a rapidly growing number of new digital resources. Unfortunately there is no registry or trusted body of documentation that rates the quality of metadata generation tools or identifies the most effective tool(s) for any given task.

The aim of the first stage of the project was to remedy this situation by developing a framework for evaluating tools used for the purpose of generating Dublin Core metadata. . . .

A test program was then implemented using metrics from the framework. It evaluated the quality of metadata generated from 1) Web pages (html) and 2) scholarly works (pdf) by four of the more widely-known metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, DC-dot, SamgI, and the Yahoo! Term Extractor. . . .

It was found that the output from Data Fountains was generally superior to that of the other tools that the project tested. But the output from all of the tools was considered to be disappointing and markedly inferior to the quality of metadata that Tonkin and Muller report that PaperBase has extracted from scholarly works. Over all, the prospects for generating high-quality metadata for scholarly works appear to be brighter because of their more predictable layout. . . .

In the third stage of the project SOAP and RESTful Web Service interfaces were developed for three metadata generation tools—Data Fountains, SamgI and Kea. This had a dual purpose. Firstly, the creation of an optimal metadata record usually requires the merging of output from several tools each of which, until now, had to be invoked separately because of the ad hoc nature of their interfaces. As Web services, they will be available for use in a network such as the Web with well-defined interfaces that are implementation-independent. These services will be exposed for use by clients without them having to be concerned with how the service will execute their requests. Repositories should be able to plug them into their own cataloguing environments and experiment with automatic metadata generation under more 'real-life' circumstances than hitherto. Secondly, and more importantly (in view of the relatively poor quality of current tools) they enabled the project to experiment with the use of a high-level ontology for describing metadata generation tools.

Cloud Computing: DuraSpace Report to Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released a progress report from the DuraSpace project, a joint project of the DSpace Foundation and the Fedora Commons. (Thanks to RepositoryMan.)

Here's an excerpt from "DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Receive Grant from the Mellon Foundation for DuraSpace" that describes the project:

Over the next six months funding from the planning grant will allow the organizations to jointly specify and design "DuraSpace," a new web-based service that will allow institutions to easily distribute content to multiple storage providers, both "cloud-based" and institution-based. The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and sharable.

SPARC Releases Digital Repository Videos

SPARC has released a series of videos about digital repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The video series was taped at the November 2008 SPARC repositories meeting, and underscores the central role of repositories across library services. Particular emphasis is placed on the added value they contribute to the institution and on the importance of funding repository development even in lean economic times. The clips feature three full-length plenary addresses plus seven short interviews with leading-edge repository implementers, including:

  • Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian at University of Alberta
  • Michelle Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation
  • Bonnie Klein, Information Collection/Copyright Specialist at the US Defense Technical Information Center
  • Catherine Mitchell, Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at California Digital Library (CDL)
  • Sarah Shreeves, IDEALS Coordinator at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
  • John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science at Creative Commons
  • Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications Inc.

Welsh Repository Network Launched

The Welsh Repository Network has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Welsh Repository Network (WRN), a network of twelve institutional repositories within each of the higher education institutions (HEI) within Wales, was launched at the National Library of Wales on Thursday 19th February, 2009. The launch celebrated the success of the WRN Project; a project funded by the JISC in association with the Wales Higher Education Library Forum (WHELF), to provide each HEI in Wales with the resources and support needed to establish and operate effective, individual institutional repositories. Each HEI was provided with funding to purchase repository hardware or to purchase a hosted repository system, along with support and assistance via the Welsh arm of the Repositories Support Project (RSP) based at Aberystwyth University.

The WRN launch celebrated the fact that the principality of Wales now has 100% coverage with respect to universities and repositories. This will allow the universities in Wales to not only preserve and protect their research, but also make available cutting edge research to the world, enabling more open dissemination of the ground breaking and world leading research undertaken across Wales through the Open Access movement.

A further deliverable of the project is the production of a suite of twelve case studies, documenting the hardware purchases of each institution (available from http://hdl.handle.net/2160/1881). As the HEIs in Wales are diverse in size and type, ranging from large research-led institutions to smaller liberal arts or specialist institutions, a variety of hardware and software solutions were required to fit with their existing infrastructures. It was hoped that creating these case studies would assist other universities to allow them to compare their profile with a case study of an institution with a similar background and infrastructure plan, and to gauge their hardware needs for repository support accordingly.

Leslie Carr on Repositories and Cloud Computing

In "The Cloud, the Researcher and the Repository," Leslie Carr discusses repositories and cloud computing, especially the problem of large file deposit.

Here's an excerpt from:

The solution that Tim [Brody] has come up with is to allow the researcher's desktop environment to directly use EPrints as a file system—you can 'mount' the repository as a network drive on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop using services like WebDAV or FTP. As far as the user is concerned, they can just drag and drop a whole bunch of files from their documents folders, home directories or DVD-ROMs onto the repository disk, and EPrints will automatically deposit them into a new entry or entries. Of course, you can also do the reverse—copy documents from the repository back onto your desktop, open them directly in applications, or attach them to an email.

Public Knowledge Releases Open Archives Harvester 2.3.0

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Archives Harvester, an open source OAI-PMH harvester.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).

UK's Intute Repository Search Project Releases Two Search Engines for Testing

Supported by JISC funding, the Intute Repository Search project is developing increasingly sophisticated search capabilities for document discovery in UK repositories, and it has released two search engines for testing (conceptual search and text mining based search).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Search services harvest the metadata and full-text out-put from institutional repositories, making the aggregated content searchable and browsable via a single interface. Intute Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR.

The development path of this project involves simple metadata search, full-text indexing of documents, text-mining of full-text documents, automatic subject classification, term-based document classification, query expansion, clustering of results and browsing/visualisation of the search results. User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Intute Repository Search.

Two complementary advanced search and browse services have been developed for user testing. One is Autonomy IDOL (www.autonomy.com/content/Products/products-idol-server/index.en.html) and the other is using components developed by NaCTeM (www.nactem.ac.uk).

Autonomy IDOL relates to the conceptual feature of the service. This allows users to search for documents most closely matched to their query, read the overview and abstract of those documents and also have the opportunity to view documents relating to the query's search results. The result is a richer contextual search facility for users who want to view documents that are ranked according to their relation to the query.

NaCTeM has developed the text mining component. This allows users to take advantage of the TerMine service (www.nactem.ac.uk/software/termine/) among others, to automatically discover term associations within texts that are harvested from UK HE institutional repositories. By extracting information that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to identify in a large number of documents, users can view documents that are linked with each other via salient concepts in a way that may lead to the answer of existing research questions or the creation of new ones. This then allows for a more meaningful and personalised search facility for users who are looking for specific patterns and connections between terms, within the collective resource of Intute Repository Search.

Metadata Tool under Development: Update on Duke's Project Trident

Will Sexton has posted an update about Duke University Libraries' Project Trident, which is developing a metadata tool for use with its digital repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Our specifications essentially treat the Editor as a client of the Repository, and the Repository not as an implementation, but as an API with RESTful bindings. . . .

We took this approach to promote the modularity of the Editor tool. Other organizations or institutions may choose to implement the RESTful API “on top of” their local repository implementation, and adopt the Trident Editor for their own needs. We intend to implement our Repository module using Fedora, but the Editor module should be reusable with a variety of repository platforms.

University Council at Boston University Endorses Open Access Initiative

The University Council of Boston University has endorsed an open access initiative that will establish an institutional repository.

Here's an excerpt from "University Council Approves Open Access Plan":

Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit.

"We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college," says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. "We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared."

"The resolution passed by our University Council is a very important statement on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the University," says BU President Robert A. Brown. "The digital archive called for in the resolution will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students."

UT Dallas Launches Institutional Repository Using Texas Digital Library

The McDermott Library at the University of Texas at Dallas has launched its institutional repository, Treasures @ UT Dallas, using the Texas Digital Library's DSpace system.

Read more about it at "Tools Helping Library Share its Wealth of Material."

ARL Releases The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services

The Association of Research Libraries Digital Repository Issues Task Force has released The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The report, "The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services," identifies key issues surrounding repository development, explores common strategies that libraries are using, analyzes relevant environmental trends, discusses issues where ARL and its member libraries should focus attention, and recommends the following actions for research libraries to undertake:

  • Build a range of new kinds of partnerships and alliances, both within institutions and between institutions.
  • Base service-development strategies on substantive assessment of local needs rather than blindly replicating work done at another institution.
  • Engage with key local policy issues and stakeholders to encourage institutional engagement with national and international policy issues.
  • Develop outreach and marketing strategies that assist "early adopters" of repositories to connect with the developing repository-related service system.
  • Define a scope of responsibility to guide the development of repository services for varied forms of content.

The report focuses on repository services generally, rather than concentrating on repository technologies or content. Repository services include services to authors, contributors, and users, particularly of university-created content. Some examples of repository services provided by research libraries include long-term archiving and migration of content, dissemination and access management, metadata and format management, search and discovery tools, publishing, data mining, etc. Illustrations drawn from a variety of digital repositories are used throughout the report.

The task force notes that, due to repository services' powerful potential to enable key work and enhance the effectiveness of functions across the research enterprise, research institutions cannot afford to do without such services, even in difficult economic times. Researchers and scholars with access to a spectrum of repository services possess a substantial advantage in conducting cutting-edge research, delivering high-quality teaching, and contributing valuable services to society. Libraries have key strengths and missions requiring them to undertake various roles in repository service development. This report presents a fresh perspective on the digital repository environment and is intended to inspire ARL member libraries and others to assess their views and plans for service development.

"SWORD: Cutting Through the Red Tape to Populate Learning Materials Repositories"

JISC has released "SWORD: Cutting Through the Red Tape to Populate Learning Materials Repositories."

Here's the abstract:

This in-depth article by Sarah Currier, the Product Manager for Intrallect Ltd., introduces SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) to those interested in sharing, reuse, repurposing and management of teaching and learning materials. The article provides an overview of the tool, technical details of how SWORD works and four case study vignettes, or SWORD Stories, on work that is already under way, which illustrate how SWORD streamlines the process of depositing learning materials into repositories.

OCLC and HathiTrust to Collaborate on Enhancing Access to Digital Repository Materials

OCLC and HathiTrust, a shared digital repository for research libraries, will collaborate on improving access to materials in HathiTrust's repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

HathiTrust, a group of some of the largest research libraries in the United States collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, and OCLC will work together to increase visibility of and access to items in the HathiTrust’s shared digital repository.

Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. The group's digital collections, including millions of books, will be archived and preserved in a single repository hosted by HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain and those where rightsholders have given permission will be available for reading online.

OCLC and HathiTrust will work together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. The organizations will launch a project in the coming months to develop specifications and determine next steps.

January Edition of Ranking Web of World Repositories Published

The January edition of CCHS-CSIC's Ranking Web of World Repositories has been published.

Here's an excerpt:

Following several requests we now show two global Rankings. One that covers all repositories as was shown in previous editions (Top 300), and a new one that focus only on Institutional Repositories (Top 300 Institutional).

New SURFshare Projects

The SURFshare programme has authorized 12 new projects, which will begin at the end of January.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Twelve innovation projects have been approved for the SURFshare programme and will start at the end of January 2009. All of these projects have the same objective, namely to promote knowledge dissemination via the Internet. In this new round of projects, the SURFshare programme allots an active role to researchers and ‘lectors’ (directors of research groups and knowledge networks in Universities of Applied Science): the main thing is not the infrastructure but the user. The grant from the SURFshare programme comes to over € 630.000 on a total budget of € 1.220.000. The year-long innovation projects were submitted by institutions of higher education. . . .

The twelve projects that have been awarded grants are:

Knowledge dissemination at Universities of Applied Sciences

  • National Knowledge Forum for Care and Treatment of Addiction
  • Automotive Knowledge Bank for Universities of Applied Sciences
  • DIGIPUB—Digital Publication environments
  • FUTURE—Thematised Access to Expertise, Knowledge & Research for SMEs, Students and Experts

Enriched publications

  • JALC—Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries, enriched publications in Dutch archaeology
  • DatapluS—Repositories for Enhanced Survey Publications
  • ESCAPE—Enhanced Scientific Communication by Aggregated Publications Environments
  • Theses Plus—Enriched theses in the Utrecht repository
  • Veteran Tapes—Enriched publication based on multidisciplinary re-use of qualitative research files

Collaboratories

  • Tales of the Revolt Collaboratory: Sharing, Enhancing and Disseminating Sources
  • Hublab-2—Toward successful implementation of the Liferay platform in historical research
  • Virtual Knowledge Studio Collaboratory—Understanding Scholarly Collaboration in Practice

Free: All About Repositories Webinar Series

The DSpace Foundation, the Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems, and SPARC are offering a free All About Repositories Webinar Series.

Here's an excerpt from the press release (see it for a list of the first webinars):

Got a repository? Would you like to understand more about what repositories are and how they operate? This spring DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems and SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) will offer a free About Repositories Webinar Series to provide professional learning opportunities for repository managers, developers, curators and decision makers. The seminar series will kick off on Feb. 18 at 9:00 a.m. PT with DSpace and Fedora: A Collaboration Update presented by Michele Kimpton, Executive Director, DSpace Foundation, and Sandy Payette, Executive Director Fedora Commons.

Each month a new topic or issue of interest to repository communities will be presented in a one-hour online format. All About Repositories Webinar Series will be web cast for synchronous event access, and will also be made available through DSpace, Fedora, Sun and SPARC web sites as an open educational reference for repository users and developers.

Future web seminars will focus on topics such as web services, and will take an in-depth look at some of the top implementations from the Innovation Fair held at the November 2008 SPARC repositories meeting. . . .

Pre-registration is required for all seminars at http://www.education-webevents.com/.

Final Version Released: An Ecological Approach to Repository and Service Interactions

John Robertson of JISC CETIS has announced that the final version (1.5) of An Ecological Approach to Repository and Service Interactions has been released.

Here's an excerpt:

Ecology is the study of systems that are complex, dynamic, and full of interacting entities and processes. Although the nature of these interactions and processes may be highly detailed, a higher level view of them is accessible by and intuitive to non-specialists. We think that ecology, and examples of the ecosystems it studies, may offer a useful analogy to inform the task of understanding and articulating the interactions between users, repositories, and services and the information environments in which they take place. This report outlines some concepts from ecology that may be useful and suggests some definitions for a common conversation about the use of this metaphor. It concludes by examining how this approach relates to other initiatives currently ongoing in the JISC Information Environment.

Load Testing DSpace

In "DSpace at a Third of a Million Items," Stuart Lewis reports on a load test of DSpace.

Here's an excerpt:

  • On average deposits into an empty repository took about one and a half seconds.
  • On average deposits into a repository with three hundred thousand items took about seven seconds.
  • If this linear looking relationship between number of deposits and speed of deposit were to continue at the same rate, an average deposit into a repository containing one million items would take about 19 to 20 seconds.
  • Extrapolate this to work out throughput per day, and that is about 10MB deposited every 20 seconds, 30MB per minute, or 43GB of data per day.