Category: Digital Repositories

"Institutional Repository on a Shoestring"

George Wrenn, Carolyn J. Mueller, and Jeremy Shellhase have published "Institutional Repository on a Shoestring" in the new D-Lib Magazine issue.

Here's an excerpt:

Humboldt State University (HSU), with 7,800 students (fall 2008), is one of the smaller campuses in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system. Our institutional repository, Humboldt Digital Scholar (HDS), originated as a pilot project during the Library's August 2004 planning meeting and became a permanent Library service in April 2006. The repository functions "on a shoestring," unfunded and reliant on contributions of time from librarians and library staff for its ongoing maintenance and development.

In this article, the authors, three members of the HDS Steering Committee, describe the process of setting up and managing a digital repository: hardware and software selection; customizations; gaining campus support; developing collections; accepting submissions; and planning for the future, including participation in a system-wide effort to create a shared repository for the CSU.

Digital Collection/Repository Software: OCLC Releases CONTENTdm 5

OCLC has released CONTENTdm 5. In addition to being used as a digital asset management system, CONTENTdm is being increasingly being used to support institutional repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

OCLC has released CONTENTdm 5, a new version of the popular CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management software that fully supports Unicode, the industry standard used to recognize text in most of the world's non-Western languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Hebrew, among others. . . .

For end users, CONTENTdm 5 provides a new experience with powerful search improvements, including the integration of Find—the search engine behind OCLC's WorldCat.org. Offering capabilities beyond full Unicode searching, CONTENTdm 5 also features faceted browsing to help refine search results, as well as relevancy ranking similar to what end users experience when searching WorldCat.org and other popular search engines. These improvements ensure a library achieves its ultimate goal for its digital collection—to help end users find, get and use the digital items they need.

For libraries, the new CONTENTdm includes a totally redesigned Project Client, offering more streamlined collection-building workflows that will reduce the time needed to create a digital collection, reducing project costs and maximizing results.

Other CONTENTdm 5 enhancements include a new reports module designed to better track and assess collection usage; nine integrated thesauri, which will improve efficiency by providing controlled vocabularies; and increased capacity that supports more collections, items and metadata fields as well as larger volumes for batch processing.

CONTENTdm 5 offers improvements for handling EAD (Encoded Archival Description) files, including how finding aids are imported, displayed and searched.

E-Print about Southern Cross University Library's Full Service Repository Model

Kerrie L. Burn and Katie Wilson have made available "Build It and They Will Come?: Assessing the Impact of 'Academic-Friendly' Practices on Institutional Repository Growth at Southern Cross University."

Here's the abstract:

Despite a proliferation of institutional repositories being established in recent years, and the significant financial and staffing resources invested in them, many have not fulfilled their initial promise. While most repository managers have been committed to providing open access to the research output of their institutions, many repositories have limited content and most academics have not yet been persuaded to engage with them in a sustained way. It has been hypothesised that better results might be obtained if population strategies were more aligned with the needs and current work practices of academics rather than the primary focus of the repository being as a showcase for the institution.

In 2008 Southern Cross University Library’s ePublications@SCU project team sought to take a more "academic-friendly" approach to repository development with the view that this would ultimately lead to improved deposit rates. Attempts were made to reduce any perceived complexities of the system that may be barriers to academic participation. Some of the strategies employed by Library staff included: producing promotional material that highlighted the personal and professional benefits for academics of the repository, creating Personal Researcher Pages for each academic in order to showcase their scholarly profiles, and taking responsibility for copyright checking and uploading of all papers into the repository.

Open Journal Systems SWORD Plugin

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released a SWORD plugin for Open Journal Systems, which was developed by Scott Yeadon and Leo Monus. The plugin requires "a significant amount of patching to DSpace," and it is recommended that testing be done with Fedora. A new version will be released next year that may eliminate the need for DSpace patching.

"In Search Of A Standardized Model for Institutional Repository Assessment or How Can We Compare Institutional Repositories?"

Chuck Thomas, Florida Center for Library Automation, and Robert H. McDonald, University of California San Diego, have deposited a postprint of "In Search Of A Standardized Model for Institutional Repository Assessment or How Can We Compare Institutional Repositories?" in eScholarship.

Here's the abstract:

Assessing universities and faculty is a continuous struggle. Academic administrators must labor year after year to gather meaningful statistics for assessment exercises such as periodic institutional accreditations, program reviews, and annual funding requests. It is hard to overstate the difficulty and complexity of compiling such data. The professional literature of higher education administration contains frequent calls over the past several decades, for better ways to measure performance in colleges and universities. One way to accomplish this is through the work of research libraries and their use of institutional repositories. Developing a standardized way to assess a university's ouput through the use of digital repository metrics is one such method to assess and compare separate institutions. This paper looks at several models that could be of use in this process.

Repository Deposit Software: SWORD PHP Library Released

Stuart Lewis has released a PHP library for the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) software.

Here's an excerpt from his post:

There are many web applications that could deposit into repositories using SWORD, and many of these are written in PHP. Examples might include open source Content Management Systems, Blogs or Wikis. By using this library you can easily retrieve service documents and make deposits by using the API provided. There are two simple method calls (one to retrieve a service document and one to deposit a file). In addition there is a packager included that can package a file and metadata together into a package format supported by both DSpace and EPrints. This is the same code which is used to power the Facebook SWORD deposit tool (http://fb.swordapp.org/).

Report from the Enhancing Repositories for the Next Generation of Academics IMLS Grant Project

The University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries' IMLS-funded Enhancing Repositories for the Next Generation of Academics grant project has released "The Next Generation of Academics: A Report on a Study Conducted at the University of Rochester."

Here's the abstract:

This document reports on the user research portion of "Enhancing Repositories for the Next Generation of Academics" (IMLS Grant No. LG-06-06-0051). We conducted user research from December 2006 through March 2008 to support development of a suite of authoring tools to be integrated into an institutional repository. Our understanding of the work practices of graduate students enabled us to design the authoring tools to meet their needs for individual and collaborative writing and to make it easy for them to move completed documents from the authoring system into the repository.

Feasibility Study into Approaches to Improve the Consistency with Which Repositories Share Material

JISC has released Feasibility Study into Approaches to Improve the Consistency with Which Repositories Share Material: Final Report for JISC.

Here's an excerpt:

In view of resource constraints which were often mentioned by our respondents, priority should be given to:

  • populating the repository with sufficient high quality material that your target audience will consider it a 'critical mass';
  • creating and exposing robust policies;
  • creating and maintaining machine interfaces to metadata, indexes and the full text of items held in repositories, particularly scholarly works;
  • creating minimal metadata for all items, with richer metadata for those items which cannot be efficiently crawled and indexed; automation should be used wherever possible to aid and supplement human intervention.

Sufficient consistency for worthwhile collaborative work using standards-based technologies and rich human-created metadata may be achieved only where sufficient staff/human resources exist to create, share and maintain appropriate metadata and policies. In addition, such consistency may only be found where a federation is able to mandate standards, practices and policies or where participants feel they have a strong common interest in the success of shared objectives.

Taking account of the feedback we received, in order to promote more productive sharing between repositories we also make recommendations to:

  • increase the use of automated tools to help, and in some cases replace, human metadata creation;
  • create and maintain stronger relationships between repository owners/sponsors and also between them and other metadata holders such as publishers;
  • move towards embracing Web standards—as opposed to 'digital library' standards—in the production and maintenance of repositories and the sharing of their content.

Read more about it at "Repository Interoperability."

Grant Awarded: DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons for DuraSpace Planning

The DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons have received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support planning for DuraSpace.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

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.

Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, said, "Together we can leverage our expertise and open source value proposition to continue to provide integrated open solutions that support the scholarly mission of universities."

Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, observes, "There is an important role for high-tech non-profit organizations in adding value to emerging cloud solutions. DuraSpace is designed with an eye towards enabling universities, libraries, and other types of organizations to take advantage of cloud storage while also addressing special requirements unique to areas such as digital archiving and scholarly communication."

The grant from the Mellon Foundation will support a needs analysis, focus groups, technical design sessions, and meetings with potential commercial partners. A working web-based demonstration will be completed during the six-month grant period to help validate the technical and business assumptions behind DuraSpace.

Presentations from the Oxford Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop

Presentations from the Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop at the Oxford Said Business School are now available.

Here's a selection:

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2008

Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.

Here's a brief selection:

Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London

The RAND Corporation has released Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London. (Thanks to Resource Shelf.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.