Category: Digital Repositories

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.

Catherine Mitchell Named as Director, eScholarship Publishing Group at CDL

Catherine Mitchell, Acting Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, has been named as the permanent occupant of that post. In this capacity, Mitchell is responsible for the eScholarship Repository, eScholarship Editions, the Mark Twain Project Online, and other ventures.

In her statement about the appointment, Laine Farley, CDL Interim Executive Director, said:

Catherine has held the position on an interim basis since November 2007. During that time, she has led the group to develop a new services-oriented vision and to launch an ambitious redesign of the eScholarship interface. She was also the project manager for the Mark Twain project which successfully launched last November. Catherine’s dedication, deep understanding of scholarly communication, publishing issues, and professionalism are admired by all of us who work with her.

Committee on Institutional Cooperation and University of California Launch HathiTrust, Shared Digital Repository

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California System's university libraries have launched the HathiTrust, a shared digital repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A group of the nation’s largest research libraries are collaborating to create a repository of their vast digital collections, including millions of books, organizers announced today. These holdings will be archived and preserved in a single repository called the HathiTrust. Materials in the public domain will be available for reading online. . . .

Launched jointly by the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and the 11 university libraries of the University of California system, the HathiTrust leverages the time-honored commitment to preservation and access to information that university libraries have valued for centuries. UC’s participation will be coordinated by the California Digital Library (CDL), which brings its deep and innovative experience in digital curation and online scholarship to the HathiTrust.

"This effort combines the expertise and resources of some of the nation’s foremost research libraries and holds even greater promise as it seeks to grow beyond the initial partners," says John Wilkin, associate university librarian of the University of Michigan and the newly named executive director of HathiTrust. Hathi (pronounced hah-TEE), the Hindi word for elephant incorporated into the repository’s name, underscores the immensity of this undertaking, Wilkin says. Elephants also evoke memory, wisdom, and strength.

As of today, HathiTrust contains more than 2 million volumes and approximately ¾ of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which are in the public domain. Public domain materials will be available for reading online. Materials protected by copyright, although not available for reading online, are given the full range of digital archiving services, thereby offering member libraries a reliable means to preserve their collections. Organizers also expect to use those materials in the research and development of the Trust.

Volumes are added to the repository daily, and content will grow rapidly as the University of California, CIC member libraries, and other prospective partners contribute their digitized content. Also today, the founding partners announce that the University of Virginia is joining the initiative.

Each of the founding partners brings extensive and highly regarded expertise in the areas of information technology, digital libraries, and project management to this endeavor. Creation of the HathiTrust supports the digitization efforts of the CIC and the University of California, each of which has entered into collective agreements with Google to digitize portions of the collections of their libraries, more than 10 million volumes in total, as part of the Google Book Search project. Materials digitized through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust.

Read more about it at "University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library."

Microsoft Releases Research-Output Repository Platform Beta 1 and OfficeSWORD

Microsoft Research has released Research-Output Repository Platform Beta 1 and Savas Parastatidis, Architect in the Technical Computing @ Microsoft group, has released OfficeSWORD.

Here's an excerpt from the Research-Output Repository Platform's download page:

The platform is based on Microsoft's technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused documentation. New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets—such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags—as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.

Here's an excerpt from "SWORD Plugin for Word 2007":

During discussions with the Fedora Commons and DSpace communities, it was suggested to us that an open source plugin for Word 2007 that talks with any repository service through SWORD would be a good idea. I finally managed to put some time aside to develop such a plugin and upload it to Codeplex. You'll need VS.NET 2008 SP1 to load the code and run it (there is currently no separate installer I am afraid but we are working on one).

NISO Holds Final Thought Leader Meeting on Research Data

NISO (the National Information Standards Organization) has held its final Thought Leader meeting on the topic of research data. A short summary of the meeting is available at “NISO Brings Together Data Thought Leaders.”

Earlier this year, NISO held Thought Leader meetings on institutional repositories, digital library and collections, and e-learning and course management systems. Final reports are available for the institutional repositories and digital library and collections meetings.

Digital Repository Log Standards: Final Report: JISC Usage Statistics Review

JISC has released Final Report: Usage Statistics Review.

Here's an excerpt:

The JISC Usage Statistics Review Project is aimed at formulating a fundamental scheme for repository log files and at proposing a standard for their aggregation to provide meaningful and comparable item-level usage statistics for electronic documents like e.g. research papers and scientific resources. . . .

The thus described usage events should be exchanged in the form of OpenURL Context Objects using OAI. Automated access (e.g. robots) should be tagged. . . .

With the JISC-funded Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS) and the DFG-funded Open-Access-Statistics there are two projects which will formulate standards for usage statistics and work on their implementation. To reach broad comparability national efforts should be bundled together. A central authority—which could for example be the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER)—should aggregate the usage data. . . .

Policies on statistics should be formulated for the repository community as well as the publishing community. Information about statistics policies should be available on services like OpenDOAR and RoMEO.

National Research Data Management for the UK: UKRDS Interim Report Released

The UK Research Data Service has released the UKRDS Interim Report.

The report recommends adopting a "Hybrid/Umbrella" model for managing research data in the UK. Here's an excerpt:

In this model ["Hybrid/Umbrella"], UKRDS acts as an umbrella organisation, representing the interests of many UK data repositories, both those based around single institutions and those based on storage for a single discipline. Such an organisation would be well-placed to act as a mediator, as a standards-setting body and as source of information about data archiving and repositories, perhaps in a similar fashion to the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). In time it might become a data repository in its own right or take on other functions as required. This approach brings the Shared Services model into the current environment of grid computing and cloud-based data storage, with an emphasis on distributed shared services, rather than centralised shared services. Although there are still risks associated with this model, they are lower than the previous two and more manageable. The exact structure of such an organisation would be dependent on circumstance and would need to take into account the requirements of the member organisations.

Funded: Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR): A Demonstration Project

The Florida Center for Library Automation has received a $392,649 grant (matching amount: $392,764) from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a two-year project titled "Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR): A Demonstration Project." The Cornell University Library and the New York University Libraries are FCLA's grant partners.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Practical repository-to-repository transfer requires agreed-upon transfer protocols, enhancements to repository software applications, and a common standards-based transfer format capable of transporting rich preservation metadata and associated digital objects. Building on prior work, this project will define a transfer format, modify three different open source repository applications to import and export information packages in this format, and test a carefully developed set of use cases to verify the usability and flexibility of the format.

New Fedora Commons HatCheck Newsletter

Fedora Commons has published a new issue of its HatCheck newsletter.

Highlights include: