Digital Repositories – Page 33

Wednesday’s OAI5 Presentations

Presentations from Wednesday’s sessions of the 5th Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in Geneva are now available.

Here are a few highlights from this major conference:

MESUR: Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (PowerPoint): "The two-year MESUR project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to define and validate a range of usage-based impact metrics, and issue guidelines with regards to their characteristics and proper application. The MESUR project is constructing a large-scale semantic model of the scholarly community that seamlessly integrates a wide range of bibliographic, citation and usage data."
OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (PowerPoint): "In this presentation, we will give an overview of the current activities, including: defining the problem of compound documents within the web architecture, enumerating and exploring several use cases, and identifying likely adopters of OAI-ORE."
OpenDOAR Policy Tools and Applications (RealVideo): "OpenDOAR has developed a set of policy generator tools for repository administrators and is contacting administrators to advocate policy development."
State of OAI-PMH (PowerPoint): "The OAI-PMH was released in 2001 and stabilized at v2.0 in 2002. Since then there has been steady growth in adoption of the protocol. Support for the OAI-PMH is assumed for base-level interoperability between institutional repositories, and is also provided for many other collections of scholarly material. I will review the current landscape and reflect on some milestones and issues."

(You may want to download PowerPoint Viewer 2007 if you don’t have PowerPoint 2007).

The Depot: A UK Digital Repository

The JISC Repositories and Preservation program has established the Depot, so that researchers who do not have an institutional repository can deposit digital postprints and other digital objects.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

The general strategy being adopted in the UK is that every university should develop and establish its own institutional repository (IR), as part of a comprehensive ‘JISC RepositoryNet’. Many researchers can already make use of the IRs set up in their institution, but that is not (yet) the case for all. A key purpose for The Depot is to bridge that gap during the period before all have such provision, and to provide a deposit facility that will enable all UK researchers to expose their publications to readers under terms of Open Access.

The Depot will also have a re-direct function to link researchers to the appropriate home pages of their own institutional repositories. The end result should be more content in repositories, making it easier for researchers and policy makers to have peer-reviewed research results exposed to wider readership under Open Access. . . .

The principal focus for The Depot is the deposit of post-prints, digital versions of published journal articles and similar items. There are plans to include links to places for depositing other digital materials, such as research datasets and learning materials. As indicated, The Depot helps provide a level-playing field for all UK researchers and their institutions, especially when deposit under Open Access is required by grant funding bodies. It may also become a useful facility for institutions as they implement and manage their own repositories, helping to promote the habit of deposit among staff, with the simple message, ‘put it in the depot’.

The Depot is based on E-Prints software and is compliant with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI), which promotes standards for repository interoperability. Its contents will be harvested and searched through the Intute Repository Search project. It offers a redirect service, UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an extant repository is correctly placed there instead of in The Depot.

Additionally, as IRs are created, The Depot will offer a transfer service for content deposited by authors based at those universities, to help populate the new IRs. The Depot will therefore act as a ‘keepsafe’ until a repository of choice becomes available for deposited scholarly content. In this way, The Depot will avoid competing with extant and emerging IRs while bridging gaps in the overall repository landscape and encouraging more open access deposits.

A Depot FAQ is available.

Repository 66: OA Digital Repository Map Mashup

Stuart Lewis of the University of Wales Aberystwyth has created a Google Map mashup called Repository 66 that shows worldwide open access digital repositories using data from ROAR and OpenDOAR. (Route 66 was a famous highway in the US.)

Summary of PerX Project Findings About OAI-PMH and Repository Metadata Challenges

Roderick A. MacLeod has posted a useful summary of some of the key documents and findings of the PerX (Pilot Engineering Repositories Xsearch) project on JISC-REPOSITORIES. He notes: "These documents may help to dispel possible myths concerning the ease of service provision, ease of reharvesting metadata, surfacing digital repository content in third part services, etc."

Here’s a excerpt from the project’s About page that describes it:

PerX is a two-year (June 2005-May 2007) JISC Digital Repositories Programme project, to develop a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research community. This pilot will then be used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of a full scale subject resource discovery service.

(Prior posting about PerX.)

Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PLIN) Project

ARROW and the University of Southern Queensland have established the Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PLIN) Project.

As outlined in the project’s Executive Summary, its goals are to:

Support adoption and use of persistent identifiers and shared persistent identifier management services by the project stakeholders.

Plan for a sustainable, shared identifier management infrastructure that enables persistence of identifiers and associated services over archival lengths of time.

The project’s anticipated outcomes are:

Best practice and policy guides for the use of persistent identifiers in Australian e-learning, e-research, and e-science communities.

Use cases describing community requirements for identifiers and business process analysis relating to these use cases.

E-Framework representations of persistent identifier management services that support the business requirements for identifiers.

A "pilot" shared persistent identifier management infrastructure usable by the project stakeholders over the lifetime of the project. The pilot infrastructure will include services for creating, accessing and managing persistent digital identifiers over their lifetime. The pilot infrastructure will interoperate with other DEST funded systemic infrastructure. The development phase of the pilot will use an agile development methodology that will allow the inclusion of "value-added" services for managing resources using persistent identifiers to be included in the development program if resources permit.

Software tools to help applications use the shared persistent identifier infrastructure more easily.

Report on options and proposals for sustaining, supporting (including outreach) and governing shared persistent identifier management infrastructure

The PLIN Projet will base its work on the CNRI Handle System. The below excerpt from the Handle System home page describes its primary features:

The Handle System® is a general purpose distributed information system that provides efficient, extensible, and secure identifier and resolution services for use on networks such as the Internet. It includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. The protocols enable a distributed computer system to store identifiers, known as handles, of arbitrary resources and resolve those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, contact, authenticate, or otherwise make use of the resources. This information can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing its identifier, thus allowing the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other related state information.

Report About Users’ Digital Repository Needs at the University of Hull

The RepoMMan Project at the University of Hull has published The RepoMMan User Needs Analysis report.

Here’s an excerpt from the JISC-REPOSITORIES announcement:

The document covers the repository needs of users in the research, learning & teaching, and administration areas. Whilst based primarily on needs expressed in interviews at the University of Hull the document is potentially of wider applicability, drawing from an on-line survey of researchers elsewhere and a survey of the L&T community undertaken by the CD-LOR Project.

DRAMA Project’s Fedora Authentication Code Alpha Release

The DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) project has released an alpha version of its Fedora authentication code. DRAMA is part of the RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities Project) project.

Here’s an excerpt from the fedora-commons-users announcement about the release’s features:

Federated authentication (using Shibboleth) for Fedora.

Extended XACML engine support via the introduction of an XML database for storing and querying policies and XACML requests over web services.

Re-factoring of Fedora XACML authorization into an interceptor layer which is separate from Fedora.

A new web GUI for Fedora nicknamed "mura" (Note: that we will be changing the GUI name to a new one soon).

Report on Sharing and Re-Use of Geospatial Data in Repositories

The GRADE project has released a report titled Designing a Licensing Strategy for Sharing and Re-Use of Geospatial Data in the Academic Sector.

The JISC-REPOSITORIES announcement indicates that the report presents "a licensing strategy for the sharing and re-use of geospatial data within the UK research and education sector," and that it "puts forward a conceptual framework for resolving those described rights management issues raised in relation to repositories."

Here is an excerpt from the report that describes it further:

Geospatial material created in the education sector can be highly complex, incorporating data created elsewhere either as found, or customised to fit the particular need of the academic or lecturer. The downstream rights can become very complex, as it is necessary to ensure that permissions have been gained to reuse or repurpose the data, and it is usually essential that correct attribution is made. There are currently concerns and confusion over the assertion of IPR and copyright of created geospatial data particularly where third party data are included.

This report considers a licensing strategy for the sharing and re-use of geospatial data within the UK research and education sector.

UK Council of Research Repositories Established

SHERPA Plus has announced the launch of the UK Council of Research Repositories.

It is described as follows: "UKCoRR will be an independent professional body to allow repository managers to share experiences and discuss issues of common concern. It will give repository managers a group voice in national discussions and policy development independent of projects or temporary initiatives."

Digital Object Prototypes Framework Released

Kostas Saidis has released the Digital Object Prototypes Framework. It is available from the DOPs download page.

Here is an excerpt from the fedora-commons-users announcement:

At a glance, DOPs is a framework for the effective management and manipulation of diverse and heterogeneous digital material, providing repository-independent, type-consistent abstractions of stored digital objects. In DOPs, individual objects are treated as instances of their prototype and, hence, conform to its specifications automatically, regardless of the underlying storage format used to store and encode the objects.

The framework also provides inherent support for collections /sub-collections hierarchies and compound objects, while it allows DL-pertinent services to compose type-specific object behavior effectively. A DO Storage module is also available, which allows one to use the framework atop Fedora (thoroughly tested with Fedora version 2.0).

PRESERV Project Report on Digital Preservation in Institutional Repositories

The JISC PRESERV (Preservation Eprint Services) project has issued a report titled Laying the Foundations for Repository Preservation Services: Final Report from the PRESERV Project.

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The PRESERV project (2005-2007) investigated long-term preservation for institutional repositories (IRs), by identifying preservation services in conjunction with specialists, such as national libraries and archives, and building support for services into popular repository software, in this case EPrints. . . .

PRESERV was able to work with The National Archives, which has produced PRONOMDROID, the pre-eminent tool for file format identification. Instead of linking PRONOM to individual repositories, we linked it to the widely used Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), through an OAI harvesting service. As a result format profiles can be found for over 200 repositories listed in ROAR, what we call the PRONOM-ROAR service. . . .

The lubricant to ease the movement of data between the components of the services model is metadata, notably preservation metadata, which informs, describes and records a range of activities concerned with preserving specific digital objects. PRESERV identified a rich set of preservation metadata, based on the current standard in this area, PREMIS, and where this metadata could be generated in our model. . . .

The most important changes to EPrints software as a result of the project were the addition of a history module to record changes to an object and actions performed on an object, and application programs to package and disseminate data for delivery to an external service using either the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) or the MPEG-21 Part 2: Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL). One change to the EPrints deposit interface is the option for authors to select a licence indicating rights for allowable use by service providers or users, and others. . . .

PRESERV has identified a powerful and flexible framework in which a wide range of preservation services from many providers can potentially be intermediated to many repositories by other types of repository services. It is proposed to develop and test this framework in the next phase of the project.

Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist Published

The Center for Research Libraries and RLG Programs have published the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

In 2003, RLG and the US National Archives and Records Administration created a joint task force to address digital repository certification. The goal of the RLG-NARA Task Force on Digital Repository Certification was to develop criteria to identify digital repositories capable of reliably storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections. With partial funding from the NARA Electronic Records Archives Program, the international task force produced a set of certification criteria applicable to a range of digital repositories and archives, from academic institutional preservation repositories to large data archives and from national libraries to third-party digital archiving services. . . . .

In 2005, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded funding to the Center for Research Libraries to further establish the documentation requirements, delineate a process for certification, and establish appropriate methodologies for determining the soundness and sustainability of digital repositories. Under this effort, Robin Dale (RLG Programs) and Bernard F. Reilly (President, Center for Research Libraries) created an audit methodology based largely on the checklist, tested it on several major digital repositories, including the E-Depot at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and Portico.

Findings and methodologies were shared with those of related working groups in Europe who applied the draft checklist in their own domains: the Digital Curation Center (U.K.), DigitalPreservationEurope (Continental Europe) and NESTOR (Germany). The report incorporates the sum of knowledge and experience, new ideas, techniques, and tools that resulted from cross-fertilization between the U.S. and European efforts. It also includes a discussion of audit and certification criteria and how they can be considered from an organizational perspective.

UK EThOSnet ETD Project Funded

A UK-wide ETD project called EThOSnet has been funded for a two-year period by JISC and CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries). When the project concludes, the British Library will establish the EThOS service based on the work done by EThOSnet.

An excerpt from the press release is below:

The project builds on earlier exploratory work, also funded by JISC and CURL, which between 2004 and 2006 developed a prototype for the service. Independent evaluation has since given the prototype strong backing and suggested further developments, while a recent consultation resulted in expressions of interest from over 70 HE institutions to participate in the emerging e-theses service.

EThOSnet builds on these firm foundations and through collaboration with the British Library and the HE community will transform access to theses in the UK by providing the full text of theses through a single point of entry. In addition, in tandem with the emerging network of institutional repositories in the UK, it promises to become a central element of the national infrastructure for research.

Fez 1.3 Released

Christiaan Kortekaas has announced on the fedora-commons-users list that Fez 1.3 is now available from SourceForge.

Here’s a summary of key changes from his message:

Primary XSDs for objects based on MODS instead of DC (can still handle your existing DC objects though)

Download statistics using apache logs and GeoIP

Object history logging (premis events)

Shibboleth support

Fulltext indexing (pdf only)

Import and Export of workflows and XSDs

Sanity checking to help make sure required external dependencies are working

OAI provider that respects FezACML authorisation rules

For further information on Fez, see the prior post "Fez+Fedora Repository Software Gains Traction in US."

Fez+Fedora Repository Software Gains Traction in US

The February 2007 issue of Sustaining Repositories reports that more US institutions are using or investigating a combination of Fez and Fedora (see the below quote):

Fez programmers at the University of Queensland (UQ) have been gratified by a surge in international interest in the Fez software. Emory University Libraries are building a Fez repository for electronic theses. Indiana University Libraries are also testing Fez+Fedora to see whether to replace their existing DSpace installation. The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (http://www.coalliance.org/) is using Fez+Fedora for their Alliance Digital Repository. Also in the US, the National Science Digital Library is using Fez+Fedora for their Materials Science Digital Library (http://matdl.org/repository/index.php).

Open Access Repository Software Use By Country

Based on data from the OpenDOAR Charts service, here is snapshot of the open access repository software that is in use in the top five countries that offer such repositories.

The countries are abbreviated in the table header column as follows: US = United States, DK = Germany, UK = United Kingdom, AU = Australia, and NL = Netherlands. The number in parentheses is the reported number of repositories in that country.

Read the country percentages downward in each column (they do not total to 100% across the rows).

Excluding "unknown" or "other" systems, the highest in-country percentage is shown in boldface.

Software/Country	US (248)	DE (109)	UK (93)	AU (50)	NL (44)
Bepress	17%	0%	2%	6%	0%
Cocoon	0%	0%	1%	0%	0%
CONTENTdm	3%	0%	2%	0%	0%
CWIS	1%	0%	0%	0%	0%
DARE	0%	0%	0%	0%	2%
Digitool	0%	0%	1%	0%	0%
DSpace	18%	4%	22%	14%	14%
eDoc	0%	2%	0%	0%	0%
ETD-db	4%	0%	0%	0%	0%
Fedora	0%	0%	0%	2%	0%
Fez	0%	0%	0%	2%	0%
GNU EPrints	19%	8%	46%	22%	0%
HTML	2%	4%	4%	4%	0%
iTor	0%	0%	0%	0%	5%
Milees	0%	2%	0%	0%	0%
MyCoRe	0%	2%	0%	0%	0%
OAICat	0%	0%	0%	2%	0%
Open Repository	0%	0%	3%	0%	2%
OPUS	0%	43%	2%	0%	0%
Other	6%	7%	2%	2%	0%
PORT	0%	0%	0%	0%	2%
Unknown	31%	28%	18%	46%	23%
Wildfire	0%	0%	0%	0%	52%