Category: Institutional Repositories

The University of Rochester Libraries' IR+ institutional repository software has been overviewed in a recent Inside Higher Ed article ("Encouraging Open Access") and a University of Rochester press release.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Created by a team at the University's River Campus Libraries, UR Research (https://urresearch.rochester.edu/home.action) is a one-stop Web site for managing the academic workflow. The suite of online tools meets an array of research needs, from authoring manuscripts to showcasing work to storing digital materials securely and when needed, permanently.

The system is designed to give researchers the incentive they need to upload their work to Web-based archives. "It's a win-win relationship," explains Suzanne Bell, the librarian charged with introducing the system to the University community. "Researchers get the tailor-made functions and online storage they need, Internet users get free and open access to academic research and priceless collections." For libraries, the program was designed as open-source software available for download to other institutions at no cost.

"It's a cyber work space that's collaborative," says Natalie Klein, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences who quickly became enamored with the site after its recent launch. Klein particularly likes the ability to create and share documents in virtually any format. As a psycholinguist, her research data is quantitative and requires specialized text formatting, coding that is typically stripped when using popular online text sharing programs like Google Documents.

Klein also loves the user control built into the program, allowing her to create a customized researcher page and to easily post and update her CV and research. "I can upload documents myself instead of harassing a Web developer," she points out. "And the support has been great. I can't get that with Google Documents or even my department's Web site."

Doug Guiffrida, associate professor of counseling and human development in the Warner School of Education, agrees. The library's support team has always been "fantastic," he says. "They have made using this super easy."

Guiffrida uses the online archiving system to keep his work organized in one place and available for search engines and the public, who are free to download documents from the system. (Users also may have private work areas that cannot be searched or viewed by the public.) When a colleague asks for a paper, Guiffrida emails the UR Research link; when he gives a presentation, he posts the PowerPoint file on the system and shares the URL, a more earth friendly practice than printing out stacks of handouts, he points out. Even in his own office, Guiffrida says, "I actually use it instead of keeping hard copies around, if I need to look at something that I've written. I'm kind of a minimalist." And, unlike most departmental Web sites, the system tracks how often files are downloaded. "It's nice to see what people are reading and what they are ignoring," says Guiffrida.

An early adopter of UR Research, Guiffrida first began using the system when it was originally introduced in 2003 as simply a digital repository, a place for scholars to preserve and make available online preprints, dissertations, working papers, photographs, research data, music scores, and other work. But five years after its launch, only 6,500 documents had been entered into UR Research, says Nathan Sarr, the library's senior software engineer who designed the expanded system.

So the development team went back to the drawing board to find out what was wrong. Under the leadership of Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of River Campus Libraries; David Lindahl, software development director; and Nancy Fried Foster, director of anthropological research, they conducted an anthropological study of faculty members and a second study of graduate students. What they discovered was that researchers needed software for working collaboratively with their colleagues, whether down the hall or across the globe. They needed online tools for sharing different versions of manuscripts in a safe and secure environment. And they needed a place to showcase their research. Graduate students, in particular, needed safe storage for their theses and the ever growing mounds of digital data from research. And all researchers, juggling demanding schedules, needed a system that saved time and was easy to use.

"We saw there was a disconnect between the repository and faculty needs," says Gibbons. "Then we set out to build a system that addressed all of the misalignments we found. Every significant feature of this system can be traced back to a finding of our faculty and/or grad student research."

"What's novel about this system is that it has been built around user needs," adds Mike Bell, assistant dean for information technology. "Most other repositories have been focused on systems architecture and public access, not on what is most important to contributors."

Researcher pages in Hong Kong University's institutional repository will be updated with citation data generated by Elsevier's Scopus API.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Scopus API offers users the opportunity to creatively interact with Scopus data by building mashups. It also allows access and usage of Scopus data inside and outside of the traditional library domain through applications based on the API. The API returns Scopus data in a format that easily integrates into an application or a web site. The majority of Scopus data is already available through the API, which can currently be used to request very specific information about article references, citations and affiliations.

HKU is the first institution to show Scopus h-index, and counts of citations, documents, and co-authors for each current HKU author across the institution, in its local institutional repository, The HKU Scholars Hub (The Hub). These details are shown on The Hub ResearcherPages, an expert profiling system which showcases the research of each current HKU author. HKU uses the Scopus API to build these pages, and update them in real time.

The Scopus search API draws on live data from Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database. By using the API, HKU is able to populate The Hub with real-time Scopus information, increasing accuracy and enriching data with valuable citation information. The API also enables HKU to highlight its overall performance and automate the process of keeping faculty publication lists up to date through continuous electronic tracking of individual researcher output. Research metrics cumulated by paper, and by author, are brought seamlessly into The Hub and displayed on appropriate records. This flexibility is a result of a recent enhancement to the Scopus API which allows for easier and more scalable ways of implementing citation counts to instantly enrich the content available on a given platform. . . .

HKU plans to further enhance ResearcherPages to display other output and citation details and expects there will be new opportunities to leverage the results in key activities such as the grant application process. HKU is also using the additional bibliometric data from Scopus and others to prepare for an impending Research Assessment Exercise.

Jorum has released Issues Surrounding Syndicated Feed Deposit into Institutional Repositories.

Here's an excerpt:

Repositories offer various ways of depositing resources. This paper examines the issues surrounding the potential offered by a syndicating feed standard such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and the ATOM protocol. The distinction is made between notification of metadata, for the purpose of registration and supply of metadata (to support search and subsequent onward linking to the object described being hosted elsewhere) and deposit of the object with metadata (to support its release for others to use).