Category: Institutional Repositories

Digital Video on Northwestern’s Mounting Books Project

The Northwestern University Library has made a digital video available about their Mounting Books Project.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract of a presentation on the project that will be given at Open Repositories 2009:

The Northwestern University Library undertook a software development project to create an automated workflow to enable files from its Kirtas book scanner to be both linked to the OPAC with a page viewer application, and ingested into its Fedora repository as archivally sustainable and reusable digital objects. The web-based Book Workflow Interface (BWI) software utilizes jBPM for management and web services for key creation components. It also features an AJAX interface to support drag-and-drop creation and editing of METS-based book structures. The BWI system ingests locally scanned texts as well as texts digitized by external partners or vendors.

WRAP—Warwick Research Archive Project: Final Report

The WRAP—Warwick Research Archive Project: Final Report has been released by the project.

Here's an excerpt:

WRAP's aim was to capitalise on the learning from early adopter institutional repository projects and build a repository for the University of Warwick that would further develop understanding of how repositories can meet the needs of their stakeholders.

Key objectives were to implement a repository for preprints, postprints and theses with the EPrints Open Source software, using SWAP, the Scholarly Works Application Profile, and the EThOS EPrints OAI plugin; to explore the potential for interoperability of the repository with other campus systems; to develop an infrastructure to receive around 350 theses a year; to attract participation by a range of departments and researchers; and to achieve a corpus of over 1500 items by project end. . . .

WRAP has been implemented as a full-text only repository to expose and emphasise Warwick research excellence. The project team also adopted a mediated submission process combined with creation of high quality metadata, including full Library of Congress Subject Headings, to maximise discoverability, interoperability and provide future-proofing.

Although content submission levels are very good technical delays when implementing SWAP with EPrints, combined with the time and effort required to create high quality metadata, have significantly impacted on record creation and ability to meet the initial volume target. However, as the project closes WRAP has achieved many of its aims and objectives, including its primary purpose of providing a repository service that is embedded within the institution. In particular, WRAP has implemented the SWAP metadata schema with EPrints software, obtained an institutional mandate for submission of e-theses, developed procedures for populating the repository, integrated WRAP with the campus search engine, and created a mechanism for transfer of content to and from the Expertise/My Profile system.

“Using OAI-ORE to Transform Digital Repositories into Interoperable Storage and Services Applications”

The latest issue of The Code4Lib Journal includes "Using OAI-ORE to Transform Digital Repositories into Interoperable Storage and Services Applications."

Here's an excerpt:

In the digital age libraries are required to manage large numbers of diverse objects. One advantage of digital objects over fixed physical objects is the flexibility of ‘binding’ them into publications or other useful aggregated intellectual entities while retaining the ability to reuse them independently in other contexts. An emerging framework for managing flexible aggregations of digital objects is provided by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) with its work on Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE). This paper will show how OAI-ORE is being used to manage content in digital repositories, in particular institutional repositories, and has the potential ultimately to transform the conception of digital repositories.

Special Issue of Library Trends on Institutional Repositories

The latest issue of Library Trends (57, no. 2, Fall 2008) is about institutional repositories.

Here are the articles (links are to article preprints):

  • "Introduction: Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future"
  • "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel"
  • "Institutional Repositories in the UK: The JISC Approach"
  • "Strategies for Institutional Repository Development: A Case Study of Three Evolving Initiatives"
  • "Perceptions and Experiences of Staff in the Planning and Implementation of Institutional Repositories"
  • "Institutional Repositories and Research Data Curation in a Distributed Environment"
  • "At the Watershed: Preparing for Research Data Management and Stewardship at the University of Minnesota Libraries"
  • "Case Study in Data Curation at Johns Hopkins University"
  • "Describing Scholarly Works with Dublin Core: A Functional Approach"
  • "The 'Wealth of Networks' and Institutional Repositories: MIT, DSpace, and the Future of the Scholarly Commons"
  • "Leveraging Short-term Opportunities to Address Long-term Obligations: A Perspective on Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Programs"
  • "Shedding Light on the Dark Data in the Long Tail of Science"

“Repository Software Survey, March 2009”

The Repositories Support Project has released the "Repository Software Survey, March 2009," which analyzes the CONTENTdm, Digital Commons, DigiTool, DSpace, EPrints, EQUELLA, Fedora, intraLibrary, Research-Output Repository Platform, Open Repository, and VITAL digital repository systems.

DSpace Statistics Add-on Version 2.1 Released

The RepositóriUM team at Minho University has released version 2.1 of the DSpace Statistics Add-on.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Statistics System is an add-on to the DSpace platform that allows gathering, processing and presenting usage, content and administrative statistics. Despite the fact that its development was done to meet the specific needs of RepositóriUM, the system is completely adjustable to other environments as its components can easily be configured, changed or extended, to respond to different information needs.

With the release of the current version 2.1 of the Stats System the main focus was solving some architectural issues of version 2.0, primarily:

  • Adapting the add-on to the new build and deploy mechanism of DSpace 1.5.1;
  • New mechanism for gathering the events on DSpace, avoiding DSpace logging mechanism and log4j JDBC Appender (replaced by Mark H. Wood UsageEvent plug-in);
  • New mechanism for aggregating the stats. Ported from pl/pgsql to Java;
  • Eliminate the pl/java language as a requirement;
  • Improvements on spider detection mechanism.

eXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit Released

The eXtensible Catalog project has released the eXtensible Catalog (XC) OAI Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The OAI Toolkit is used to make data stored in an institution's ILS or other repository available for harvesting via OAI-PMH, including other eXtensible Catalog applications. For an ILS, this is accomplished by exporting ILS metadata, converting it from MARC to MARCXML, and loading it into an OAI-PMH compliant repository. The repository (embedded in the OAI Toolkit) makes the data available for harvesting by other XC components.

The OAI Toolkit can be used as part of the XC system, or on its own to enable OAI-PMH harvestability of an existing repository. It is a server application written in Java and is only needed for ILS's and other repositories that do not already have the ability to be act as OAI-PMH Repositories (OAI Servers).

Repositories Support Project Podcasts Launched

The Repositories Support Project Podcasts has launched a podcast series.

Here are titles of the initial podcasts:

  • Digital Preservation: Are Repositories Doing Enough for Preservation?
  • DRIVER: Promoting Digital Repositories across Europe
  • EPrints: Repository Software of the Future or of the Past?
  • Fedora: Optimum Repository Software or Overkill?

CLASM: Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle

Richard M. Davis has announced that JISC has funded the CLASM (Copyright Licensing Application with SWORD for Moodle) project. (Moodle is an open source course management system.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.

Two Million Plus Downloads: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institutional Repository

As of today, the DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository contains over 31,000 documents, has had 2,132,581 full-text downloads to date, and 1,307,822 downloads in the past year (see the bottom of the repository's home page). It is also used to publish RURALS: Review of Undergraduate Research in Agricultural and Life Sciences, a gratis open access journal. It uses the Digital Commons software from the Berkeley Electronic Press.

CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service Commences

The CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service has begun operation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

CAUL has appointed the University of Southern Queensland, through the Australian Digital Futures Institute (ADFI) within the Division of Academic Information Services (DAIS) to undertake its new institutional repository support service. The service will commence officially on March 16, 2009.

The service is being funded for two years, with the approval of Department of Innovation (DIISR), with monies remaining from the successful ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World) project, supplemented by CAUL member subscriptions.

The aim of the service is fully described in the Invitation to Offer released in October, 2008. It will, inter alia:

  • provide a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia; support emerging areas of activity;
  • support and develop toolkits for copyright and institutional repositories;
  • provide best practice and policy advice for areas such as data migration, metadata, standards compliance, import and export, harvesting, ingest of new forms of digital material;
  • assist with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises;
  • assist the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment;
  • provide a watching brief on trends and developments in repositories.

Project Manager and institutional repository specialist is Katy Watson, currently Research Information Systems Coordinator at the University of the Sunshine Coast, one of the two full-time staff in CAIRSS. She will be supported by a small team from the University of Southern Queensland. The copyright element of the service will be provided by Swinburne University. The key personnel are Tim McCallum, Technical Officer; Luke Padgett, Copyright Officer; Dr Peter Sefton, Senior Advisor and Professor Alan Smith, USQ delegate.

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.

How Long Should Institutional Repository Items Be Preserved?: Chris Rusbridge Discusses Results of Informal Surveys

In "Repository Preservation Revisited," Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, discusses the findings of some informal surveys he conducted about how long institutional repository items should be preserved.

Here's an excerpt:

Note, I would not draw any conclusions from the actual numerical votes on their own, but perhaps we can from the values within each group. However, ever hasty if not foolhardy, here are my own tentative interpretations:

  • First, even "experts" are alarmed at the potential implications of the term "OAIS."
  • Second, repository managers don’t believe that keeping resources accessible and/or usable for 10 years (in the context of the types of material they currently manage in repositories) will give them major problems.
  • Third, repository managers don't identify "accessibility and/or usability of its contents for the long term" as implying the mechanisms of an OAIS (this is perhaps rather a stretch given my second conclusion).

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:

"Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box"

Library Journal has published "Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box" by Andrew Richard Albanese.

Here's an excerpt:

If [Clifford] Lynch is "queasy," it's because he questions whether institutions—in particular, libraries—are biting off more than they can chew and swallow by conflating IRs with an alternative publishing mission. "I think it is short-sighted. I know many of these institutions are feeling great pain from pressure on their acquisition budgets and would like to mitigate that," he says. "But that's a short-term economic thing, and I'm sorry to see it getting mixed up with IRs."

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.