The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Archives Harvester, an open source OAI-PMH harvester.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).
Supported by JISC funding, the Intute Repository Search project is developing increasingly sophisticated search capabilities for document discovery in UK repositories, and it has released two search engines for testing (conceptual search and text mining based search).
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Search services harvest the metadata and full-text out-put from institutional repositories, making the aggregated content searchable and browsable via a single interface. Intute Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR.
The development path of this project involves simple metadata search, full-text indexing of documents, text-mining of full-text documents, automatic subject classification, term-based document classification, query expansion, clustering of results and browsing/visualisation of the search results. User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Intute Repository Search.
Two complementary advanced search and browse services have been developed for user testing. One is Autonomy IDOL (www.autonomy.com/content/Products/products-idol-server/index.en.html) and the other is using components developed by NaCTeM (www.nactem.ac.uk).
Autonomy IDOL relates to the conceptual feature of the service. This allows users to search for documents most closely matched to their query, read the overview and abstract of those documents and also have the opportunity to view documents relating to the query's search results. The result is a richer contextual search facility for users who want to view documents that are ranked according to their relation to the query.
NaCTeM has developed the text mining component. This allows users to take advantage of the TerMine service (www.nactem.ac.uk/software/termine/) among others, to automatically discover term associations within texts that are harvested from UK HE institutional repositories. By extracting information that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to identify in a large number of documents, users can view documents that are linked with each other via salient concepts in a way that may lead to the answer of existing research questions or the creation of new ones. This then allows for a more meaningful and personalised search facility for users who are looking for specific patterns and connections between terms, within the collective resource of Intute Repository Search.
The University Council of Boston University has endorsed an open access initiative that will establish an institutional repository.
Here's an excerpt from "University Council Approves Open Access Plan":
Boston University took a giant step towards greater access to academic scholarship and research on February 11, when the University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit.
"We believe this is the first time that a university as a whole has taken a stand on behalf of the university as opposed to a single school or college," says Wendy Mariner, the chair of the Faculty Council and a professor at the School of Law, at the School of Public Health, and at the School of Medicine. "We are looking forward to new forms of publication in the 21st century that will transform the ways that knowledge and information are shared."
"The resolution passed by our University Council is a very important statement on the importance of open access to the results of scholarship and research created within the University," says BU President Robert A. Brown. "The digital archive called for in the resolution will become a great repository for the creativity of our faculty and students."
The Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration turned seven on February 14th.
Here's an excerpt from the Peter Suber's posting about the BOAI:
Released on February 14, 2002, the BOAI "statement of principle,…statement of strategy, and…statement of commitment" was the first to offer a public definition of OA, the first to use the term "open access", the first to call for OA journals and OA repositories as complementary strategies, the first to call for OA in all disciplines and countries, and the first to be accompanied by significant funding. A good number of OA projects were already under way, but the BOAI helped to catalyze the OA movement and give it energy, unity, and identity.
The Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, have released "The University’s Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship."
Here's an excerpt:
Primary Recommendation: Campuses should initiate discussions involving administration and faculty about modifying current practices and/or its intellectual property policies such that the university retains a set of rights sufficient to ensure that broad dissemination of the research and scholarly work produced by its faculty occurs. . . .
Some specific institutional strategies include:
- Initiate a process to develop an institutional dissemination plan by explicitly evaluating existing dissemination activities, policies relating to promotion and tenure, and policies regarding faculty copyrights. For instance, charge a campus blue ribbon task force to advise the provost on key issues raised by the emergence of new forms of scholarly publishing and the gains that might be had by utilizing more effective ways of sharing the high quality results of the processes of scholarly and creative endeavor.
- With this foundation, develop priorities for supporting new dissemination strategies that enhance the value of the multifaceted investments in faculty research and scholarship by promoting the broadest possible access to it.
- Engage departments on campus in developing fresh articulations of the criteria that are appropriate for judging the quality of contributions to their discipline, criteria that embrace emerging forms of scholarly work, where those possess the same attributes of quality and contribution to new knowledge, and do not rely solely on traditional publications and historic practices.
- Develop institutional policies that enable the university to disseminate the full range of its community’s products now and in the future.
- Where local dissemination infrastructure exists (such as institutional repositories), promote its use and expand its capabilities as required. Where needed, build new infrastructure that supports documentation of the products of faculty work, both for grant management and compliance and for more general purposes.
- Seek opportunities to invest in shared dissemination infrastructure with other institutions – through shared facilities or by contributing funds to the development of dissemination services by another institution.
- Encourage faculty authors to modify contracts with publishers so that their contracts permit immediate open access or delayed public access to peer reviewed work in a manner that does not threaten the viability of the journals or monographs.
- Develop policies or strategies that redirect resources from high cost /low value dissemination practices to development of dissemination mechanisms residing inside the academy.
- Where universities support presses, work to realign presses more directly with the university mission. Encourage press investments in dissemination activities that correspond to areas of excellence on campus. Consider revising reporting relationships to encourage collaboration between presses and libraries. Invest in press/library collaborations.
The McDermott Library at the University of Texas at Dallas has launched its institutional repository, Treasures @ UT Dallas, using the Texas Digital Library's DSpace system.
Read more about it at "Tools Helping Library Share its Wealth of Material."
The Association of Research Libraries Digital Repository Issues Task Force has released The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
The report, "The Research Library's Role in Digital Repository Services," identifies key issues surrounding repository development, explores common strategies that libraries are using, analyzes relevant environmental trends, discusses issues where ARL and its member libraries should focus attention, and recommends the following actions for research libraries to undertake:
- Build a range of new kinds of partnerships and alliances, both within institutions and between institutions.
- Base service-development strategies on substantive assessment of local needs rather than blindly replicating work done at another institution.
- Engage with key local policy issues and stakeholders to encourage institutional engagement with national and international policy issues.
- Develop outreach and marketing strategies that assist "early adopters" of repositories to connect with the developing repository-related service system.
- Define a scope of responsibility to guide the development of repository services for varied forms of content.
The report focuses on repository services generally, rather than concentrating on repository technologies or content. Repository services include services to authors, contributors, and users, particularly of university-created content. Some examples of repository services provided by research libraries include long-term archiving and migration of content, dissemination and access management, metadata and format management, search and discovery tools, publishing, data mining, etc. Illustrations drawn from a variety of digital repositories are used throughout the report.
The task force notes that, due to repository services' powerful potential to enable key work and enhance the effectiveness of functions across the research enterprise, research institutions cannot afford to do without such services, even in difficult economic times. Researchers and scholars with access to a spectrum of repository services possess a substantial advantage in conducting cutting-edge research, delivering high-quality teaching, and contributing valuable services to society. Libraries have key strengths and missions requiring them to undertake various roles in repository service development. This report presents a fresh perspective on the digital repository environment and is intended to inspire ARL member libraries and others to assess their views and plans for service development.
JISC has released "SWORD: Cutting Through the Red Tape to Populate Learning Materials Repositories."
Here's the abstract:
This in-depth article by Sarah Currier, the Product Manager for Intrallect Ltd., introduces SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) to those interested in sharing, reuse, repurposing and management of teaching and learning materials. The article provides an overview of the tool, technical details of how SWORD works and four case study vignettes, or SWORD Stories, on work that is already under way, which illustrate how SWORD streamlines the process of depositing learning materials into repositories.
The January edition of CCHS-CSIC's Ranking Web of World Repositories has been published.
Here's an excerpt:
Following several requests we now show two global Rankings. One that covers all repositories as was shown in previous editions (Top 300), and a new one that focus only on Institutional Repositories (Top 300 Institutional).
As part of the development of EPrints 3.2, the storage component has been rewritten, and the revised software supports cloud storage, which was demonstrated using Amazon CloudFront.
Read more about it at "EPrints gets Cloud Storage Support."
The DSpace Foundation, the Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems, and SPARC are offering a free All About Repositories Webinar Series.
Here's an excerpt from the press release (see it for a list of the first webinars):
Got a repository? Would you like to understand more about what repositories are and how they operate? This spring DSpace Foundation, Fedora Commons, Sun Microsystems and SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) will offer a free About Repositories Webinar Series to provide professional learning opportunities for repository managers, developers, curators and decision makers. The seminar series will kick off on Feb. 18 at 9:00 a.m. PT with DSpace and Fedora: A Collaboration Update presented by Michele Kimpton, Executive Director, DSpace Foundation, and Sandy Payette, Executive Director Fedora Commons.
Each month a new topic or issue of interest to repository communities will be presented in a one-hour online format. All About Repositories Webinar Series will be web cast for synchronous event access, and will also be made available through DSpace, Fedora, Sun and SPARC web sites as an open educational reference for repository users and developers.
Future web seminars will focus on topics such as web services, and will take an in-depth look at some of the top implementations from the Innovation Fair held at the November 2008 SPARC repositories meeting. . . .
Pre-registration is required for all seminars at http://www.education-webevents.com/.
John Robertson of JISC CETIS has announced that the final version (1.5) of An Ecological Approach to Repository and Service Interactions has been released.
Here's an excerpt:
Ecology is the study of systems that are complex, dynamic, and full of interacting entities and processes. Although the nature of these interactions and processes may be highly detailed, a higher level view of them is accessible by and intuitive to non-specialists. We think that ecology, and examples of the ecosystems it studies, may offer a useful analogy to inform the task of understanding and articulating the interactions between users, repositories, and services and the information environments in which they take place. This report outlines some concepts from ecology that may be useful and suggests some definitions for a common conversation about the use of this metaphor. It concludes by examining how this approach relates to other initiatives currently ongoing in the JISC Information Environment.
In "DSpace at a Third of a Million Items," Stuart Lewis reports on a load test of DSpace.
Here's an excerpt:
- On average deposits into an empty repository took about one and a half seconds.
- On average deposits into a repository with three hundred thousand items took about seven seconds.
- If this linear looking relationship between number of deposits and speed of deposit were to continue at the same rate, an average deposit into a repository containing one million items would take about 19 to 20 seconds.
- Extrapolate this to work out throughput per day, and that is about 10MB deposited every 20 seconds, 30MB per minute, or 43GB of data per day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Repositories Support Project has released three briefing papers:
Temple University Libraries have announced that they will no longer archive paper or microfilm copies of doctoral dissertations. Instead, ETDs will be deposited in Temple's Digital Collections repository, where they will be freely available.
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.
Presentations from Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall 2008 meeting are now available.
Bepress surveyed 110 participants at the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 about repository trends, and Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress President, has now released the results of this survey ("Perceptions of Developing Trends in Repositories").
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/).
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.
Stuart Lewis of the SWORD 2 project has released a SWORD-based Facebook repository deposit application.
Read more about it at "Launched Today: the Facebook Repository Deposit Application."
