Category: Institutional 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.

U-SKIS: Open Source Institutional Repository Workflow Software for CONTENTdm

The University of Utah's Marriott Library has developed the open source University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) for institutional repository workflow control with the CONTENTdm software. U-SKIS is written in Perl 5.5 and utilizes MySQL.

Read more about it at "University of Utah's Open Source Software Extends Power of CONTENTdm for Institutional Repositories."

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author's rights and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites.

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose, including derivative works, in accordance with the license.

The prior publication in the Tout de Suite series, Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, is also available.

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.

Institutional Repositories: Strategies for the Present and the Future

A preprint of "Institutional Repositories: Strategies for the Present and the Future," written by Jean-Gabriel Bankier, Connie Foster, and Glen Wiley, is now available. Bankier is the President of the Berkeley Electronic Press, Foster is the Head of the Department of Library Technical Services at the Western Kentucky University Libraries, and Wiley is Metadata Librarian at the Cornell University 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.

CARL DSpace Users Reluctant to Upgrade to 1.5

The Relog Experiment reports that, at a Canadian Association of Research Libraries meeting on institutional repositories at Access 2008, most attending libraries that used DSpace were reluctant to upgrade to 1.5 and were not using Manakin.

Here's an except that explains their reservations:

  • customizations made to DSpace 1.4 will take a lot of programming time to move over to 1.5
  • certain plug-ins and enhancements that are in heavy use in 1.4 have not yet been made available for 1.5
  • administrators are evaluating other platforms and are not willing to invest the time in upgrading to 1.5 if they end up switching platforms
  • programmers are hard to find, train and retain

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.

Identifying Factors of Success in CIC Institutional Repository Development: Final Report

The Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has released Identifying Factors of Success in CIC Institutional Repository Development: Final Report.

Here's the abstract:

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a one-year pilot study to investigate advances in institutional repository (IR) development. The aim was to learn about successes and challenges experienced by IR initiatives at university libraries that had made a substantial commitment to developing and sustaining an IR. Three sites were studied using the comparative case study method. They were purposefully selected to represent varying approaches to IR development undertaken at research libraries with similar missions and users.

New Fedora Commons HatCheck Newsletter

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

Highlights include:

Technical Report: Doctoral Theses Digitisation

Ingrid Mason, Digital Research Repository Coordinator at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre of the Victoria University of Wellington’s University Library, has deposited a report (Technical Report: Doctoral Theses Digitisation) about that library's doctoral theses digitization project in its institutional repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Doctoral theses (~1200) in the University Library’s collection have been digitised and uploaded into the Library’s two research repositories: RestrictedArchive@Victoria and ResearchArchive@Victoria. With a view to sharing learning and useful information key considerations for other tertiary institutions undertaking a similar project are:

  • digital file sizes and server storage space
  • purpose of and standards of digitisation for access
  • data matching from library system and alumni database
  • database listing and tracking of theses and allied tasks
  • inventory listing and batching of theses into boxes
  • costs for digitisation, transportation and short term assistance