Category: Open Source Software

"Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project"

Javier Arias has self-archived "Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project."

Here's an excerpt:

Open Access has matured for journals, but its uptake in the book market is still delayed, despite the fact that books continue to be the leading publishing format for social sciences and humanities. The 30-months EU-funded project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of five important digital platforms supporting open access monographs. The content of participating platforms will be enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (via DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of Open Source Metrics Services that enable the collection of OA Metrics and Altmetrics from third-party platforms, and how the architecture of these tools will allow implementation in any external platform, particularly in start-up Open Access publishers.

Read more about it: "Shared Infrastructure for Next- Generation Books: HIRMEOS."

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades"

Juan Alperin, John Willinsky, Brian Owen et al. have self-archived "The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades."

Here's an excerpt:

As the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) enters its third decade, it faces the responsibilities of supporting the more than 10,000 journals using its software and are dependent on PKP continuing to develop the code. In the fall of 2017, PKP, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, contracted the consulting services of BlueSky to Blueprint, with its principal Nancy Maron embarking on an exploration of PKP's standing and prospects among a sample of those involved in scholarly publishing, including current, former, and potential users of its software (Maron 2018). This paper presents BlueSky's findings and PKP's responses in what may serve as a lesson on the maturing of, and challenges faced by, an open source software project seeking to sustain in-creased global access to research and scholarship.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Accessible, Dynamic Web Content Using Instagram"

Jaci Wilkinson has published "Accessible, Dynamic Web Content Using Instagram" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

The Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at the University of Montana had a simple enough request. Their homepage had been static for years and it was not possible to add more content creation to anyone’s workload. However, they had a robust Instagram account with more than one thousand followers. Was there any way to synchronize workflows with an Instagram embed on the homepage? The solution was more complicated than we thought. We developed an Instagram embed, but in the process grappled with some fundamental questions of technology in the library. How do we streamline the creation and sharing of ephemeral, dynamic content? How do we reconcile web accessibility standards with the innovative new platforms we want to incorporate on our websites? . . . .

The ASC's embedded homepage Instagram feed fits their needs, is accessible, and builds community around their unique collections. By providing all the code created in this project in GitHub, including the CSS we used, our hope is that institutions interested in this Instagram feed model could replicate it for their own purposes without extensive technical support.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Reimagining the Digital Monograph Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers"

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has released "Reimagining the Digital Monograph Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers."

JSTOR Labs, an experimental product development group within the not-for-profit digital library JSTOR, undertook an ideation and design process to develop new and different ways of showing scholarly books online, with the goal that this new viewing interface be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement for any scholarly book that is already available in PDF form. This paper documents that design process, including the recommendations of a working group of scholars, publishers, and librarians convened by JSTOR Labs and the Columbia University Libraries in October 2016. The prototype monograph viewer developed through this process—called "Topicgraph"—is described herein and is freely available online at https://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Migrating bepress Digital Commons Journals to OJS"

The Public Knowledge Project has released "Migrating bepress Digital Commons Journals to OJS."

Here's an excerpt:

PKP has recently developed an import plugin that is specifically designed to port and preserve Digital Commons journal content into an OJS installation that can then serve as a journal workflow management and publishing platform. This import plugin was developed with financial support from the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Services to facilitate the transition of their Digital Commons journal content into OJS 3.1. As with all PKP software, this is an open source plugin that is now freely available to everyone, thanks to our friends at the University of Minnesota.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 8 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Open Source Software for Digital Preservation Repositories: a Survey"

Carlos André Rosa et al. have self-archived "Open Source Software for Digital Preservation Repositories: a Survey."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper focuses on the state-of-the-art in open-source software solutions for the digital preservation and curation field used to assimilate and disseminate information to designated audiences. Eleven open source projects for digital preservation are surveyed in areas such as supported standards and protocols, strategies for preservation, methodologies for reporting, dynamic of development, targeted operating systems, multilingual support and open source license. Furthermore, five of these open source projects, are further analysed, with focus on features deemed important for the area. Along open source solutions, the paper also briefly surveys the standards and protocols relevant for digital data preservation. The area of digital data preservation repositories has several open source solutions, which can form the base to overcome the challenges to reach mature and reliable digital data preservation.

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An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts

Hui Zhang and Camden Lopez have published "An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts>" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital repository managers rely on usage metrics such as the number of downloads to demonstrate research visibility and impacts of the repositories. Increasingly, they find that current tools such as spreadsheets and charts are ineffective for revealing important elements of usage, including reader locations, and for attracting the targeted audiences. This article describes the design and development of a readership map that provides an interactive, near-real-time visualization of actual visits to an institutional repository using data from Google Analytics. The readership map exhibits the global impacts of a repository by displaying the city of every view or download together with the title of the scholarship being read and a hyperlink to its page in the repository. We will discuss project motivation and development issues such as authentication with Google API, metadata integration, performance tuning, and data privacy.

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"Openness as Social Praxis"

Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward have published "Openness as Social Praxis" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt:

The paper "Fifty shades of open" by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness —that of social praxis. More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.

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Challenges & Opportunities Concerning Corporate Formation, Nonprofit Status, & Governance for Open Source Projects

The Berkman Klein Center has released Challenges & Opportunities Concerning Corporate Formation, Nonprofit Status, & Governance for Open Source Projects.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

To help open source projects navigate these foundational questions, this report addresses a number of key considerations that those managing open source software development initiatives should take into account when thinking about structure, organization, and governance. The guide elucidates reasons why institutional structure and internal governance processes are important and walks the reader through several models of each, explaining how they might benefit or impact the open source development initiative, and is also replete with case studies and diagrams to illustrate these ideas in practice.

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PLOS Releases Ambra Journal Publishing Software Under MIT License

PLOS has released its Ambra publishing journal software under the MIT License.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This isn’t the first time Ambra was available to those looking for a journal publishing platform. Under continuous development since 2009, Ambra was a monolithic Struts webapp offered as open source since its beginning. In 2012, PLOS began a project to re-architect Ambra as a service-oriented, multi-component stack. PLOS has been actively using, testing, and improving these new components in its journal platform since 2013, and in early 2016 we replaced the legacy Ambra webapp in its entirety. Having sorted through some minor license incompatibilities and put together documentation and quickstart guides, we’re proud to release Ambra under the MIT License

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Omeka Classic 2.5 Released

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka Classic 2.5.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The final day of January 2017 brings with it the release of the long awaited version 2.5 of Omeka Classic. While the release includes a long list of minor changes and bug fixes (see the release notes), there are a number of key improvements that were requested by the user community:

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"The Devil’s Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University"

Dave Mayo and Kate Bowers have published "The Devil's Shoehorn: A Case Study of EAD to ArchivesSpace Migration at a Large University" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

A band of archivists and IT professionals at Harvard took on a project to convert nearly two million descriptions of archival collection components from marked-up text into the ArchivesSpace archival metadata management system. Starting in the mid-1990s, Harvard was an alpha implementer of EAD, an SGML (later XML) text markup language for electronic inventories, indexes, and finding aids that archivists use to wend their way through the sometimes quirky filing systems that bureaucracies establish for their records or the utter chaos in which some individuals keep their personal archives. These pathfinder documents, designed to cope with messy reality, can themselves be difficult to classify. Portions of them are rigorously structured, while other parts are narrative. Early documents predate the establishment of the standard; many feature idiosyncratic encoding that had been through several machine conversions, while others were freshly encoded and fairly consistent. In this paper, we will cover the practical and technical challenges involved in preparing a large (900MiB) corpus of XML for ingest into an open-source archival information system (ArchivesSpace). This case study will give an overview of the project, discuss problem discovery and problem solving, and address the technical challenges, analysis, solutions, and decisions and provide information on the tools produced and lessons learned.

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"Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library’s ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project"

Max Eckard, Dallas Pillen and Mike Shallcross have published "Bridging Technologies to Efficiently Arrange and Describe Digital Archives: The Bentley Historical Library's ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration Project" in the Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, ArchivesSpace and Archivematica have emerged as two of the most exciting open source platforms for working with digital archives. The former manages accessions and collections and provides a framework for entering descriptive, administrative, rights, and other metadata. The latter ingests digital content and prepares information packages for long-term preservation and access. In October 2016, the Bentley Historical Library wrapped up a two-year, $355,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to partner with the University of Michigan Library on the integration of these two systems in an end-to-end workflow that will include the automated deposit of content into a DSpace repository. This article provides context of the project and offers an in-depth exploration of the project’s key development tasks, all of which were provided by Artefactual Systems, the developers of Archivematica (code available at https://github.com/artefactual-labs/appraisal-tab).

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A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs

Andrew Bullen has released A Cookbook of Methods for Using CONTENTdm APIs.

Here's an excerpt:

CONTENTdm has a number of useful APIs for directly accessing information contained in its indexes and files. This site is intended as a practical reference guide to using many—though not all—of these APIs.

See also: "Using CONTENTdm's APIs to Customize Your Site and Access Your Data."

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"Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!"

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University has released "Happy Beta Release Day, Omeka S!!."

Here's an excerpt:

Omeka S is the next-generation, open source web-publishing platform that is fully integrated into the scholarly communications ecosystem and designed to serve the needs of medium to large institutional users who wish to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation.

Though Omeka S is a completely new software package, it shares the same goals and principles of Omeka Classic that users have come to love: a commitment to cost-effective deployment and design, an intuitive user interface, open access to data and resources, and interoperability through standardized data.

Created with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Omeka S is engineered to ease the burdens of administrators who want to make it possible for their end-user communities to easily build their own sites that showcase digital cultural heritage materials.

See also: Omeka S Beta Technical Specs.

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"Michigan Publishing Announces Beta Launch of New Publishing Platform, Fulcrum"

Michigan Publishing has released "Michigan Publishing Announces Beta Launch of New Publishing Platform, Fulcrum."

Here's an excerpt:

In its beta phase, Fulcrum is focused on the presentation of digital source and supplemental materials that cannot be represented adequately in print form. Fulcrum allows for a richer experience and deeper understanding for the reader and enables authors to make better, multi-faceted arguments. The platform readily supports multimedia content, including playback for audio and video files and pan-zoom capability for high resolution images. All content is discoverable and preserved via durable URLs. Structured metadata and faceted search results also allow for further exploration of the materials.

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"OSS4EVA: Using Open-Source Tools to Fulfill Digital Preservation Requirements"

Marty Gengenbach et al. have published "OSS4EVA: Using Open-Source Tools to Fulfill Digital Preservation Requirements" in Code4Lib Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This paper builds on the findings of a workshop held at the 2015 International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES), entitled, "Using Open-Source Tools to Fulfill Digital Preservation Requirements" (OSS4PRES hereafter). This day-long workshop brought together participants from across the library and archives community, including practitioners, proprietary vendors, and representatives from open-source projects. The resulting conversations were surprisingly revealing: while OSS' significance within the preservation landscape was made clear, participants noted that there are a number of roadblocks that discourage or altogether prevent its use in many organizations. Overcoming these challenges will be necessary to further widespread, sustainable OSS adoption within the digital preservation community. This article will mine the rich discussions that took place at OSS4PRES to (1) summarize the workshop's key themes and major points of debate, (2) provide a comprehensive analysis of the opportunities, gaps, and challenges that using OSS entails at a philosophical, institutional, and individual level, and (3) offer a tangible set of recommendations for future work designed to broaden community engagement and enhance the sustainability of open source initiatives, drawing on both participants' experience as well as additional research.

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"4.3 M Investment to Create a Canadian Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences Research"

Érudit has released "4.3 M Investment to Create a Canadian Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences Research."

Here's an excerpt:

With a total funding of 4.3 M, the project will be supported over 3 years by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Governments of Québec and Ontario, and several Canadian universities. . . This funding will enable the implementation of a national digital research infrastructure dedicated to production, aggregation, as well as the enhancement and online searching of essential data for humanities and social sciences research, published in French and in English. . . .

Built from Érudit platform and editorial management software developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), this Cyberinfrastructure brings together national and international partners with key expertise in data science and innovative tools development based on principles of open source software.

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Public Knowledge Project: Report to the Community 2015/2016

The Public Knowledge Project has released Report to the Community 2015/2016.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Highlights include:

  • New grant awards from MacArthur, CIRA, and MediaX
  • Continued progress on Open Journal Systems 3.0
  • The release of Open Monograph Press 1.2
  • The integration of user experience design into our development workflow
  • Ongoing development and improvement of our XML parsing stack’s accuracy
  • Initiating the open access publishing cooperative study
  • Launching the new PKP Index and PKP LOCKSS Network
  • The 5th PKP Conference in Vancouver

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Open Library Foundation Launched

The Open Library Foundation has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Open Library Foundation has been established to promote open source projects for libraries and to foster and support contribution, distribution, and sustainability of the benefits of these projects. . . . .

The foundation was inspired by the creation of the FOLIO project. FOLIO was announced in June and is now building a diverse community of libraries, vendors and software developers. The goal of FOLIO is to create an open source Library Services Platform that can power innovative approaches to current practice, and encourage new and expanded library services that more fully support scholarly inquiry and knowledge production. The Foundation's inaugural projects also include two existing open source communities, the Open Library Environment (OLE) and the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb). . . .

The Open Library Foundation will make sure the code created from open source projects remains available and act as a "safe haven" for the projects' output-separated from the needs and goals of any contributor, user or affiliated party. The Open Library Foundation also will ensure that the code is freely available under an Apache v2 license.

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"TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available"

DuraSpace has released "TRY IT OUT: DSpace 6.0 Release Candidate #3 Available."

Here's an excerpt:

The third release candidate of 6.0 is now available for download and testing. 6.0-RC3 (Release Candidate #3) is a pre-release of 6.0, and we hope that the 6.0 final release will follow closely in its footsteps. . . .

We believe the 6.0 release is nearly production-ready, but could use your help in verifying there's nothing we've overlooked.

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