End of DRIVER, beginning of COAR

As our current Committee Secretary, Mary Robinson posted to our list with her other hat on about the press release about COAR on the DRIVER website(http://www.driver-support.eu/newsevents.php?item=nCOAR4 ) UKCoRR members will have noticed that the European DRIVER project is coming to an end and the Confedoration of Open Access Repositories has been established.

DRIVER's activities were largely twofold:
1) Providing a focus for the OA community
2) Technical developments to help the community to share their content.
... And the DRIVER guidelines lines for Repository Managers and Administrators which focus on how to expose digital scientific resources using OAI-PMH and Dublin Core Metadata, are really very useful. The DRIVER Guidelines can be accessed at: http://www.driver-support.eu/managers.html

As COAR is likely to establish membership through the payment of a fee, and as UKCoRR is not funded, we are not likely to be very closely involved with their work, but the JISC have joined and UKCoRR and the JISC can and do work closely together through the committee members' activities and through collaboration with the Repositories Support Project who have sponsored much of our activity and through contact when issues arise. JISC colleagues have said that they think it is important to work with/through UKCoRR to reach repository managers.

One thing to note here is that the community which DRIVER was serving, and which COAR will serve, is slightly different than that which UKCoRR serves: obviously there is the wider, European scale. But also there is the fact that COAR is about open access repositories and the open access community more broadly so it is inclusive of learning objects and other types of material. Meanwhile, UKCoRR is for research repositories, which might or might not contain open access materials!

I hope that helps to make sense of the repositories/OA landscape a little further!

UKCoRR Committee meeting- minutes available

The UKCoRR committee met via telcon on 26th October

The minutes from the meeting are now available from the UKCoRR website http://www.ukcorr.org/documents.php

Report about UKCoRR meeting

UKCoRR member, Miggie Pickton of Northampton University has written a report about the UKCoRR meeting held in August this year, which appears in the October issue of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' Library & Information Update.

Pickton, M (2009) Passionate about research repositories and open access. Library & Information Update, October 2009, pp. 18 - 19

Thanks Miggie!

UKCoRR at RSP Summer School

I presented UKCoRR at the RSP Summer School earlier this week. There were quite a few UKCoRR members present as well as non-members and representatives from other projects and groups. Full details of the event are available from the RSP website.

Cross Projects Forum

I represented UKCoRR in Birmingham on Tuesday at an informal meeting of several UK projects and organisations which support repositories. Representatives were there from JISC, RSP, ERIS, UKOLN, and the Welsh Repository Network and included our own Dominic Tate with his RSP hat on. One of the main reasons for the meeting was to minimise duplication of work across the projects and facilitate sharing and dissemination of outputs.

Using the results of the UKCoRR members survey earlier this year and issues raised on the list I was able to highlight some key areas for training or support, in particular copyright which is an ongoing concern to members. I reminded them that although membership of the UKCoRR list is limited to UKCoRR members, if projects wish to post relevant announcements/surveys to the list they can do so through the committee or members.

The UKCoRR blog was mentioned as being really useful to those outside UKCoRR so they can follow developments and issues of concern to members. A suggestion was made to include in blog postings anonymised quotes from list emails which explain issues of concern to the members.

Much of the discussions focused on support materials and resources that will be developed by the various projects. Within the UKCoRR committee we have discussed before having a webpage devoted to useful links and it was suggested at the meeting that we could use Delicious to develop and manage the links listed. I also spoke to the ERIS and the Welsh Repository Network about their various repository groups and the overlap with UKCoRR. Within the committee we'll be discussing the various ideas raised and continuing discussions with these various projects and groups so if members or indeed nonmembers have any comments please do email me.

UKCoRR Committee meeting- minutes available

The UKCoRR committee met via telcon on 20th August.

The minutes from the meeting are now available from the UKCoRR website http://www.ukcorr.org/documents.php

Research Funding and Assessment: The Future

Hi All,

I thought I'd drop a quick couple of lines about an event that I will be attending on behalf of UKCoRR.

On October 14th there will be a fairly high profile meeting held at the Royal Society in London, to look at issues surrounding the future of research funding and assessment in the United Kingdom. As many of our members will not be able to make it I thought I'd ask to see if anyone has any particular issues you would like me to try and raise at the meeting? I'm not sure what chance we will get to raise issues or ask questions, but I thought I should give it a go. More details are available on the event's website at http://www.hepi.ac.uk/wip.asp?ID=129.

I will of course be reporting back after the event, with a focus on any developments which may affect the work of repository managers in the UK. Do post any thoughts to the list, or if you'd prefer to email me in person, you can drop me a line to dominic.tate@nottingham.ac.uk.

I have spoken to David Lammy once before, when he was my MP when I lived in Tottenham - I'm not sure he will necessarily remember me though...

Dominic