SWORDv2

SWORD version 2 is a new JISC funded project to update the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) standard in order to cope not only with the traditional 'fire and forget' deposit scenario, but also to facilitate new functions - update, retrieve and delete extensions - needed to support the whole deposit lifecycle of scholarly works while also supporting the broadening range of technical systems to enable better integration across the scholarly infrastructure. In addition, a new community development model is planned to ensure that it is developed, implemented and adopted by communities engaged in research management across HE.

Though the emphasis of SWORDv2, like it's predecessor, is on research outputs, it will surely also impact on teaching and learning materials - including OER - and the respective systems used to manage them whether dedicated repositories like Jorum or VLEs and other LMSs; as noted by CETIS' John Robertson in a recent post the "development [is] focused on scholarly works but extending the profile to support CRUD functionality and ongoing interaction around content and use of content between users and repository is an important step towards richer tools and services"

Development will first document the use cases that SWORDv2 needs to fulfil before developing the new standard and implementing it across the main repository platforms. Naturally the project would value input from UKCoRR and we have been invited, as a community, to review and comment on the requirements and specification as they evolve. Keep an eye on the blog at http://swordapp.org/ and for the more technically minded there is a mailing list that you can subscribe to at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sword-app-techadvisorypanel (where you can also browse the archive.)

In addition, UKCoRR is very pleased to welcome Richard Jones, the Technical Lead for the SWORDv2 project, to our membership meeting on Friday 25th February at the University of Salford (register here). Richard is a core developer of the DSpace platform and also Head of Repository systems at Symplectic Ltd currently working on the RePOSIT project which aims to “increase uptake of a web-based repository deposit tool embedded in a researcher-facing publications management system.”

We are especially keen for colleagues to bring their deposit wish-lists and use-cases to the February meeting

N.B. RePOSIT is one of three projects funded under the Deposit strand of JISC's current Information Environment Programme 2009-11 which also includes DepositMO: Modus Operandi for Repository Deposits which is "creating a repository deposit workflow connecting the user’s computer desktop, especially popular apps such as MS Office, with digital repositories based on EPrints and DSpace" and will liaise closely with Microsoft and DURA – Direct User Repository Access "a collaboration between Mendeley, Symplectic and CARET and the Library at the University of Cambridge"

UKCoRR members' meeting 2011. Destination: Salford

The Committee are delighted to announce the details of the UKCoRR members' meeting 2011.

• Booking is now open!

The meeting will take place on Friday, February 25, 2011 from 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM (GMT), in the Conference Room of the Clifford Whitworth Library, University of Salford.

You can reserve your place at: http://ukcorr.eventbrite.com/

The event also has a page on Lanyrd.com. We hope to see you there!

A draft programme for the delay is below.

N.B. If you're interested in delivering a lightning talk on the day, please contact Dominic Tate - Dominic.Tate@rhul.ac.uk – by the end of January with ideas for 5 min presentations/updates of your repository work...

TIME	DESCRIPTION
10.00 – 10.30	Arrival and Registration
10.30 – 10.35	Opening introduction - Acting Director IS, Julie Berry
10.35 – 10.50	Committee reports/round-up
10.50 – 11.05	Coffee/tea
11.05 – 11.45	Richard Jones, Technical Lead of SWORDv2 project
11.45 – 12.15	Lightning talks
12.15 – 12.45	Josh Brown, JISC Programme Manager: E-Research - Research Information Management
12.45 – 1.30	Lunch
1.30 – 3.15	Café style networking with tables (with afternoon coffee?)
3.15 – 3.30	Coffee/tea
3.30 – 3.55	UKCoRR map
3.55 – 4.00	Concluding words and close

OAI-PMH aggregation?

I wanted to explore the issue of OAI-PMH aggregation and to gauge UKCoRR opinion of its still-to-be-realised potential (or not). I've also been threatening to post to the blog for a while and this seemed like an ideal subject to explore in a more public forum than on the mailing list.

As I noted once in a post on my own blog I have for some time been a little nonplussed by our collective, continued obsession with the woefully under-used OAI-PMH. Other than OAIster (an international service), the only services I'm currently aware of in the UK are the former Intute demo now maintained by Mimas - http://irs.mimas.ac.uk/demonstrator/ and a (pilot) OAI-PMH cross-search tool developed as part of ERIS (Enhancing Institutional Repository Services in Scotland)

The protocol dates back to the earliest days of the open access and institutional repository movements when there was considerable investment by the community, in software specification for example, and has never really, I don't think, been as widely used as it could be. I can offer only anecdotal evidence but I’m pretty sure that your average academic will tend towards Google/Google Scholar* - who withdrew support for OAI-PMH back in April 2008 - to source research on the open web. Google, however, arguably has inherent limitations for academic purposes and I would argue that OAI-PMH still has considerable potential for (OA) research dissemination (though possibly watered down by so many repositories also carrying metadata only records rather than exclusively full text - one of the draw-backs of OAI-PMH harvest is that there was no easy way of filtering on full text from the major repository software.)

* As an aside I've had mixed results retrieving full text records from UK IRs using Google Scholar with many not returning anything at all - though the IRs in question certainly contain full text content.

In Ireland, however, they have rian.ie - Pathways to Irish Research which is much more fully realised portal that aggregates 8 Irish IRs using OAI-PMH, enabling you to browse by author surname and offering an advanced search form to filter by keyword, title, author, subject, institution and (interestingly) funder. Aggregating just 8 repositories (5 DSpace, 2 EPrints, 1 Digital Commons) will obviously make it easier to standardise metadata and systems than in the UK and it also returns full text only which immediately makes it more useful from an OA perspective. I've been in touch with the chair of the RIAN project group who has confirmed that "it was a policy decision to include only full text metadata in the RIAN harvest, even though some IRs might have some metadata only deposits. It was felt that a national portal of OA research material would be much more useful if it included only full text." This was achieved, however, by organising local IRs such that only full text content is exposed for harvest which isn't really a practical solution across the much greater number of repositories in the UK.

I've had some discussion with James Toon, the project manager for ERIS who in his dealings with research groups in Scotland has found "no interest at all in just searching for data in a national aggregation". Nevertheless, I can't help but feel that there is still potential for an aggregation service with a high level of functionality especially if we could figure out how to return full text only. May be it's just me?

James suggests that "the power of aggregations are on the subject level, when you can do things with the data - such as enhance it by linking common ontology, or providing subject specific services, such as topic mapping and so on"; he has also been working on CRISpool which is using the CERIF standard to integrate heterogeneous research information from several institutions into a single Portal. Perhaps OAI-PMH has had it's day and CERIF-XML aggregation is the future; nevertheless, the current repository infrastructure across the UK does not (yet) widely support that format - though this may change if more institutions implement CRIS - whereas the older protocol is a standard output across all 183 institutional repositories in the UK currently listed on OpenDOAR and, for that reason, I would argue, if no other, could be used more effectively after the rian.ie model.

"Doing it Differently", RSP event 27.10.10 - Sheffield Cathedral

An excellent day of presentations started off by Steph Taylor who gave an overview of repository use to date including easier deposit workflows, quality control, embedding in HEIs, plus potential links with the local community and other entry points such as Facebook.
Richard Davis discussed ideas for creative repository management involving staff profile pages, stats, links and a possible download button to Kindle or iPad.
Pat Lockley covered the use of RSS feeds - have a look at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/.
Stephanie Meece showed us the UAL Research Online http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/ which is 60% non-text based. Stephanie talked of practiced-based research, publicity and technical and metadata issues.
Jason Hoyt of Mendeley - http://www.mendeley.com/, gave an overview of the new service that will be available in Spring 2011 which will include clouds of trends/popular authors, a music database and statistical aggregating. Mendeley has 27 million items that are searchable now.
Joss Winn's blog and presentation outline re: RSS and Wordpress is available at http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/10/25/rss-in-rss-out-experimenting-with-wordpress-for-scholarly-publishing/.
The final speaker, Sally Hanford discussed iTunesU. 16 UK HEIs currently use iTunes U - http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/, for audio and video files with Nottingham having launched their educational content/podcasts etc in June this year.
Altogether, an interesting and stimulating day. For slides and handouts please visit: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=DID1010/index.php.
Nicky Cashman.

Collaboration with COAR

I'm back from the Open Repositories 2010 meeting now, and, having cleared most of my immediate tasks, I have time to reflect on some of last weeks presentations and meetings.

On Wednesday last week I attended the COAR 'birds of a feather' session at OR2010, and was introduced to a number of representatives of various member institutions, and was given an overview of COAR, its members and what it is all about. As stated on their website, COAR is a 'not-for-profit association of repository initiatives' which aim s to 'enhance greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access digital repositories'.

In addition to the meeting I had informal discussions with Birgit Schmidt, and was able to talk to her and her colleagues about UKCoRR, its aims, and what it had achieved already.

I was able to attend this meeting as my institution (the University of Nottingham) is currently a COAR member (at a cost of €2500 pa). As far as I can tell, JISC and EDINA are currently the other UK members, but sadly UKCoRR does not have any money, let alone €2500 to put towards COAR membership. The team from Göttingen were interested in UKCoRR and I have agreed to write a short case study or briefing paper, to explain more about what we have achieved in the UK and how this has been accomplished.

We will stay in close touch with COAR and the team, but as UKCoRR has no funding, we cannot make the necessary contribution to become members, so for now, we will stay in touch and collaborate where appropriate, but UKCoRR as an organisation will not be able to become formal members of COAR at this time.

'Cafe Society' element to the next UKCoRR meeting?

Finally, the new UKCoRR Committee met in cyberspace yesterday to welcome the new committee members and to discuss forthcoming actions and issues.

As the agenda steered around to the next UKCoRR membership meeting, we wondered what you would all like from it. Networking is an obvious point, and we will be sure to build in enough time for longer coffee break and a good lunch break.

Another point that came up was whether we should have a 'Cafe Society' element to the day. The Welsh Repository Network team used this format at their recent CRIS event, and I believe this was popular and successful. Would a similar format be of benefit at a UKCoRR meeting, perhaps split around different topics. If so, then what are the hot topics you'd like to discuss? Do drop me or any of the UKCoRR committee a line to let us know what you'd like! You can get me at dominic.tate@nottingham.ac.uk or on 0115 846 7544.

RSP: Digital Preservation Day, Birmingham 27/05/2010

I attended the RSP event in Aston Business School on Thursday 27th May and came away with not only some good advice, but also with the impetus to build on long-held ideas and assumptions. Preservation was the aim of the day, but as so often happens, other forms of repository work kept popping up. When discussing preservation/curation the question was : does your repository/institution have a digital preservation policy? I don't believe any hands went up in the air. Furthermore, with very few of us with steering groups, policy-making seemed relatively unattainable at present. So, the advice then given was to start with baby steps - meet with colleagues/superiors first and discuss the barriers you feel are in place - attempt to conquer these one by one or over a set period of time. Furthermore, yet more education of stakeholders is required so as to demonstrate the value of your repository. Also, we must target that value to user needs. I appreciate that this is repeating the same message, but it seems that is what needs to be done. Keep plugging away, know who your supporters are, communicate your repository's value more effectively. Then repeat all over again! A good repository day with presentations, discussions, good company and yet more food for thought! Nicky Cashman.