ORE@JISC
With the release of the beta OAI-ORE specification this week, I thought it was worth highlighting some of the JISC work in the UK that is contributing to this initiative. Two short projects are looking to experiment with ORE and feed back into its development. The FORESITE project at Liverpool, run by Rob Sanderson, has produced ORE resource map descriptions of the JSTOR collection (1.8 million full text articles), and will also ORE-enable the DSpace repository platform, depositing the JSTOR-ORE collection into DSpace using the SWORD protocol. The Theorem project, based at Cambridge and run by Jim Downing, is looking at etheses, both representing ‘ideal’ born-digital theses as ORE resource maps, and looking at workflows around these. This project is working closely with the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) developed by Peter Sefton at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, to create an authoring and management environment that produces and handles chemistry theses as born-digital objects, with live links to data, and so on. This work complements an international project led in the UK by Chris Awre, and involving partners from the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which is looking to get some international agreement on a complex object format for theses, drawing from the ORE specifications, but building on specifications currently used, such as x-metadiss in Germany. Given the relative simplicity of doctoral theses – they have limited versioning issues for example – and the pressing need in many countries to automate the thesis workflow, it may be that theses become an early ORE adopter.
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Through the work on interoperability being done by the UK funded Preserv project, we have already implemented OAI-ORE in the Fedora and EPrints repository platforms. This was first demonstrated at the Open Repositories 2008 (http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk) conference where it was shown that by using ORE we could transport a complete Fedora repository into EPrints and a complete EPrints repository into Fedora. This was achieved with no loss of data or metadata relating to the records. More information on this can be found on the Preserv website about this development (http://www.preserv.org.uk/?page=oai-ore) and the plug-ins for both import and export from EPrints can be found via files.eprints.org (http://files.eprints.org/353/). These plug-ins are still in development but they are scheduled for release with the next version of EPrints. From the Preserv aspect we are now investigating how ORE maps can enable two or more repository softwares to manage a single repository dataset. This work involves working closely with EPrints and Fedora developers and we hope that it will reveal any issues in ORE which can be developed to enable greater digital preservation. ORE provides an excellent means by which complex relations between digital objects can be described in a loosely coupled manor. This can thus be utilised alongside web/object storage paradigms to enable low level repository services. At the recent Preservation Archive Special Interest Group (PASIG - http://sun-pasig.org) a couple of presentations by David Tarrant (me - Southampton) and Neil Jeffries (Oxford) went some way to outlining the developments in the Preserv project and the uses of ORE.
[…] a big push in this direction in collaboration with Jim Downing and team at Cambridge as part of the JISC TheOREM project. In TheOREM we’re going to set up ICE as a ‘Thesis Management System’ where a […]