Building repository interoperability and developer communities
Yesterday at the Library of Congress RepoCamp (that is repository camp) took place. The event was organised by the JISC Common Repository Interface Group (CRIG) and the supporting work led by WoCRIG (wisdom of CRIG). Some prize money was contributed by Microsoft for a developer competition.
The list of attendees at RepoCamp was pretty impressive. The majority were technical developers and some gave pitches on particular solutions and technologies that help repository interoperability; attendees at the Camp reviewed these pitches and gave feedback on the ideas. There was also an opportunity for everyone at RepoCamp to pitch prototypes and then to start to develop ideas together. A competition is being held where prizes are being given to motivate developers to develop prototypes. There is a particular focus on using OAI-ORE in ways that bring OAI-ORE functionality into user facing applications. The outcomes from the prototypes that enter into the competition will be judged on 8th August by a panel that includes: Savas Parastatidis (Microsoft), David Flanders (coordinator of WoCRIG), Rob Sanderson (University of Liverpool) and Tim DiLauro (John Hopkins University). Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van De Sompel and Simeon Warner (Cornell University) amongst others have helped organise the competition and event with JISC WoCRIG.
I didn’t go to the event so I don’t know how it went but by posting this I hope others will be able to follow links and see the outputs and get a sense of the discussions.
Prior to RepoCamp some developers from the UK have held a CRIG Roadshow in the US. The Roadshow has been focused on interoperability between repositories and eLearning (VLEs), eScience and eAdministration/Library systems. This has been a good way to bring UK and US developers together. After all these issues are global and not something to be dealt with solely within national boundaries.
The approach to WoCRIG has been a way to get technical developers talking and working together to review and develop specifications and solutions. The JISC vision (shared by many others worldwide) of a layer of scholarly content on the web, in part, underpinned by repositories is a challenging one and one way to help achieve this is by getting developers to define problem spaces in repository interoperability based on use cases and to undertake rapid prototyping and testing. JISC CRIG was originally established to help identify what use cases repositories need to support in research and learning and to suggest innovative solutions.
RepoCamp has built upon other CRIG work and meetings that have been held in the UK and the RepoChallenge that took place at Open Repositories 08 at Southampton University in April this year. That challenge was won by Mining for ORE by Ben O’Steen (University of Oxford), Dave Tarrant and Tim Brody (University of Southampton).
The JISC plans to hold a large scale developer event as part of the JISC Information Environment programmes in 2009.
Crowdsourcing ideas on repository definition
We have had a couple of meetings recently to discuss the future of repositories. For these meetings we set up a site so that people could discuss the defintion of a repository and related ideas. This discussion has been very interesting so we have decided to open it up for wider comment.
You can find the site at: http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/. Feel free to vote and comment on the ideas that are up there or submit your own if you have something to add.
The votes are purely a gauge of an idea’s popularity and will not be treated as anything other than that.
The information that we gather on this site will be used to prepare reports that are designed to guide JISC’s future funding plans for repositories.
The site is built using a free service called ideascale: http://www.ideascale.com/. It is very easy to use but it is a new service so it is still developing.
Digital Preservation and Copyright Law Report Released
Over the last 18 months or so, JISC has been working with international partners to look into the way that copyright issues affect digital preservation activities and how changes to legislation might facilitate better long-term access to a wide range of scholarly material. The report entitled ‘The Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation’ is available online at: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/resources/pubs/wipo_digital_preservation_final_report2008.pdf
A workshop to discuss the contents of the report was held at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva on Tuesday 15th July and Fred Friend was there to participate in the event and the following is based on bits of his description of the workshop …
The workshop began with an excellent talk by Cliff Lynch of CNI. Cliff began by saying that “digital preservation is one of the biggest challenges of our time”. He pointed to the enormous scale of the content to be preserved by contrast with the small scale of most preservation projects to date. In Cliff’s view, although the technical problems are hard, the legal, economic and societal problems are much more difficult to resolve. We need to establish a culture that honours stewardship. In questions after Cliff’s presentation, I asked him how we could decide what to throw away digitally, as paper archivists throw away some material. Cliff’s response was that storage costs are becoming so low that we should keep everything.
The four organizations undertaking the Study (Library of Congress - US, JISC - UK, Open Access to Knowledge Law Project - Australia, SURF Foundation - Netherlands) summarised their national situation, and Adrienne Muir (Loughborough university) provided a synthesis of the four national perspectives. Adrienne has done a good job, both on the UK section in the Study Report and on the conclusions and recommendations in the Report.
Either side of lunch various people reported on aspects of the preservation situation or on particular projects. Ben White of the British Library gave a very good talk, bringing in the importance of access to preserved content. Eileen Fenton of Portico also gave a good presentation.
The final session was entitled “Ideas for a path forward” and there was some consideration of the recommendations that are included at the end of the report which call for action to amend current positions on copyright law. Each of the national jurisdictions contain commentaries about their particular region but there has also been some attempt to consolidate recommendations where possible.
Neil Grindley / Fred Friend
The JISC Preservation of Web Resources Workshop (PoWR)
The first JISC-PoWR workshop took place on Friday (27th June 2008) at Senate House Library, University of London and was attended by over 30 people from a wide range of professional groupings, including the Web management and Records Management communities. The workshop was entitled ‘Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start’ and considered how delegates could begin to consider including Web resources in their preservation strategy. There was much interest in the case study presented by the University of Bath which illustrated the differing perspectives held by the web and records management communities. Bringing together these communities is something the project is seeking to address.The main presentations are now available for download:
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2008/06/30/workshop-1-resources-available/
Posted by: Neil Grindley