Sharing citations?
An international workshop in Amsterdam in March, funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER, discussed work needed to improve interoperability between repositories. Four areas of work were focused upon:
- citation services
- interoperable identification systems
- repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and
- repository organisation (supporting repositories around the world)
There’s more information and an update here:
http://repinf.pbworks.com/
There is also an option to sign up to this wiki / community.
Specifically now, there is a proposal for internationally coordinated work to enable repositories of OA research papers to share the citations therein. This is currently out for public review, and your comments would be most welcome. Please see the proposal here:
http://repinf.pbworks.com/Citation-Services-draft-project-proposal
There are some 15-20 funders of repositories infrastructure around the world (like JISC in the UK) also looking at this proposal, with a view to funding the work it describes.
Thanks
Neil
Towards the academic library of the future - expressions of interest by 8 July 09
We’re working in partnership with SCONUL, RIN, RLUK and the British Library on an initiative:
• to gather and analyse evidence about current and future trends that are likely to have an impact on the future of academic and research libraries in the UK; and
• to formulate strategic responses to help libraries respond creatively to key changes in the wider environment, so that they continue to develop and sustain effective levels and types of information services to support students and researchers in the HE and related sectors.
We’re currently seeking expressions of interest to lead and manage the activity which will use a variety of futures tools and techniques, such as horizon-scanning; trend and driver analysis; scenario analysis; attractiveness grids; and/or value chain analysis. Prospective consultants may wish to suggest other approaches. Whatever approaches are adopted, a key feature of the programme should be that seeks the active participation of as wide a range as possible of people in the library and information sectors, along with users and other stakeholders from across the higher education and research sectors, and their engagement in helping to
• identify, review and assess key trends and underlying drivers likely to affect scholarly libraries, and their use by students and researchers in the years ahead;
• formulate and test scenarios to assess current policies, processes and services, the likely impact of future developments, and the issues and choices facing decision-makers; and
• draft a series of authoritative papers setting out possible futures for library and information services in supporting institutional teaching, learning and research strategies, and the steps required if those futures are to be realised.
The success of the initiative will depend on securing contributions from people with a wide range of views and perspectives who are prepared to experiment with ideas, to challenge existing assumptions, to ask awkward questions, and to test possible impacts.
The contract let will be funded up to a level of £120,000 (exlcuding VAT) and will run from September 2009 to April 2011.
Expressing interest:
Expressions of interest should simply take the form of an email indicating a name and full contact details. Following the outcome of this call, the RIN will issue an ITT to those who have expressed an interest. A full project specification and tendering requirements will then be issued.
The deadline for expressions of interest is 8 July 2009.
Expressions of interest should be directed to Aaron Griffiths (aaron.griffiths@rin.ac.uk). Please also contact Aaron is you have any questions relating to this work.
JISC has recently taken forward a campaign to help raise some of the related issues.
A new climate for meteorological publishing?
***This is a guest post from Fiona Hewer on behalf of the JISC OJIMS project***
Scientific information about weather and climate change is being scrutinised more than ever to meet the need for advice to policy-makers on greenhouse gas emissions and their consequences. The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), a world-leading publisher, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre, a NERC repository, have been working on new ways to provide scientific quality assurance and access to meteorological data, to meet this need, and the wider requirements of the meteorological sciences.
The internet provides many ways to give access to data and information on-line, from online journals and institutional repositories to project and personal websites. ”Overlay Journals” are websites that can sit above all these sources, collating information on a particular topic and providing quality control information, such as through a peer-review process. So, for users with an interest in a particular topic, an overlay journal gives wide, quality-controlled access from a single web site.
The OJIMS project (Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences) aimed to investigate overlay journal mechanics, create an open-access repository and evaluate business models for potential overlay journals. It has been funded mainly by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme (Repository Start-up and Enhancement Strand) and also supported by NERC. The project has raised awareness of the potential benefits and obstacles to digital publishing in the meteorological community, including scientists and organisations in the public and private sectors.
The project activities included; surveys of scientists and stakeholder organisations; review of outputs from other JISC projects such as RIOJA and other work on open-access; identification of the benefits, risks and costs of two overlay journal scenarios; development of a document editor for overlay journals; and creation of a new document repository.
Fiona Hewer of Fiona’s Red Kite was engaged by RMetS to evaluate the business models. It evaluated the technologies and business cases associated with new overlay journals. It is hoped that this will lead to the publication of a data journal in the near future.
The OJIMS project outputs have been used to inform NERC’s information strategy.
The full reports can be downloaded here. More information is available on the project website including a link to the CEDA-docs demonstration repository.
Participate in JISC Landscape Study
Apologies, firstly, to Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell over at UKOLN that I haven’t done this post a bit earlier. They are both currently working on a landscape study to understand how people use Web 2.0 tools and services as part of the shared infrastructure services (SIS) programme to both set the current work in context and also to understand what we need to do into the future.
There is more information on the UKOLN blog for the project at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ so if you are working with Web 2.0 tools and services please visit and fill in the survey.
jiscri - The results
We have been notifying and sending out grant letters to bidders to the JISC Rapid Innovation call, also known as jiscri, this week and are now able to release some information about the call.
We got 94 bids for the call and have ended up funding 33 projects at a cost of £1.1m. Originally we had allocated less funding to this call but in response to the number and quality of bids we received it was agreed we were able to increase the level of funding available for these projects. So thank you to those that submitted proposals and showed interest in this programme activity.
The 33 projects still need to sign and return their grant letters before the projects are confirmed so we can’t give a full run down of them yet but will list them on this blog and the JISC website as soon as we can. We were able to fund projects in each of the priority areas specified in the call:
- Mashups
- Aggregating tags
- Semantic web and linked data
- Data search
- Visualisation
- Personalisation
- Mobile technologies
- Lightweight shared infrastructure services
- User interfaces
The projects will start in June and run for 6 months. We will be having a meeting for these projects and people interested in them in early September. An announcement about this should come from the IE demonstrator soon. The IE demonstrator will be showcasing the work of these projects so it is a good RSS feed to grab if you are interested in jiscri.
Web Services and repositories
I attended a workshop on June 2 on the use of Web Services to enable interoperability between repositories, repository services and other systems. The workshop was organised by the Ethos project (Electronic Theses Online). Most attendees were from a repository manager or developer background.
[Update: the presentations (including audio recording) at this event are now available]
As a number of speakers noted, the term ‘Web Services’ is a very broad one. The main focus of the day was on the use of a number of specific protocols and approaches to provide ’services’:
SWORD for depositing items in repositories
SRU to search for and retrieve items
And REST for passing data between servers.
Using such ’services’ enables repository services to be used from within environments other than the repository itself (so, if you wanted to deposit an item in a repository from within a research management application of some kind, for example). It also enables repositories to use other systems’ services. One example given of this was look up of file format information from the National Archives’ PRONOM database of file formats.
From discussion, the general view appeared to be that Web Services do have a role to play in aiding integration of repositories with other systems and avoiding ’silos’. However, achieving such integration raises issues such as:
- having sufficient access to technical expertise
- ensuring good communication between repository managers and developers
- focussing on real user needs.
None of these are easy issues to address. Two of the speakers came from institutions which are members of the Scottish Digital Library Consortium and they noted the value of libraries ‘clubbing together’ to share available technical expertise and resources.