A repository of university committee papers
The KCL Committee Zone project is one of the Start Up and Enhancement projects in the JISC repositories and preservation programme. The project is drawing to a close and has developed a repository to store the agendas, minutes and papers that are produced for the various committees of King’s College London.
The project held a dissemination event on the 10th where the repository was demonstrated. I think a few points from their demonstration are worth highlighting.
- The metadata scheme chosen is a reduced set of the e-government metadata standard, based on qualified dublin core.
- The repository only uses 11 metadata fields for the items stored in the repository. This means that the deposit process is only one screen and is not a great burden on the committee administrators who will be depositing. This lightweight approach is the result of working very closely with the committee administrators using focus groups and one on one sessions.
- The metadata collected is contextual information, not about search as the repository has a powerful full text search.
- Advocacy for this type of repository is still important. KCL committee zone have got good buy in so far due to the way they have involved the committee administrators in the project but there is still more advocacy required. This was highlighted by someone from the audience who pointed out that their similar project had struggled for buy in.
The other speakers at their dissemination event came from the BSI and from Islington council, they were both using complex document management systems to manage their committees. These presentations were very interesting as both seemed to focus strongly on the services offered to their staff and fitting or improving existing workflows. Both were using commercial content management systems and it seems that repository work in the HE environment could benefit from studying the workflow tools that they can offer.
Harvesting usage data?
I was talking with a researcher the other day who said that, despite his institution mandating deposit of research papers in his institutional repository, he didn’t comply - prefering to deposit in an international subject repository. Naturally, I asked him ‘why?’. He said that it was because he wanted each of his papers to be in one, and only one, place on the web, so that he could get accurate download statistics for it. Obviously, we’re aware in the JISC IE team of the various arguments on this topic, and we’ve funded a piece of work to look at the practical ways in which subject and institutional repositories might work together, which could address this issue among others. We’ve also funded various projects on repository statistics, such as ‘Interoperable Repository Statistics’ (which has developed a tool that repository managers can use to analyse and share statistics) and an ongoing small piece of work on harmonising article-level usage data formats. There is also MESUR and other projects in this space.
However, in the real world, it is likely that copies of some research papers are likely to be at various places on the web, and we wondered whether a tool could be built that used fuzzy matching to identify copies that were probably the same paper, some means of querying the servers on which they sat to get download data, and a reliable way of then aggregating that data into some acceptable statistics. Is that an important use case? Is feasible to build something that addresses it?
What’s the relationship (if any) with name authority services (see the JISC pilot Names project) or persistent identifiers (see the JISC Resourcing Identifier Interoperability for Repositories - RIDIR demonstrator)?
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.
Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis
We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.
We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.
We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.
We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.
We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis.
Please comment either by posting comments or by email to Tom Franklin who is leading on this (tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk).
Research
The Research Excellence Framework is of concern to many at the moment including senior managers, research managers, researchers and librarians. We believe that it is likely that institutional repositories will make collection of the relevant information easier and cheaper and will support whatever metrics are likely to be selected. It is also possible that open access repositories will lead to research being found more easily and therefore cited more widely. This also supports increasing research recognition.
Funding mandates from funding bodies such as research councils and Wellcome can be addressed through the use of required repositories (such as UK Pubmed Central), but through the use of suitable institutional repositories that support things like embargo periods.
Community and business engagement requires that information is made accessible to those that might effective use of it. Institutional repositories may assist here.
Teaching and learning
Cost reduction may be achieved through better sharing of learning materials, including learning objects, this will be of interest to both managers and teachers who need to then implement and make use of repositories, but contributors will also have to think about using appropriate standards. Integration with the VLE would also enable the most current version of materials to be easily accessible.
Quality assurance of courses, especially franchised courses for instance between a university and FE colleges is of concern to senior managers and teachers and could be supported by making learning resources available across the group through use of repositories.
Many institutions and their managers are concerned with retaining control over the IPR of their learning materials, institutional repositories for learning objects offer one way of controlling access effectively.
Information services and libraries
All managers and Staff are concerned with meeting their legal and Contractual requirements including self-deposit / open access and being able to enforce embargoes. Institutional repositories can help with these issues.
Help wanted
Are these the most important drivers?
Are there other drivers that we should consider?
Have we correctly identified the key audiences who can help to identify these things?
Posted by: Tom Franklin
Metadata for stuff in repositories …
I just wanted to highlight some metadata application profile work that is underway as part of the information environment repository programme. Having attended the birds of a feather session (coordinated by Rosemary Russell, UKOLN and Julie Allinson, University of York) about this at OR08 I finally got to see what JISC had funded. Today at the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group we discussed some of the work and I guess it made me think it was worth making a few more people aware of it. JISC has funded the development of:
metadata application profiles based on Dublin Core for:
Scholarly works
Geo-spatial data/information
Images
Multi-media
And we’ve also funded some work to assess what might be done in terms of application profiles for the following:
Learning objects
Scientific data
A little bit of context…
After using OAI-PMH across repositories in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories (FAIR) programme the experience was that Dublin Core was often not rich enough to be very useful to end user applications. The requirement for both metadata and full text indexing was a specific recommendation of the FAIR ePrints UK harvest and search project. After other work also confirmed this the response was to seek to add to basic DC by developing an application profile. The scholarly works application profile (SWAP) was developed by Julie Allinson (at the time UKOLN now University of York) and Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation). SWAP aims to help support richer search functions and also to support full text indexing, and as I understand it another benefit is navigation between different versions. It is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model which uses the following entities: work, expression, manifestation and item.
You can read more about SWAP here:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/allinson-et-al/
SWAP, although based on a FRBR type model was kept quite simple. It seems that when creating SWAP some hard lines were drawn to avoid too much complexity and from the feedback I have heard it seems to have addressed requirements. It was certainly good to hear from one of the attendees at the OR08 meeting that SWAP was “exactly what they required”. Mick Eadie (Visual Arts Data Service, University College for the Creative Arts) also described the images AP at the OR08 meeting, and it seems to have tried to keep a simple approach too. A draft of the images AP is now out for comment. See:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile
Of course to get the real benefit of these application profiles the implementation of them has to be made as easy as possible and we need to encourage take-up. Working with repository software providers to support the APs is one thing that might be possible and the teams supporting the work intend to do this. SWAP has been implemented at Warwick University as they customised EPrints software to support it.
If you really want to help or know someone that can 
a job advert is currently out for a related metadata advocacy post at UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/vacancies/08H127A/job-ad/
Note that SWAP is the most mature of the APs; the other areas are in initial draft and are still being developed.
Here are some related links:
SWAP:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile
The geo spatial work that James Reid, EDINA (University of Edinburgh) is leading on is currently out for comment:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/images/e/ef/Geospatial_Application_Profile.doc
Work done by Phil Barker, CETIS, (Heriot-Watt University) on the learning material application profile is here:
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/domainModel.draft1.html
It is probably worth mentioning that previously some work has been done for learning materials/objects. See information on RLLOMAP: http://www.intute.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/
and: http://standards-catalogue.ukoln.ac.uk/index/UK_LOM_Core
RLLOMAP seems to have a similar aim to the current work in that it was to support the exchange of metadata using OAI-PMH and UK LOM did build on this.
Not surprisingly the multi-media application profile is a tough one and drafts are not yet available as far as I know. But I do know via Pete Johnston (Eduserv Foundation) that there are some early results being reviewed! Gayle Calverley is leading the work in this area.
There is also the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community where discussion should take place about the application profiles once the work picks up as a whole (coordination and outreach is currently being planned):
http://dublincore.org/groups/scholar/