Author Archives: Richard M. Davis

I manage ULCC’s Digital Archives & Repositories Team, contributing to our many and varied projects for archives and libraries in the education and cultural heritage sectors, and managing our repositories service for a growing number of HE institutions.

Projects I’ve had hand in include the National Digital Archive of Datasets for The National Archives, Linnean Online, Transcribe Bentham and SOAS Digital Archive. JISC-funded projects include JISC-PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources), Social Networking Extensions for Eprints, Copyright Licensing Applications with SWORD for Moodle. Current projects include innovative repository interfaces, text-mining tools, linked-data applications, and solutions for blog preservation. We also run the highly-acclaimed Digital Preservation Training Programme.

Open Repositories 2011 (Part 1)

Rory and I had a fun, productive and informative time at Open Repositories 2011 in Austin: everyone involved agreed that this year’s OR conference at the University of Texas was a great success. The conference kicked off with a keynote from Jim Jagielski of the Apache Software Foundation, describing the history and organisation behind Apache [...]

Open Repositories 2011 (Part 3): Changing Platforms

To OR11 I took a presentation, jointly with Imma Subirats, from UN FAO in Rome, which we called Changing Platforms. The aim of the presentation was to discuss the subject of migrating repositories between different software platforms. In addition to her work at FAO, Imma is Chief Executive for the E-LIS repository, a major international [...]

Open Repositories 2011 (Part 2): The Developer Challenge

An event that asked developers to demonstrate the Future of Repositories can only be considered a great success when it receives entries that include: Multiple real-time examples of using “Repositories As A Service (RaaS)”, not only exchanging data but also sharing sophisticated functionality between EPrints and DSpace – and even including an Android application A [...]

Your friendly neighborhood Digital Archives team

In May, the University of London Communications Office invited us to answer a few questions about ourselves for an Intranet article. We thought we’d reproduce some of our answers here, for the benefit of anyone else who wants a quick introduction to what we do (and ourselves, in case we forget). Please introduce yourself We [...]

Thoughts about blog data and metadata

During the ArchivePress project at ULCC, we briefly considered the data and metadata generally made available with blogs and blog posts. As ArchivePress focused on the representations of blogs in newsfeeds, we examined the metadata that is generated in common, and exposed in the newsfeeds of three of the most common blog platforms, WordPress, Blogger [...]