SNEEP 0.3.2
The JISC funded SNEEP project (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints) – part of the original JISC rapid innovation programme – aimed to provide a set of social networking tools for EPrints repositories. It ran for 6 months and ended in May 2008. Since the rather low key publication of the resultant EPrints plugin interest and uptake has been slowly but surely gathering momentum.
Today I am pleased to announce a couple of significant SNEEP related developments. Firstly , thanks to my colleague Ben Wheeler here at ULCC, SNEEP 0.3.2 released this week offers an automagic installer. This does away with the (slightly tortuous) manual install procedure that we suspect discouraged all but the hardier EPrints hac… I mean administrators.
You can download SNEEP 0.3.2 and/or read Ben’s post to the EP-tech mailling list. The download page is also a good place to see SNEEP in action.
PICT
I am also pleased to announce a new project (funded as part of the 2009 JISC rapid innovation programme) that aims to build on the SNEEP work to provide SNEEP-ish services to a broader range of web resources. The goal of the PICT project (Platform Independent Community Toolbox) is a lightweight javascript tool that can be deployed across an number of web resources (not just a repository) to encompass the web-based real estate of a given research community and provide that community with collaborative tools available at the on-line research coalface.
Effectively PICT will allow resource owners to offer
- tags
- comments
- notes
- other goodies
from their web page. The data gathered by these tools will be managed by a PICT server (probably run by a community-minded resource owner) and be available for cross referencing with other resources in a PICT community.
If all that is a bit difficult to picture, rest assured that demos will appear throughout the course of the project that should help to clear the murk.
