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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.

Less than three weeks have passed since I found myself at Open Repositories 2009 (#OR09) in Atlanta, and it already seems a long time ago. For the record, Georgia Tech put on an excellent show, overflowing with fascinating presentations, people and ideas – far too many to take in – and (most importantly) an excellent and entertaining dinner at the Georgia Aquarium.

I took a smashing poster describing our work on Linnean Online and the SNEEP extensions for EPrints, and also spoke about these projects to the EPrints User Group sessions and had to endure the now inevitable Minute Madness. I was pleased to spot the SNEEP Comments plugin in use when Jessie Hey demonstrated EdShare, another of Southampton’s learning resource repository projects. It was also great to meet up again with Patrick McSweeney who has been tweaking SNEEP at Southampton, and discuss ways of keeping ongoing work on the plugins in sync. Regular readers may remember Patrick from OR08, and he cut an even more unforgettable figure this time.

The talk of the event seemed to be the relentless buzz around the unification of DSpace/Fedora Commons, engendering the new creation that is DuraSpace (and DuraCloud). This offers a lot of exciting possibilities that we’ll need to keep track of, though it won’t be the first repositories event that has offered us a surfeit of jam tomorrow… For now, for the curious, here’s the Duraspace FAQ.

By contrast, it’s slightly disappointing that, over the water, the EPrints user group seemed a tad under-subscribed. Features available in EPrints 3.1.x, and those imminent for 3.2, from cloud storage controllers and desktop folder visualisations to preservation support, promise quick wins for anyone wanting to push the repository model further: Les and the EPrints team waste no time in responding to the latest demands of the zeitgeist. All the same, informal discussions with users and non-users of EPrints suggested substantial resistance to its Perl-based core. Yet EPrints continues to push more configurability away from its Perl source: in the kind of repository-driven future oft foretold – from WordPress-type exensibility to modular service-oriented solutions – the underlying code base ought to become increasingly irrelevant as long as the package does what it says on the tin.

As usual it was great to meet some old friends, and lots of people for the first time. Memorably serendipitous (re-)discoveries included:

• Bibapp – “a Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder”. There have been many attempts to integrate personalised, portfolio pages with repositories, and this looks like an effort worth investigating further, particularly as it claims to be repository neutral (and a good excuse to try out Ruby for real?).
• ParallelArchive – another variant on the repository model: “a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository”. Run by Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University in Budapest – of particular interest to students of cold war and related issues
• E-Lis – still a superb multilingual collection of LIS resources, and undoubtedly the acid test of all EPrints internationalisation efforts
• MIT Open CourseWare – the mother of all OERs?
• The great Peter Sefton – great to meet him at last, at 6′ 7″, someone I can truly look up to. For a much more thorough account of the conference, see Pete’s Blog

I didn’t manage anything in the way of sightseeing, though the Aquarium seemed to be top of most locals’ list of recommendations, and we went there. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort to see the Civil War museum. For the visual record of OR09, content and context, you might like to see Jim Downing’s photos from the event, and the official photo OR09 set on Flickr.

Some of us at ULCC, and over 100 other people from around the UK, spent a couple of days this week at the Aston Business School reviewing the outcomes of JISC’s repositories and preservation programme and looking forward to what comes next. It was a useful and stimulating couple of days – the best programme meeting I’ve attended so far. The few projects that weren’t represented at the meeting missed out in a lot of ways. If you’re involved in a JISC project, make sure you, your project manager, or both of you go to a programme meeting when you are invited. You’ll learn a lot, make some useful contacts, save some time, get some useful ideas and possibly lay the groundwork for future projects or collaborations.

I began the day by chairing the final meeting of RPAG(the repositories and preservation advisory group.) Read the rest of this entry »

The previous post may not have shown up on Andy McGregor’s RSS radar, but this one should! A most agreeable surprise to learn from Joss at Lincoln, in his comment on my previous post, that Lincoln’s shiny new Lincoln Green Institutional Repository has implemented the SNEEP plugins, and soon their users will, we hope, be able to add Comments and Tags to the abstract pages of repository items. I know a few little tweaks have been necessary and we hope to look into them soon and ensure they are fed back into the main SNEEP code base. We’re really grateful to Joss at Lincoln and Seb at Southampton for persevering and sharing our vision (however misguided!) – I’m looking forward to hearing how they get on.

If it’s not live, it’s not blogging! Here I am only minutes ago on the SNEEP stand at the JISC Innovation Forum 2008 at Keele University demoing the ajaxy fun that can be had commenting and tagging Eprints with the SNEEP plugins. No pens or mugs, unfortunately, but plenty of copies of the highly informative Sneepflet.

As usual, a JISC gathering is a great opportunity to meet others working in the field – plenty of familiar faces and some new ones. JISC-sponsored innovations move on at a head-spinning pace in all the areas we are directly or indirectly involved in, from digital preservation and archives to repositories and e-learning. With JISC-PoWR in mind, I was especially interested to meet our former ULCC/RSC colleague Sarah Sherman, who is now working on the APT-STAIRS project, investigating the use of Google Docs for students, teachers and researchers. Definitely a preservation angle here, that I hope we’ll be able to follow up.

Plenty about the conference, and more, on the JIF08 blog; if contemporaneous twittering is your bag, check out twemes.com/jif08.