Chris Rusbridge has already done an excellent job of some near-real-time reporting on the sessions, and I’m not going to try to replicate that level of detail in this post. As a first-time attendee at iPres, I was impressed by the professional mix attending, which took in hard-core computer science, digital preservation and curation folk, repository managers and those from the traditional custodial professions. In that respect it was very reminiscent of the early DLM-Forums, which were eye-opening for me when I attended the first one in 1996. But it was also interesting to observe that, just as DLM was dominated by archivists and records managers, iPres is a very library-oriented event. For example, those who expressed a desire for a Europe-wide event bringing together all those with an interest in digital preservation didn’t seem to be aware that the DLM-Forums existed.

One positive observation (of many) is that there is more reassuring news on the oft-vexed issue of IPR barriers to digital preservation. At the close of day 1, we heard a summary of the findings of the international survey on the impact of copyright law on digital preservation. That indicated that the UK had one of the strictest set of constraints of all the countries looked at – in terms of who is permitted to carry out certain acts in the name of preservation and what those acts are. Other countries have more relaxed exemptions and that doesn’t appear to be causing the major rightsholdfers any significant financial loss. That should give us hope for some change in the law in the UK at least. And Horst Foster, making the keynote speech opening day 2, appeared to echo this at the European level, implying that the case for change had been made and accepted, although he was notably cautious about making any promises as to when this change might come about.

That’s an improvement on the situation in Europe a few years ago, though, when I was at one of a number of expert panels helping the European Commission to frame the forthcoming research questions and challenges in the digital preservation arena. At that time we were all warned off mentioning the (C) word at all – it seemed to have a somewhat toxic flavour. It’s really heartening to see that things have changed.

One should add a note of caution, however. After Adrienne Muir had commented favourably on how Australian law allows institutions such as the national library and archives to bypass DRM systems in order to preserve material, Colin Webb injected a note of caution. It is apparently still illegal to manufacture or to import a device to Australia which allows a DRM system to be bypassed. But if the national library happens to find such a device on its premises, it can use it without fear of breaking the law. Still some way to go, then, before the law is ‘joined up and working’ – the strapline of iPres2008.

DDI is something that is of particular relevance to the work we’re doing at NDAD, and more than once we’ve been asked why we didn’t use this metadata standard to describe our datasets. The simple answer is that it wasn’t around when we began, or at least not in a form that was capable of being used with the bulk of the datasets we were receiving. But in the intervening 10 years DDI has moved on, as has our own understanding of the metadata requirements of generalised dataset preservation. DDI has many obvious strengths, but it also has some drawbacks, one of which is the cost of applying it to all datasets. I don’t think there’s enough work been done on examining these and it may be that the cost problem is not as great as I and others think it is.

Last year the DCC encouraged attendees to use their online forums to discuss the conference as it was taking place, and I hope that we’ll see the same happening this year.

DSUG can be a slightly tense affair, since it must address the expectations of both technical and non-technical staff engaged with repositories. Interesting as I found Federico Meschini’s demonstration of managing the DSpace code base using Eclipse and Maven, I think many librarians attending found this “basic” tutorial beyond them. The slightly aspirational tendencies of several discussions can also be a little frustrating. It’s interesting to know what’s planned for version 1.6 and 2.0 of DSpace, but since 1.5 has yet to be released, this can seem like pie in the sky.

Stefania Arabito (University of Trieste) had asked me to contribute a short presentation on SAS-Space for a session of case-studies of DSpace instances. The brief paper I presented was rather less than earth-shattering, and my plans to show a little more of it than the front page were scuppered by the FAO firewall. But there’s only so much you can say in 10 minutes: I hope I was at least competent. What seemed to provoke the most interest, in later discussion with other delegates, was the fact that we haven’t restricted repository content to peer-reviewed articles, theses, and dissertations. This probably never seemed at all surprising to me, after so many years of association with a dataset archive. Things like the Masefield bibliography, London Book Trades database and 19th Century Francophone Music Criticism transcriptions are equally valuable scholarly works, in my opinion, and worthy of preservation and publishing in an Institutional Repository.

Interest was also expressed in the idea of using a wiki to manage the documentation associated with the SAS-Space Repository – policy, user guide, and such like. I’m not sure I didn’t borrow the idea from another IR, but, all the same, it still seems like a good idea to me. What I’d most like to do is integrate the wiki content a bit better with the DSpace pages/templates. I’ve been unsure how to do this, but now I’ve seen Manakin…

Scott Philips’s demonstration of Manakin was particularly interesting to me, as Manakin uses an XML/XSLT approach to rendering repository metadata that has a lot of similarities to the approach I developed a few years ago for generating NDAD catalogues (albeit with a Perl backend, where Manakin, of course, uses Java).

Manakin offers a three-tier abstraction model:

• Aspect Tier: This is the Java/Cocoon backend that assembles a METS-based XML document from the repository database.
• Theme Tier: XSLT is used to transform the raw XML into an XHTML document
• Style Tier: CSS styles the XHTML document

This means that no intervention in the Java source is necessary for any modifications that can be addressed in the Theme or Style tiers. For example, adding the logo of the institution to which the item belongs to the Search Results view can be achieved by adding some simple templates to the default XSLT templates. The Texas Digital Library is running entirely with a Manakin-based UI, and very nice it is too.

One other particularly interesting presentation and discussion I hope to follow up is Federico Meschini’s work on unifying a DSpace repository with a Learning Object repository. This involves establishing mappings between Dublin Core and LOM metadata schemas – something that may be of interest to us for work the ongoing SPELOS report.

I was also interested to find out more about CASPUR, with which Federico and the conference organisers are associated: it is what remains of the consortium that operated supercomputers for the Italian academic sector. Sound familiar?
I enjoyed the chance to chat to Robert Tansley, one of the people behind both Eprints and Dspace, who’s obviously a very sharp and clever guy. Rob’s now moved from MIT to Google, where he’s working on hush-hush research projects, but continues with DSpace/Google Scholar-related work as part of his side projects. We both agreed that, thanks in part to work on DSpace, Eprints, and their ilk, and the many standards and developments they embody and build on, the technical problems of managing and preserving most common types of digital documents seem largely solved. Rob talked of his interest in new approaches to visualising data, relationships and the like (notable Gapminder)and seemed genuinely interested when I suggested that the NDAD dataset archive might contain some material worth experimenting on. I’ll be dropping him a line, and a link, in the near future.

There were plenty of opportunities to chat informally with other repository users and developers, during lunch and the Google-sponsored evening reception, and at the conference dinner. At €150 for the whole conference package, it’s hard to imagine better value: Imma, Paola, Stefania and others did a fantastic job. The organisers also designated a unique tag, dspacerome2007, for sharing online resources from the course, including photos in Flickr and links in del.icio.us (just as we had done for photos of the Bergen meeting last year). And I’d barely even touched down when I found I’d been blogged in Italian…

Photos by Graham Triggs and others on Flickr