Chris Awre, William Nixon, Rory McNicholl at the Texas Longhorns stadium

The conference kicked off with a keynote from Jim Jagielski of the Apache Software Foundation, describing the history and organisation behind Apache and its projects. It was observed by some in the Twitter backchannel that the talk could as easily have been from 2001 as 2011, but for all that it was a worthwhile reminder that, in all our efforts, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who created and maintain the infrastructure of the Web and the Internet. And also that many our endeavours benefit from a little more dedication and commitment than you can usually squeeze between 9-to-5.

The closing keynote was by repositories stalwart Clifford Lynch, who managed to touch on so many perennial repository themes, I won’t attempt to summarise them. There is a handy anthology of tweets about his talk on Storify.

In between were plenty of presentations and opportunities to meet friends old and new from the United States of Repoland – some we have worked with, some we would like to work with, and many with challenging ideas and insights into the many facets of working with repositories.

The OR conference hops back and forth across the Atlantic (I’ve previously attended OR08 in Southampton, OR09 in Atlanta and OR10 in Madrid). Unfortunately when the conference is held Stateside, the representation of the EPrints community tends to be noticeably smaller. Not that there aren’t EPrints users in the USA (we were particularly pleased to meet the team from Cal Tech Library, very happy users and advocates of EPrints), but the distribution of software platforms is significantly different from Europe in general, and the UK in particular (if you are interested in such things, you can check out the statistics at OpenDOAR). And of course travel logistics (and costs) are non-trivial. Luckily Rory and I had been saving our prize money from last year’s Developer Challenge!

While it eluded me in previous years, I think at last I am starting to grasp at least some of the salient points of the thing they call Duraspace (launched, if I recall, in Atlanta)! I’m certainly hoping to find time to take my free Duracloud trial. However other aspects still remain opaque to me. At one panel discussion about the prospects for implementing DSpace over Fedora (or Fedora under DSpace, depending which way up you look at it), I was surprised to hear a description of ongoing DSpace-Fedora alignment efforts as “more about the journey than the destination”. An enviable luxury: for the time being we need tangible outcomes for our repositories and customers, and that’s one reason why we’ll be sticking with EPrints for the foreseeable future.

Personal highlights for me are described elsewhere: the Developer Challenge, which we enjoyed immensely, and Changing Platforms the talk that I presented with Imma Subirats, of the UN Food & Agricultural Organisation, where we discussed migrating between repository platforms. Rory also had a chance to meet developers from Yale, who had worked on the other end of the SOAS-Yale Islamic Manuscripts collaboration, and show off some of his work for the SOAS repository. We were also hugely appreciative of the generosity of the EPrints team, who kept us generally amused and amazed, and kindly included us in their group dinner on the last evening.

Adrian Stevenson's got them all-night late bar open repository blues...

The facilities at UT’s AT&T Conference Centre were outstanding, as was the surrounding campus generally, including the Longhorns football stadium (with its insanely massive west stand) where the conference dinner was held. Austin has far more attractions than we could see in such a short time, and it is an impressive and vibrant city, from the spectacular grandeur of the Texas state capitol, to the noisy entertainment on 6th Street, where virtually every bar has some kind of rock or blues band playing. We were most impressed by UKOLN’s Adrian Stevenson who jammed on a borrowed guitar with the blues band in the Blue Moon bar at 2am. As if that wasn’t enough, our visit also coincided with the massive Republic Of Texas biker rally – an insanely noisy procession of up to 50,000 bikers through the main streets of the city. Our ears won’t forget OR11 in a hurry.

In addition to her work at FAO, Imma is Chief Executive for the E-LIS repository, a major international and multi-lingual repository of articles about Library and Information Science. E-LIS has operated since 2003 on EPrints, but last year migrated to DSpace, because CILEA in Italy, who generously donate support and hosting, now focuses exclusively on working with DSpace. The E-LIS migration has been largely successful, however a number of EPrints features on which the E-LIS editors and users depended, have been difficult to replicate in DSpace, or had to be put on ice. This is no reflection on the specialists at CILEA, but perhaps indicative of more profound differences between EPrints and DSpace, that aren’t always reflected in the usual comparisons of repository platforms, such as the otherwise informative JISC RSP Repository Software survey.

ULCC of course has just completed a repository migration from DSpace to EPrints for the School of Advanced Study. Our motivation was in many respects the same as that of CILEA – our expertise lies firmly in the EPrints camp. But I think the outcomes for our end-user community are more demonstrably positive: in fact I don’t think there’s a single feature of the new SAS-Space-on-EPrints that isn’t a major improvement over its previous incarnation.

Migration of metadata and data (at least from DSpace to EPrints) presented few issues (that weren’t of my own making!) – export, transform, import. Here the similarities between the models of the two platforms was extremely valuable. But we did encounter other significant differences, some of which are set out in more detail below.

Richard presenting Changing Platforms at OR11

Issues in EPrints

Perhaps the most significant issue we encountered with re-implementing SAS-Space on EPrints was the absence of built-in support for Handle persistent identifiers. Handle support comes out-of-the-box with DSpace, but not with EPrints, so the choice we faced was between re-implementing Handle support, or dropping it. We chose the latter, since the benefits of Handles to a relatively small IR like SAS-Space were not obvious, and so it was hard to justify the extra cost and effort. By ensuring that items kept the same ID when migrated from DSpace to EPrints, and implementing a simple rewrite rule, we have ensured that Handle URIs created while DSpace was operational continue to point to the same item – but for items added since EPrints went live, no new Handle URIs are coined.

(Shortly after we returned from OR11, an extended discussion broke out on Twitter, amongst several well-respected gentlemen in our field, about the benefits of using Handles. A considerable amount of scepticism was expressed about their usefulness.)

Issues in DSpace

Imma described some workflow issues encountered with the new implementation of her repository. The E-LIS team is accustomed to a very flexible EPrints-based workflow that allows items to have their workflow status changed quite freely. DSpace, by contrast, has a unidirectional workflow model, so that items cannot (for example) be reverted from Live to Pending, if some kind of error is spotted, but effectively need to be deleted and resubmitted. This is obviously a significant divergence between the superficially similar repository platforms.

Another example Imma gave of a perplexing feature of the default DSpace UI is the button on each abstract page that says “View Full Item Record”. It leads to a rather intimidating web page displaying the item metadata as Qualified Dublin Core. It’s not a very attractive display, nor is it actually a “data” rendering of the metadata (as you would get by explicitly choosing to Export As XML, or from some new-fangled Linked Data features). It’s not clear why this view would be of interest to general users of the repository: why is it there?

At OR11 I talked to several people working with DSpace, and all agreed that there’s room for improvement in the default Web UI. In some cases they have completely reimplemented the web templates. It’s also worth noting that the page layout in the default JSP UI is entirely implemented using HTML tables, and doesn’t pass W3C validation. For a Web application that’s nearly 10 years old, this is disappointing. (The alternative Manakin XML UI implements an attractive vision of UI abstraction using XSLT, but reports suggest that configuring/maintaining it is not for the faint-hearted.)

Quite a few Web design infelicities are perpetrated in the default Community, Collection and Abstract page templates. (During the conference, many of us enjoyed and applauded Simeon Warner’s timely rant,”Don’t bold the field name”.) Of course we can change them – it’s Open Source, isn’t it? – but is it unreasonable to expect default Web templates that are at least potentially usable as is? Of course the natural and reasonable response of the DSpace community is to ask that we report the issue as a bug or feature-request to the development team. Or fix it ourselves and share the fix. But where an absent feature is really important to a user (by which I probably mean a repository manager), then the choice faced is between “getting by” until it’s implemented in the core distribution, or doing it themselves (which probably means hiring a specialist developer to implement it for them).

Out-of-the-box

At the DSpace User Group meeting in 2007, I described how we considered that, back in 2005, DSpace offered a better “out-of-the-box” experience than EPrints. I never thought it was anything to write home about – in fact I remember being disappointed by the very UI issues I’ve described above – but to my untrained eye it did seem better than EPrints, at the time. But, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, EPrints has improved remarkably since.

Of course a lot of people we admire have proved that you can create impressive repository systems using DSpace. It performs and provides a lot of essential repository functionality. Its Lucene search engine is certainly better than anything EPrints currently offers. But I’m still surprised how much more work seems to be necessary to make a DSpace installation as readily useful and usable as EPrints, and this seems to represent considerable additional cost in setting up DSpace.

I’ve heard it sometimes argued – in both EPrints and DSpace camps – that Repository setup shouldn’t be too easy, lest repository managers get in a mess and endanger the integrity of their system. In my opinion, as developers and solution providers, our job is to provide as many features and tools as possible to enable Repository Managers to manage their collections effectively and easily – not act as as gatekeepers to their systems and data.

By way of contrast, we have recently supported the Institute of Education (IOE) in setting up an EPrints repository of UK government publications, and we were pleased to see the repository manager called on us very little, other than to answer some questions and apply a few small configuration changes. The experience with SAS-Space has also confirmed to me that EPrints now has strong out-of-the-box appeal, and a rich set of features available through the Web UI, that enable a reasonably confident repository manager to get to work without needing to initiate a major technical project.

In the current climate, of straitened library budgets, this could make a considerable difference to the viability of a repository startup project. For a growing number of libraries and information services – not least at smaller research institutions, or in developing countries – that could be the difference between having a repository, or not.

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.

Does this mean that OAI-PMH is a standard that’s had its day? Some commentators have gleefully rejoiced in the possible demise of the standard. However the discussion on Paul Walk’s blog is more balanced, lucid and informative, and covers well the many areas where OAI-PMH is more and less valuable. We shouldn’t forget that Google Sitemaps and OAI-PMH were created for different purposes, though both use XML, and inevitably there is potential overlap in their application.

NDAD has an OAI-PMH interface: I don’t know whether this has ever been of any use to anyone. NDAD’s holdings are markedly different from the majority of Open Access repositories running Eprints or DSpace (see ROAR for a full list).

Interesting what other things you learn too – for example, courtesy of a comment on Lorcan Dempsey’s blog, that “[t]here’s been an unofficial Google Sitemap hack for DSpace for half of forever. The funny thing was when its use was recommended to keep Google crawlers from crashing DSpace installs.” We have a running battle with Google crawlers triggering errors on our DSpace server, so this might be worth knowing when we start our next cycle of maintenance and upgrade.

A propos of how this affects Eprints, Tim Brody points out on Eprints-Tech:

You don’t need to change anything.

Sitemaps can be used to expose hard to find Web pages or to improve indexing by focusing the crawler at particular parts of the site. The EPrints 3 Web interface has already been designed with Google in mind and is fully compatible with their normal crawler without the need for sitemaps. That doesn’t preclude the addition of a sitemap to EPrints but it seems unnecessary at the moment.

(EPrints 3 has some Google-requested additions, EPrints 2 has much the same crawler-friendly interface)

One interesting aspect of this event is Google’s approach to the change:

In order to move forward with even better coverage of your websites, we have decided to support only the standard XML Sitemap format by May 2008. We are in the process of notifying sites using OAI-PMH to alert them of the change.

An interesting contrast to the more cavalier approach of Microsoft in its recent MS Office 2003 format debacle.

The conference was organised with gusto by Les Carr and the Southampton team, who kept things moving at a rapid pace, seemingly unphased by any of the inevitable challenges of staging an event like this for over 300 people. Encouragingly, as well as the usual crowd from western Europe and anglophone countries, other countries represented this time included Serbia, Ukraine and Sri Lanka.

One interesting innovation was using Crowdvine to create an online community of delgates, which proved very simple and effective. And of course there’s an Eprints repository of all the conference papers and proceedings.

My own presentation came in a plenary session on Tuesday morning which was a bit like a rerun of our Web 2.0 Pow-Wow in December. Ian Mulvany was there to talk about Connotea’s latest ideas (David Kane from Waterford Institute of Technology was on the bill too, but was unable to come); Daniel Alexander Smith effused about Rich Tags. In a few spare minutes at the end, Patrick McSweeney, one of Les’s 3rd year undergraduates, impressed everyone hugely with a spontaneous demonstration of a Flash-based Cover Flow visualiser he is developing for Eprints.

Sandwiched between Ian and Daniel, I shared my thirty-minute thoughts on the history of annotations, from Linnaeus and Carlyle, to Flickr and SNEEP. If you’d been there you would probably have seen something like this, and your notes might look a bit like this (unless you preferred to Twitter like this).

From the encouraging feedback I got afterwards, it looks like quite a few Eprints repositories, running or planned, will be interested in one or more of our SNEEP plugins – including our bonus “Easter Egg” Notes (private comments) feature, which Rory has already been working on, since it so inevitably falls out of developing the main Comments plugin. Hope also that Rory and I can touch base soon with Tim and Sebastien at Soton, and get their feedback on the Comments alpha.

There are too many other things I could report (all the usual themes, such as sustainability and interoperability, are well covered in the programme) but I’ll limit myself to some random things that caught my eye:

• Dave Millard’s refreshingly clear grasp of the issues around managing Learning Objects in his paper Towards an Open Repository of Teaching Resources.
• Licia Calvi’s expert usabilty evaluation of repository interfaces, that found them wanting in several critical areas.
• Julie Allinson’s poster for York’s Digital Library that sets a new standard for eye-catching OAIS advocacy.

OR09 will be in Atlanta.

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