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.

Over the last year or so we’ve installed and configured (in some cases reconfigured) the IRStats package for several of the LEAP repositories, including those hosted by ULCC. It seemed a good moment to share a few thoughts about the process of getting “all statted up” with EPrints.

By default, and without any further action, IRStats provides a kind of smorgasbord control panel, demonstrating the many optional graphs, charts and list available. You can see an example on our own ULCC Publications repository.

More recently we’ve seen growing demand among repository managers to share data on downloads with both their depositors and users at large. It’s really important for repository managers to select carefully which statistics views they actually want or need to display – we can only suggest things we think might work. Once you’ve decided on the views you want, we can look at the most effective ways to display them: and this is why I’ve been having fun souping up some of the displays already offered by IRstats.

The first display we’ve been working on is the Statistics digest. These are common enough and we’ve used the example of UCL Discovery repository as the basis of work for both SAS-Space and SOAS institutional repository.

The second approach has been to re-style the IRstats “dashboard” view to lay the graphs on top of each other and then use some Javascript to handle the tabbed navigation. This seemed a more elegant approach than inserting lots of charts in the abstract page itself (as, for example, at ECS EPrints). I’ve used this display technique to display statistics for individual eprints for the School of Pharmacy, as well as SAS and SOAS.

The tabbed display of graphs and tables was also combined with a ‘modal box’ display that keeps the height of page the same (for example on this Abstract page at SOAS. At the bottom of the Abstract page I’ve added a statistics section showing the number full-text downloads, and a link that displays detailed stats in an overlaid box.

This method doesn’t just work for individual items, but can be used on other datasets in too. For example, on SAS-Space we have added it to the bottom of their Collection browse pages, so that at the bottom of each Collection view there is an opportunity to view download statistics for that collection as a whole.

Additionally in SAS-Space, since it is a repository for a number of discrete institutes, there was a requirement for institutional editors to have access to their own institute’s statistics. To achieve this, I allowed access to a constrained version of the IRStats control panel for editor-users who had the appropriate editorial permissions for the institute in question. (Unless you are a SAS-Space editor, you won’t be able to access this.)

Which statistics views to insert as tabs is the decision of the repository manager. Views we’ve used include:

• Monthly downloads
• Daily downloads
• Unique visitors
• Referrers
• Search Engines
• Top 10 items downloaded (only for a Collection, Repository or Division)
• Top 10 search terms

From a technical point-of-view, we will have to review these configurations when we upgrade to EPrints version 3.3, possibly later in the year (if it’s released!!), in conjunction with our VM infrastructure migration, and start doing things with EPStats rather than IRStats. But we now have an effective framework for adding statistics quickly to any EPrints installation.

Friday’s CeDAAME dissemination event was also an opportunity to be reminded that ULCC’s Digital Archives team has contributed in other ways to the success of SOAS’s team, directly and indirectly. Julie Makinson described how SOAS used the AIDA digital asset assessment toolkit in developing their strategic approach; and many of the SOAS team are alumni of the DPTP: so Ed and Patricia have also had their part to play in supporting SOAS’s digitisation efforts.

The presentations at SOAS were extremely interesting, describing the full range of activities of a multi-faceted digitisation programme, from the development of the strategy (using the aforementioned AIDA) to the many challenges of digitising Islamic manuscripts and related materials.

How, for example, do you reliably OCR pages of centuries-old text with mixtures of Arabic and Latin/English/French? The answer is that sometimes rekeying is unavoidable. We learned, too, that Yale used UKOLN’s DC Dot Dublin Core editor to create their metadata for Islamic collections (and then convert to TEI). Thanks to the native DC and Unicode support in EPrints, SOAS metadata (in English and Arabic) was created and managed directly in the repository. Metadata exchange between Yale’s Fedora-based system and SOAS’s EPrints system seems to have been achieved effectively – I know Rory worked closely with SOAS and Yale on this.

And I sensed genuine excitement in the room when the page-turning interfaces for viewing the books online were unveiled: both very impressive. (For SOAS Rory has been working long and hard on adapting the open source book viewer used by the Internet Archive, and ensuring that the right-to-left reading and page-turning functionality works smoothly.) We also learned about a variety of different approaches to the issues of managing and funding digitisation and cataloguing activities: with my work on the Mediawiki-based Transcribe Bentham project in mind, it was particularly interesting to hear about University of Michigan’s Collaborative Cataloguing initiative.

All in all an exciting day, and particularly satisfying to see close-up the kind of synergies that exist across all of the activities of ULCC’s Digital Archives and Repositories Team. In addition to further enhancing the SOAS Digital Archives system, we are also looking forward to working with them on their JISC-funded Engaging Overseas Communities project, which is going to involve hooking EPrints up to mobile phones in Africa and Asia.

As if that wasn’t enough, at lunchtime I also dashed over to the School of Pharmacy, where Jean, Neroli and Michelle had kindly organised a lunchtime meeting for the University of London repository managers in the LEAP consortium. It was an opportunity for me to unveil a preview of the new SHERPA-LEAP website (with added social networking goodness, courtesy of WordPress/BuddyPress) that we expect to launch very shortly.

It was a nice way to round off a week in which the Team also achieved significant milestones in our work on preservation metadata for the Parliamentary Archives and strategic development for The Women’s Library, began planning for the next DPTP course, and we received news that the FP7 BlogForever project, which will see us collaborating with Warwick, HATII, CERN and others until 2013, has received its final sign-off from the European Commission.

It was great to take part in last week’s Repositories Support Project event at Sheffield Cathedral. The theme of the day, organised by Jackie Wickham and the RSP team, was “Doing It Differently” and it covered a wide range of repository-related themes. I took along an updated and expanded version of the presentation I made to SHERPA-LEAP repository managers. I covered the same topics, but in preparing the presentation, I was amazed how many more things there were to talk about a year on.

Stephanie Taylor gave an excellent overview of the repository scene, and I hope I followed it up with useful ideas about making repositories more user-friendly or just generally useful to users. Other talks went off into less well trodden areas, though no less interesting: Pat Lockley impressed again with his enthusiastic description of Xpert; Joss Winn described his further adventures in WordPress land; and Stephanie Meece described the challenges of non-textual repositories at UAL. My ears pricked up when Jason Hoyt of Mendeley mentioned that an imminent upgrade to Mendeley will be able to identify OA sources for papers, which might signal it’s time for me to finally catch up with Mendeley (dissertation starts next year!). I didn’t catch the final speakers as I had to catch my train, but I commend to you Vicki McGarvey’s post on the SHARE project blog at Nottingham Trent University.

I tried to keep things simple by steering clear of all the complicated issues in repository management – OA, OAI-PMH, copyright, advocacy, REF, RIM, etc – and just focus on simple UI enhancements that might improve a user’s experience of the repository, and effective use of features like RSS feeds and statistics, with examples from all over the world of institutional and specialist repositories. Which features a repository manager might choose, if any, is up to them and their own circumstances, but my aim was to ensure they are at least aware of what’s possible – as evidenced by what’s been done in many repositories around the country.

Although I focused on EPrints installations, I think nearly everything I demonstrated ought to be feasible in other platforms. Overloading an abstract page with features like “Share this on Facebook/Twitter”, QR Codes, or metadata export in RSS/JSON/CSV and more, should be a very easy way to enhance the user experience of repositories. As I suggested, adding buttons to support “the latest thing” users may be finding useful, is generally not difficult. A “Send This Paper To My Kindle” button, for example, seems so trivial I might even try it myself.

I had a long list of ideas/examples to show: for anyone who didn’t have time to copy down the small print, they were:

• SNEEP
• Lincoln EPrints
• Language Box
• MePrints
• Hum Box
• ULCC Publications Archive
• UCL EPrints
• IRStats
• Repository Stats using Google Analytics (presentation by Graham Triggs at OR10)
• E-Space at Manchester Metropolitan University
• Framework for Linking Inline Semantic Metadata
• Oxford University Research Archive
• MERLIN

As regular readers will know, we have been working with repositories for quite a few years now. In 2005 we began working with the School of Advanced Study on their requirements for an Institutional Repository, and since then we have installed, configured and maintained several repositories, including some highly customised, specialist systems.

In most cases we have used EPrints. This is partly because we are familiar with the stuff it is built with (Perl, MySQL and XML have been at the heart of the NDAD dataset repository we have operated for The National Archives since 1997). But also because we like the ever-expanding set of features and options EPrints provides. I’ve watched its capabilities grow, thanks to the seemingly limitless energy and initiative of the EPrints team at Southampton. (For an interesting, user’s-eye perspective on the relative merits of DSpace and EPrints, I recommend reading some of the posts tagged DSpace in Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector blog).

It’s three years almost to the day since Rory and I attended the pre-launch briefing on EPrints3 and came away convinced that, with its AJAX UI and evolving plugin architecture, EPrints 3 was likely to play a big part in our future plans.

And hardly a day’s gone by since, when we haven’t had some EPrints-related work on our plate. In 2007 we began developing Linnean Online for the Linnean Society, and PRIMO for the Institute of Musical Research. Out of this, and the snowballing Web 2.0 zeitgeist, we also honed the idea that became SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints), one of the first JISC Rapid Innovation projects. Most recently, we’ve scaled new heights of EPrints customisation with the SOAS Fürer-Haimendorf collection, with its user-defined albums and searching enhancements, all wrapped up in 9Web’s impressive graphic design.

We’ve tweaked config files and hacked templates and for the most part enjoyed doing stuff with EPrints. (All credit is due to Rory and Ben, by the way. My role is chiefly to say “We could make it do that couldn’t we?” And, lo and behold, usually “we” can.)

Over the years I’ve also talked to many repository managers, and potential repository managers, about their requirements and expectations. I’ve spoken and networked at DSpace User Groups , Open Repositories conferences and many excellent events organised by the JISC, particularly the Repositories Support Project – and I’ve met a lot of smart and insightful people in the repo biz. Some of it must have rubbed off – I think my own understanding of what’s needed, and what’s feasible has grown considerably.

But what we’ve never done is run our own repository, and experienced these things day-to-day for ourselves. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill A Mockingbird,

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

That’s why, in the gaps between everything else going on round here, Annemarie has been putting together the ULCC Publications Archive, which I hope will become a canonical home for our published outputs. It’s not big and it’s not clever, it’s certainly not perfect, but it is something we can use to improve our understanding of what it means to run a repository. We will also no doubt use it to explore some of the tools and techniques emanating from the EPrints developer community.

And now I can really start to empathise with the repository managers I know: their agony – clarifying copyright and licenses, ambiguous form fields, disappearing diacritics – and their ecstasy – a well-formed subject tree or citation, a successful search. I’ve also an insight into the needs of authors/submitters, since several articles are mine – and I naturally want to get the citations looking just right, so that I can embed some of the nice feeds EPrints provides into my blogs, e-portfolios and who knows what other mashups. Self-interest is a great motivator, as many Open Access advocates have observed: before long I’m sure I’ll be wanting download statistics, author profiles, and most of the other things I described in 1001 Things To Do With A Live Repository.

For me it’s an invaluable experience – no less so than when, a couple of years ago, I became an actual user of a VLE, through my MSc course at Edinburgh. There’s a world of difference between being a developer or implementer of this kind of online system – thinking your job’s done when it seems to be up-and-running – and being the poor end-user who doesn’t care about PHP, JSP, Maven, Apache, etc, but  just wants to get something done.

Among the things you’ll find in pubs.ulcc.ac.uk are: papers and articles from events we have contributed to over the years, such as iPRES, Open Repositories, and DLM-Forum; published reports, like last year’s JISC-PoWR web preservation report; presentations and posters from other events, mostly in the field of e-learning or digital archives; and even the swish product sheets produced by our ace marketing department, Tim and Frank!

As well as our most recent UK activities, we’ve also unearthed some other curios, such as Patricia’s article for the Catalan Archivists’ Forum, in Catalan, and a piece by Kevin in La Vanguardia, in Spanish. Also of interest is a brief account of ULCC’s first 30 years, in the form of a brochure for a small exhibition that was held at Senate House Library in 1999.

No doubt as we delve through our own digital archives we’ll find more goodies. Having a repository is an excellent opportunity to locate and appraise these things, and share those that seem interesting and informative enough. No less than this blog, and our E-learning colleagues’ El Blog, it should be an attractive and effective shop-window – just like any good Institutional Repository.

This is just the first phase of the rollout, not only of Fürer-Haimendorf’s pictures, but also of many other valuable collections at SOAS. We are pleased and excited to have been able to assist with this endeavour, by customising EPrints to meet the extensive requirements set out for the system by Susannah Rayner and Malcolm Raggett, who are leading the project at SOAS. No less than with Linnean Online, it is a rare privilege to be associated with a project giving a new impetus, and worldwide access, to such invaluable historically important, archival collections.

SOAS organised a fascinating series of lectures on Friday to launch the collection. In one talk, Albert Alban von Stockhausen spoke passionately about the importance of sharing the collection not only with researchers, but also with the communities that Haimendorf visited. Surviving subjects in Nagaland, and their descendants, have been deeply moved on seeing these photos again. Some even refer to their own age in terms of how old they were when Fürer-Haimendorf visited.

Stuart Blackburn talked about Fürer-Haimendorf’s work in the Apatani valley in the 1940s, where he got a rapturous reception, if not as the first westerner to visit them, then probably as only the 5th or 6th, when he acted as an official representative of the British government in India, trying (not always successfully) to resolve tribal disputes. In the photos we can see valuable records of rice-growing, forest-clearance, village-settlement patterns, ritual and warrior practices, and the Apatani villages, with their densely populated, crowded lanes. There are also many individual portraits.

We are particularly pleased with the results. It is an EPrints-based repository which implements the very exacting requirements set out by the SOAS team. It has been an opportunity to develop even further the work Rory has done with EPrints, drawing on our experience adding plugins for bookmarking, tagging and commenting, which began with Linnean Online and continued with SNEEP. We also particularly enjoyed, and benefitted from, working closely with the team from 9Web, who provided graphic designs and meticulous usability testing.

I hope to enumerate the new features and describe the development work in a future post; meanwhile you can see it in action at digital.info.soas.ac.uk.

Many interesting discussions about repository approaches for the arts followed, both in the workshops, plenary debates, and over the rather smashing buffet lunch. One interesting direction the discussions took was in suggesting that while endeavours like KULTUR and PRIMO provide examples of ways to develop repositories for visual and performing arts, they don’t offer any kind of ready-made application for institutions wanting to create their own repositories with a minimum of fuss and cost. Is it possible that the benefits of such projects (particularly JISC-funded projects) would be greater if the outputs generated a reusable product rather than just a script or a recipe? Bill agreed to discuss this idea further within RSP, and I look forward to following it up soon.

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.

This event serendipitously precedes the DPC/DCC/JISC/RSP workshop on repository preservation, up the road in Euston on Friday 12th: expect to see a few familiar faces cropping up at both events!

On a related note, check out also  Les Carr’s recent blog post, The Value That Repositories Add, which includes a fascinating presentation (intended for the SPARC conference in Baltimore) demonstrating the many ways that repository software can potentially add value for its users – statistics, bibliographies, personalisation, mailing lists, news feeds, and all sorts of Web 2.0 mashupery. As Les points out, not all repositories provide all these facilities, but all are possible with the current generation of repository software, and only a little bit of extra technical wizardry. Our own resident Eprints wizard is busy working on some of them even as I write…

Since November 2007 the linnean-online collection has allowed the public access to digitised images of plant (and since this summer insect) specimens held by the Linnean Society of London. This week the on-line collection has been expanded to include 144 images of fish specimens held by the society. This part of the ongoing digitisation project was made possible thanks to generous funding from amongst others His Majesty the Emperor of Japan and the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers.

As well as these further specimens, 3845 images of correspondence to and from Carl Linnaeus have also joined the on-line collection. The correspondence enrich the collection providing important insight and historical context. Most of the letters are written in latin, however where possible links are provided to translated summaries at The Linnaean correspondence, an electronic edition prepared by the Swedish Linnaeus Society, Uppsala, and published by the Centre international d’étude du XVIII^e siècle, Ferney-Voltaire.

You don’t need to hear any more about me and SNEEP, but the other presentations offered interesting insights into work with Institutional and Learning Object repositories, thesauruses – and even a bit of Web 2.0 mashup.

Peter Kilcoyne from Worcester College of Technology demonstrated their JISC-funded Mr Cute project. This has developed a Moodle extension which considerably extends the functionality of the VLE as a repository of IMS Learning Object packages (hence the acronym: Moodle Repository Create Upload Tag Embed). Tangentially interesting (in the light of recent discussions chez nous) was seeing the way Peter’s institution has embedded Moodle in Sharepoint: a fiendishly simple but elegant way to make an open-source web app work more-or-less seamlessly with enterprise and admin systems (reminds me also we should revisit our plan to embed MediaWiki in Eprints). We also learned from Peter that Moodle now has an estimated 60% share of the VLE market in FE (according to a recent ILT Champions survey by Rob Englebright): a useful statistic to know.

Roger Greenhaigh from Harper Adams University College described the National Rural Knowledge Exchange, a resource centre for specialists in agriculture and related matters. With laudable aims of brokering joint projects, consultancy, events, reviews, bespoke training, lab and field trials, visiting speakers, graduate placements, etc., the system has nevertheless had to address a real need for simplicity in order to be of use to much of its target community. Roger described how a huge range of taxonomies was researched – from DEFRA to Dewey to business directories – in order to arrive at the best ways of arranging and classifying the information.

National Rural makes extensive and effective use of many powerful Web 2.0 tools, including RSS/Atom feeds, Google Maps and Flickr. It also tries, where possible, to shortcut established publishing cycles and schedules. The speed with which government organisations, in particular, release information, is not always conducive to timely dissemination: “what’s hot in pigs”, or up-to-the-minute information about avian flu, can’t wait weeks or months for DEFRA’s web publishing process to release it. This enlightened approach seems very reminiscent of the approach of mySociety and IdealGovernment that I described elsewhere.

I was pleased Michael Emly’s presentation reminded me about MIDESS, which was a wide-ranging and ambitious project researching many aspects of repository implementation. Of particular interest to us (in the light of PRIMO and TPYF) is its work on multimedia repositories and IPR issues.

MIDESS also experimented with using METS and OAI-PMH as metadata transmission standards: interesting to hear their conclusion that METS is too flexible to be readily usable. I’m reminded of our work with EAD, a format in which it is very easy to create metadata, but not so easy to reliably interpret others’ uses of it, unless an explicit subset is identified: MIDESS similarly concluded that there is a need for more work on application profiles. Michael also highlighted the issue that current platforms are lacking functionality for multimedia: how can we get that functionality built in?

John Robertson briefly told us about HILT , the High-Level Thesaurus project, unifying many classification schemes. A quick look at one of the HILT demo sites suggests it might be very useful, if ontology is your bag. Creating and maintaining such unions and cross-walks is not for the faint-hearted.

After my SNEEP spiel, Phil Barker explained how JORUM is now moving to a model of open access and deposit.

The closing discussion and questions and comments passim were all very constructive and thought-provoking, particularly regarding the differing expectations of repositories for Learning Objects and Scholarly Works. How real – for example – are the benefits of sharing LOs through an OAI-PMH type service? Sharing Learning Objects/Resources, it was convincingly suggested, is still likely to be hampered by a “why should I?” attitude, by fear of criticism, and by the commercially competitive environment in which many teaching institutions operate. Nevertheless, sharing aside, it’s clear that institutions need better control and management of their learning resources , and for this reason a repository-based approach – whether exo like JORUM or an IR, or intra like MR CUTE – is likely to be essential.

Finally it was a pleasure to meet other colleagues in the field, particularly Shirley Yearwood-Jackman from Liverpool University, who showed me their very nice looking Research Archive (using Eprints). They might be interested in SNEEP Comments too, though Shirley felt her contributors might like more control over which users or groups of users can comment. Although we’re close to having to button up SNEEP 1.0, Rory might have some bright ideas (he usually does).

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.

This release also includes the Notes feature: this creates private comments visible only to the logged-in user who created them.

For more information about the SNEEP project, see the SNEEP wiki.

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.

We’ve completed functional specifications for the Comments, Bookmarking and Tagging plugins. These describe the minimum functionality we expect from the plugins, and provide a meaningful benchmark to test the finished products against. As usual I’d welcome any comments and suggestions, either here or on the Wiki discussion pages.

Also, the Interim Report on the project has been signed off by Andy at JISC. We’re expecting that the project will overrun its original completion date by about 4-6 weeks, which means that we probably won’t have a finished product ready in time for OR08. Mind you I’ve seen enough projects not-quite launched at conferences (no names!) to think this is probably not exceptional.

Oh, and a bit of messing around with the Gimp finally yielded a logo I can live with.

Ben, John, Chris, David, Joss, Ian, Sebastien, Les, Nina, Steve and Tim discussing the social side of repositories.

After lunch we had fascinating demos of, and discussions around, Southampton’s Rich Tags/mSpace, Nature’s Connotea, and our own progress to-date on SNEEP. Rory’s presentation was impressively clear and confident, given that we hadn’t actually prepared anything, and had to hijack Ian Mulvany’s laptop (thanks Ian). Having missed a chance to see it in action in Bristol, it was great to see a live demo of RichTags, which is a very impressive visualisation tool (the sort of thing that, like Gapminder, can totally change one’s ideas about data and metadata – check out the mSpace movies).

Trying to take in all permutations and implications of Web 2.0 is to risk an overload of total perspective vortex magnitude, so I’ll mostly restrict the rest of my thoughts to SNEEP’s and my own interests, and look forward to reading elsewhere how others interpreted the conversation. (There’s a section at the Eprints Wiki.)

It seems to me that one of the most important things we can achieve is to maximise the degree to which Eprints is susceptible to Social Networking. That may be in an “exo” way – (Rich Tags, Del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea, etc.) or from within the repository, a la SNEEP. But I’m reassured that, even within its modest scope, SNEEP has a part to play (and isn’t likely to be superseded by anything in EPrints 3.1). How it’s, in the end, used, remains to be seen. Web 2.0 Social Networking is what-you-make-of-it: some things fly, some flutter, others sink without trace (so long Eduspaces!), nevertheless it’s amazing what can be achieved with a few RSS or Atom feeds.

Apropos Bookmarking – as we’ve seen, it has many behaviours in common with Eprints search results. Good advice from Chris on reusing the Saved Search export functionality.

Commenting: Joss was right about the need to put on a little more style. Rory’s promised to embed plenty of CSS hooks, and it might be worth having a less skeletal default, based on standard Eprints livery.

Tagging implementation has some overlap with the Bookmarking, as Rory has already identified. We should also ensure if possible that SNEEP tags play nicely with Rich Tags (or at least are no more than an XSLT template away). Rory’s posted elsewhere his ideas on tagging: worth noting also that WordPress 2.3 seems to have a competent implementation of tagging (you’re looking at it!)

Of the other discussions, I’m particularly keen to follow up David Millard’s work on Learning Object repositories, with both my other projects and my E-learning studies in mind.

But I still haven’t got to the bottom of why some Web 2.0 sites grab me (Del.icio.us, LibraryThing, CiteULike…) and others don’t (BlueDot, Connotea). Not that Connotea’s not impressive: perhaps it is simply, as Ian Mulvany explained, that the strength of its “community” has a strong affinity with Nature’s readership – other SN sites are stronger in social sciences and humanities. Ian also confirmed that Connotea does not support the “save personal copy” feature, in the way CiteULike does: this is a deal-breaker for me, as I’ve found it invaluable to have quick and easy access to my MSc reading list from anywhere – work, home, laptop, desktop. In fact anything that didn’t make it to my CiteULike bookmarks probably didn’t get read!

This gives an idea of how the comments will work in conjunction with an EPrint abstract. It allows simple non threaded comments which can be displayed, added or updated within an abstract (or other page).

And now that’s out of the way I’ll give an idea of features that I would like to add. Some of these have arisen from the recent pow wow event and others were already stumbling around my mind. The existing interface is unlikely to change drastically most of the new features listed are tinkering under the hood.

• Comments as dataset – recode comments as an EPrint::Dataset and add the appropriate EPrint::DataObj::Comment
• Threading – implemented either by allowing comments on comments or by using some sort of stored threading data within each comment record.
• Better handling of markup – HTML Parsing is performed by default but failure is not well dealt with. Also would be good to offer a repo admins the opportunity to define an allowed subset using the sneep.xml config file.
• Comment on anything – Update the DB table structure so that the thing that is being commented on can be any other EPrint::DataObject. Also – with little or no work – allow for the possibility of commenting on external objects (might be useful where EPrints is running alongside other systems)
• Comment privacy (Notes) – Allow comments to be set as private so only the owner of the comment can view it (and re-badge as a note). Look into using EPrints security model for this as that will be neat and hopefully add some extra functionality.
• Object owner veto – Give the owners of various objects the ability to disallow comments being made on those objects (defaulting to permissive).

That’s the contents of my brains on this subject at the moment. If I have missed anything obvious or if anyone has any suggestions for the less obvious please feel free to add a comment.

The tagging feature has been recognised as a vital part of any self respecting set of web2.0 extensions. We’ve already had requests for them from the Linnean Society who would like to see them alongside the prototype comments and bookmarks already on their site. Consensus on the importance and usefulness of tags seemed to be one of the (many) themes to have arisen from the EPrints & Web2.0 pow wow.

It was also suggested that tags can be and are used in varying ways (eleven apparently!). For example bookmarks can be thought of as a tag under which an arbitrary set of references to things can be stored for the use of a single person. If bookmarks are implemented as a ‘view’ of the tagging system they immediately gain all the extra good things that tags offer (sharing, etc). Other uses mentioned were ‘rating’ (by tagging an item as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘terrible’) or even as a way of organising tasks (‘to read’, ‘to buy’, ‘to review’).

With this in mind I want to make sure that the SNEEP.tags database structure is as flexible, extensible and scalable as possible. A bit of effort on the DB side of things should hopefully mean that when it comes to producing views and interfaces for the tags the various uses can be easily accommodated and if appropriate (as in the case of bookmarks) re-branded as a new feature.

One resource on database design for tags is this webinar. I haven’t seen it in action as it appears to be significantly awkward to get hold of a Linux version of the Webex software needed to view it. I have attached the slides which seem to give a good gist. It is written from the point of view of MySQL so it is very much about how to get the most out of the DB no matter the amount of content.

Web 2.0 Tags and Folksonomy: Schema Design for Scalability and Performance

The examples in the slides correlate to a tagging system for a blog, so tags are related to posts. This approach, tagging elements by id in a closed system, is not difficult to map to EPrints where tags can be related to items (eprints) or indeed anything with a unique id (documents, comments, users).

One aspect of this approach that struck me is whether it might be difficult to do searches which combine the various item types. My approach so far has been to maintain an ‘all’ counter in the stas table. Any thoughts on the merits or otherwise of the approach outlined here would be welcome.

The agenda is flexible. This is an informal event, but it would help if anyone wishing to come could notify Richard Davis or Les Carr . A list of expected attendess is being maintained here: http://tinyurl.com/36sc9r

We’re extremely grateful to the London Knowledge Labs (Institute of Education/Birkbeck) for letting us use their excellent facilities in Holborn for this event.

EPrints Web 2.0 Pow-wow

December 13th 2007, 10:30 – 17:30
London

Agenda

Before lunch:

• Who we are, what projects we represent.
• What do we understand by “Web 2.0″?
• What do we want Web 2.0 to do for our repositories?
• What progress have we made so far?

Lunch arrangements TBC.

After lunch:

• A look at EPrints:
• What’s the easiest way to achieve our goals
• Overlaps between our projects & activities
• Co-ordinating activities and sharing outcomes

Followed by a chance to network further at a nearby hostelry.

Location

London Knowledge Labs
23-29 Emerald Street
London WC1N 3QS
http://www.lkl.ac.uk

LKL travel info: http://tinyurl.com/ywmsvc

Contact

Richard Davis, ULCC
r.davis@ulcc.ac.uk 020 7692 1350

Les Carr, Southampton University
lac@soton.ac.uk

At the Society’s headquarters in Piccadilly, Julia Hoare, Linnean Society’s Project Manager for the extensive digitisation project, delivered a consummate and well-received demonstration to a colloquium of orchid specialists. This event is being treated as a “soft launch”, and feedback is being sought from this small community initially, before the system gets a full public launch in December.

The system uses Eprints to manage access to the objects and their metadata. The Herbarium can be browsed according to Linnaeus’s own binomial, Latin system, or searched across all the supplied metadata fields, including genus, species, collector and location.

Eprints takes care of searching and arrangment, as well as user registration and management. A commercial image viewing system, FSI Viewer/Erez, has been used to provide a high-definition zoom function for viewing the images.

Rory has added two features to Eprints to meet the Linnean Society’s requirements: a plugin for bookmarking objects, and another for registered users to add comments. We will be further developing these as part of the JISC-funded SNEEP project, and ultimately release them as open source extensions for Eprints.

Other collections from the Linnean Society will follow and be added to the repository. These include shells, insects and fish, as well as letters and portraits in the Society’s possession. The eventual size of the online archive is estimated to be several (check) Terabytes.

Debate at the launch ranged over many issues. The submission workflow in particular is something that some potential contributors are concerned about, and we expect this can be simplified and streamlined. However, the two areas that add the greatest complexity to the process – the mechanical and performing rights requirements pf MCPS/PRS, and the PRIMO peer-review process – may not yield to much more simplification.

The repository is now in a pilot phase, with 6 selected submissions. It will be further developed in time for a beta version next Spring (April/May, realistically). In the meantime will continue to develop documentation and identify improvements on the project pages of the PRIMO wiki.