While previous versions required a new record to be created in the local Handle server database for every persistent URL like http://hdl.handle.net/<prefix>/<item_id> to be resolved, we are now able to simply define a template that will map any

http://hdl.handle.net/<your_prefix>/xyz

to

http://your.repo.url/xyz

Assuming the following scenario:

• 7.x Handle server set up and running
• A prefix (institutional id registered in the Handle System) homed on that server. We’ll use 123456 for this example
• Your EPrints repository is located at http://your.repo.url

Here is how:

1. For handle 123456: create a Simple URL with the value http://your.repo.url
2. For handle 0.NA/123456: add an HS_NAMESPACE entry with the following UTF8 Text value:

    <namespace>
      <template delimiter="/">
        <foreach>
          <if value="type" test="equals" expression="URL">
              <value data= "${data}/${extension}" />
          </if>
          <else>
              <value />
          </else>
        </foreach>
      </template>
    </namespace>

And we’re done! Any URL with the format http://hdl.handle.net/123456/* will be resolved as http://your.repo.url/*

Being, as it is, an effective, simple way to use persistent URLs on your repository, it is most convenient when moving an existing repository that was already integrated into the Handle System from DSpace to EPrints. No need to worry about managing the existing Handle database records: a template will successfully resolve to the summary page of every record by just keeping the same record ids.

Had Handle 7 templates been available when we began the SAS-Space migration project (from DSpace to EPrints), we may have reached a different decision about discontinuing Handle for that service. (Handles created by DSpace persist, but no new handles have been minted since the system went live in EPrints.) Handle 7 templates (and the templates now have available to integrate them into EPrints) mean that setting up Handle to work with EPrints is scarcely more difficult than it is for DSpace.

Richard talking about E-books at FOTE12 conference, Senate House, University of London

I enjoyed presenting some of the early Anthologizr work to ULCC’s Future of Technology in Education (FOTE12) conference, as well as the general e-book message of earlier posts here. Slides embedded below (and also available in our repository.)

One backchannel tweet I saw described me (I presume) as “some guy who thought e-books were great”, which I don’t think entirely represents the complexity of what I was trying to convey. It’s all relative, to where we’ve arrived at, and the success of the devices that now frame e-books is so well-established that there’s no way back: what iPods and their successors did for physical audio media, iPads, Kindles and their ilk will surely do to printed media, no matter that it may have been “the most stable and mature market for creative works that exists”.

The FOTE event also yielded some smashing photos, thanks to ULCC’s excellent marketing and photography team.

Richard talking about e-books at FOTE12, Senate House, University of London

Next stop for the project, I have been looking at a couple of e-book creating environments, and hope to write them up. And our next hackathon with our excellent development team will be upon us soon.

- to set-up the instance of PKP’s OJS software
- to enable SWORD deposits to the SAS-Space repository
- to configure OJS such that digital objects were referenced from the repository where possible.

The first two steps were straightforward enough. We installed OJS-2.3.4 which has a generic SWORD plugin. However in order to retain as much metadata richness as possible during the SWORD transfer we opted to use EPXML to describe the object rather than METS. Although the generic SWORD plugin only deposited using METS, we were comfortable in forgoing using the METS standard since there was only to be a single deposit point (SAS-Space) and deposits would be managed solely by OJS administrators.

The changes made to OJS mentioned below and in “Integrating OJS and SNEEP“  can be obtained at the project site:

http://code.google.com/p/sasojs/

in the form of a patch and some additions to OJS-2.3.4

—

A form field (formatNS) was added to the deposit point template plugins/generic/sword/depositPointForm.tpl. This allowed the administrator to specify the schema used to describe the item metadata. Values for this can be “http://eprints.org/ep2/data/2.0/” or the default “http://www.loc.gov/METS/”.  Changes were made to plugins/generic/sword/SwordImportExportPlugin.inc.php to handle this new form field and  to classes/sword/OJSSwordDeposit.inc.php to make a decision on the sort of XML file to be included in the SWORD deposit package based on the new parameter. The file lib/pkp/lib/swordapp/packager_epxml_swap.php was added and this handled the construction on the EPXML file.

Another issue we faced using the generic SWORD plug-in was that it did not appear to store information on deposit items within the OJS system. This was essential in order to allow objects to be referenced by OJS from the repository. To achieve this we cannibalised an old version of the SWORD OJS plugin and added classes/sword/SwordDepositDAO.inc.php which allowed us to keep a record of deposited items within OJS.

With this record in the OJS system we could add a getSwordDeposit function to classes/article/ArticleGalley.inc.php which would check to see if a SWORD deposit was available and that the address recorded for the file resolved, before redirecting requests to the repository.

And then, finally, some changes to the article template, and the first three tasks were complete.

There is however a caveat: the embedded plugin PDF viewer, invisibly redirecting to a third party (ie SAS-Space) seemed to fall foul of some browser’s security regimes. If the security was based on the domain, then we were on safe ground as the redirect was from the journal domain (journals.sas.ac.uk) to the repository (sas-space.sas.ac.uk). However Internet Explorer (at least, as installed on SAS desktop machines) did not seem to like the redirect within the embedded viewer. For this we implemented a fall back to the local OJS copy.

Now that a full complement of Amicus Curiae articles has been loaded into the SAS-Space repository, I have been looking at ways to populate the OJS database automatically using the metadata available in the repository.

We are fortunate, as ever, that EPrints provides a wide range of export formats for individual item records and for sets of records. On the Amicus Curiae Collection page, we can see that EPrints gives us the option to export the metadata for the whole collection as a bibliographic citation (plain text or HTML), in formats for reference management software (Reference Manager, BibTex, EndNote) and in several other bibliographic data formats, including Dublin Core and METS.

However, I’ve chosen to base our process on the EP3 XML format of EPrints, which I’ve worked with before (when we migrated SAS-Space from DSpace to EPrints). It is the native EPrints export/import format, and arguably contains the most faithful serialisation of item metadata in the repository.

I’ve now created an XSLT stylesheet that transforms the EP3 XML for the Amicus Curiae collection into the “native.dtd” XML format which is the native import/export format for OJS. The biggest challenge in XSLT was grouping the journal articles by issue number, as required by the OJS native format, but once I’d found a way to do that, the rest is just fiddling about, as it so often is with metadata mapping.

Once the EP3 XML is transformed to OJS format, then, with a Journal already defined in OJS, we can use the OJS import function to import a complete set of issues, each containing its full complement of articles. It’s also possible to include a cover image for each issue (if one is available), and the article in PDF form can either be embedded in the XML using Base64 encoding, or linked-to using a URL. Since our articles are already online in the SAS-Space repository, I used the URL option. (It seems that this imports the object into OJS filestore: we will investigate whether it’s possible to prevent this, and have the online journal simply link straight to the item in SAS-Space.)

At the moment the XSLT stylesheet is working for our purposes, but offers the intriguing prospect that it could be enhanced to work over any result set in an EPrints repository, and made available as an EPrints Export Plug-in. This way, anyone wanting to quickly assemble, or reassemble, an online journal in OJS, can do so from articles deposited in a repository.

This could be an attractive scenario for anyone trying to retrospectively assemble an online journal from scans of a printed journal: once the materials are deposited in the repository (with sufficient metadata, of course, and, ideally, OCRed), then the data needed to implement a fully working journal in OJS is only a click away.

Existing OJS journal managers might even choose to manage their deposit and review workflow using the repository, and export to OJS when ready. This project gives us an interesting opportunity to compare the two approaches to item submission workflow, and I hope we’ll be able to report back on that later.

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.