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.

Excitement at the OR11 Developer Challenge Show-and-Tell (Photo by @sparrowbarley)

An event that asked developers to demonstrate the Future of Repositories can only be considered a great success when it receives entries that include:

• Multiple real-time examples of using “Repositories As A Service (RaaS)”, not only exchanging data but also sharing sophisticated functionality between EPrints and DSpace – and even including an Android application
• A tool for bundling and depositing a whole raft of research related outputs from the Web via RDF
• A tactile repository search interface with dynamic search suggestions, specifically designed for tablets and smartphones
• A complete gesture and voice-driven system for depositing and searching in repositories

All these – and other great entries too – were achieved in a couple of days’ work during the course of the conference, for the annual OR Developer Challenge, and presented at a packed Show-and-Tell session on Thursday afternoon (true, there was free beer).

Stuart Lewis’s team were worthy winners with their RaaS project, particularly as they showed a genuine commitment to a cross-platform approach – something which, sensibly, backgrounds the individual software platforms, that often receive too much attention, and focuses on the Repository as an application and entity in its own right.

We were also really pleased to see a prize go to Patrick McSweeney and Matt Taylor. And enjoyed seeing Dave Tarrant stealing the show (again) with his live demonstration of using a Microsoft Xbox Kinect to submit items to a repository.

Our own entry may not have won, but several people liked it, and you may see more of it in future. For the second year running, the Developer Challenge was a great opportunity for Rory and me to concentrate on an idea that we’ve been kicking around, without having found a home for it in existing work (yet). This was true for our Semantic Metadata popup tools that won the challenge with last year.

This year we set about achieving our  longstanding desire to take the very tactile and dynamic search interface that Rory created for the MERLIN project, and turn it into a touchscreen app, for smartphones and tablets.  The results were pretty effective.

The MERLIN Mobile interface ("TEXAS") as demonstrated at OR11

The MERLIN interface on LASSO is quite complex, but at the heart of it is the tag cloud of related terms that the Termine text-mining suggests. This always looked like it might be good on a touchscreen, so we stripped it down, rearranged and tweaked it to make it viable on an Ipad screen. If you’ve got an Ipad, you can try it out by pointing your Safari browser at http://is.gd/texasweb. (It will work on desktop browsers too, but it looks best on a portrait oriented screen.)

If you’ve got an Android device, you can even download an app-based version of it from http://is.gd/texasapp. (It’s a bit cramped in a smartphone display, but still essentially working.)

If you’ve got neither we created this page to give you a rough idea what it looks like.

It’s worth mentioning that this is a real, live, working application: enter a search term (“logical positivism”, “climate change”, “Jeremy Bentham”,  …) and it searches over the full-text corpus of all articles in University of London Open Access repositories (SHERPA-LEAP consortium members), and makes suggestions about additional or alternative search terms, based on the results of the text-mining analysis of the articles

The hackathon approach of working closely together to create something quickly worked well again: Rory hacks, and I test and review each time he hits ‘Save’! All very agile and iterative.

In honor of our hosts in Austin, we decided to call the new interface Touchscreen Enhanced Cross-Search with Augmented Serendipity – or TEXAS for short.

Kudos to Mahendra Mahey, Peter Sefton and the DevCSI project for putting (and keeping) it all together, and to the awesome panel of judges (even though they didn’t pick us)!

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.

Some repositories have reported issues with Microsoft “DOCX” files, which IE8 in particular may treat as a ZIP file. This is a potential problem with all the current slew of MS file types. The solution is to add the following entries to your web server configuration.

Exactly how you (or more likely your system manager) achieve this depends on your Web platform (e.g. Apache, Tomcat, IIS) but whoever runs it should be able to make the necessary changes, and once the Web server is restarted, the new types should be picked up. (We’ve just done this for the ULCC-hosted repositories.)

“MIME-Types” have a long and chequered history as a way of identifying file types to internet applications. To some extent IE8 is correct to infer (in the absence of better information from the Web server) that .docx files are ZIP files, because MS Office Open XML formats are bundled using the ZIP compression tool. But in general what one really wants the browser to do is pass the file to an Office application, not WinZip.

Ironically, it seems other browsers do correctly infer MS OOXML file types.

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

Beacon cited through fog

Who would have thought that reference management could be so interesting? We spent a  very informative and enjoyable Thursday in snowy Milton Keynes, at the Innovations in Reference Management (#IRM10) event (part of the OU/JISC TELSTAR project). All thoroughly blogged by Owen Stephens, and tweeted by many.

Owen Stephens and Jason Platts of OU described the outputs of the TELSTAR project, which integrates the OU’s Moodle VLE with Refworks. This means that students using the VLE can move seamlessly between their reading lists and Refworks, locating resources, maintaining consistency of style and generating bibliographies easily.

Paul Stainthorp of Lincoln University described some exciting, bleeding-edge uses of Yahoo Pipes to mashup data from Refworks, OPAC, and Amazon. Arguably even more bleeding-edge was the presentation by Euan Adie from Nature Publishing, who showed us Help Me Igor, a reference manager plugin for Google Wave. Speakers from CiteULike and Mendeley also gave us fascinating insights into their respective social-tinged bibliographic management offerings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kevin and I brought to the table the theme of web preservation. With reference to our work with JISC-PoWR, UKWAC and ArchivePress, we reminded anyone who hasn’t heard our spiel already that there are many important, valuable and eminently citable web resources, notably blogs by academic researchers, that are at risk of disappearing – making references to them virtually useless.

Authors may not be responsible for ensuring their readers can access the resources they reference, but we think they should at least give them a fighting chance of doing so! We  therefore proposed that students and researchers should be encouraged to locate and cite copies of web resources in stable web archives (such as the UK Web Archive) rather than “in the wild”.

We also discussed the idea that persistent collections of web resources could be created at the institutional level, whether that were an open archive of blog posts by a university’s researchers, or a closed repository where researchers can store copies of the web resources they cite.

One of the strong themes that emerged in discussion was the need for information literacy/digital skills training at all levels to address current tools and trends in reference management; and to re-assert the purpose, value and nature of citation in online digital environments

An interesting suggestion also made was that reference management tools are becoming a natural part of the environment, just as email has: is provision of specialised applications by universities an “aberration”?

I’m inclined to think not, after all it was clear from the workshop that there’s still a need to support ongoing study and research effectively, and scope to develop and validate new approaches.  Microsoft Word may now include reference management features, but that doesn’t obviate the need to educate people in how to use them effectively, and why.

We’re very grateful to Owen for including us in his programme: this is a fascinating area, where e-learning, libraries, preservation and publishing collide, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it.

“Would you want to put that in your repository?” asked Les. And this is a particularly extreme example where we can do some calculations to give us a fairly good answer. Scientific data centres and the researchers that use them have been considering this question for many years, and one way of looking at it is to see if the cost of recomputation exceeds the cost of storage over a particular time period. We’re assuming here that the initial question – is this worth keeping at all – has been answered at least vaguely positively.

Let’s look first at the cost of recomputation. Fabrice says the equipment used for this task cost no more than €2000. If we assume that it has a life of 3 years, that gives us a cost per day of €1.83. I’m avoiding the usual accounting practice of allowing for inflation, or lost interest on capital, in calculating the true depreciation value of the asset – there’s a number of different schemes and they all give similar results. I’ve just dividided the capital cost by the number of days of use we’ll get. But computers use electricity, and that costs money as well. Let’s assume this is a power-hungry beast that draws 400W and that power costs us 13.5¢ per kwH (which is what my domestic tarrif is if we assume a euro/sterling rate of €1.10 = £1 and 5% VAT.) That adds €1.30/day to the cost of running the system, for a total cost of €3.13/day.

Fabrice’s announcement says that it took 131 days of system time to calculate and verify his results, which gives a computational cost of €410.03 – which I’ll round to €410 since I’ve only been using 3 significant figures so far in the computations, and because there’s a lot of hand-waving involved in lots of these figures. So, we know how much it would take to recompute this result given the software, machine and instructions. (And the computational cost is likely to decline over time in the short term.)

The answer needs a Terabyte of storage. What will it cost to keep that in a repository? That’s a slightly more difficult question to answer, but we can give a number of figures that provide upper and lower bounds. SDSC quote $390/Tbyte/year for archival tape storage (dual copies), excluding setup costs and assuming no retrieval. Moore et al quote $500/year as a raw figure, obtained by dividing total system costs by usable storage within it. At current rates of $1 = €0.67, that gives us a cost of €261/year or €335/year. SDSC are likely to be at the cheap end of the scale. ULCC’s costs, given our lower total volumes, would be closer to €1500/year for a similar service (dual archival tape copies on separate sites) although that does include retrieval costs. Amazon’s AWS would be about €100/year for a single copy. You would want two copies, so it’s twice that, and the cost of transferring the data in would be about 25% more than the storage cost. Since I haven’t factored in ingest costs for any of the other models, I’ll ignore it for AWS as well. (And yes, AWS isn’t a repository, and there’s no metadata, and… This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation. It’s a small envelope.)

Which means, at a very rough level and ignoring many pertinent factors, that after about two years of storage in the repository, we would have been better off recalculating the data rather than storing it. There’s a lot of assumptions hidden there, however. For one, we’re assuming that this data will rarely, if ever, be required. If many people want it, the recalculation cost rapidly becomes prohibitive (and so does the 131 days they have to wait for their request to be satisfied!)

One of the other problems is more subtle. I said that, in the short term, recalculation costs would be likely to fall as computational power becomes cheaper. The energy costs involved will rise, of course, but there’s still a significant downward trend. But after a sufficient period of time, it becomes non-trivial to reconstruct the software and the environment it needs in order to allow the computation to happen. Imagine trying to recalculate something now where the original software is a PL/I program designed to run under OS/360. It’s not impossible by any means, but the cost involved and expertise required is non-trivial. At least with our example we won’t have any doubts about whether the right answer has been produced – the computation of π produces an exact, if never-ending, answer. Most scientific software doesn’t do this and the exact answers produced can depend on the compiler, the floating-point hardware, mathematical libraries and the operating system. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to recreate these faithfully, and we often don’t have any means of checking whether or not we have succeeded. (Keeping the original outputs would help in this, of course, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid.) That’s part of the problem that Brian Matthews and his colleagues examine in the SigSoft project and there’s still a great deal of work to be done there.

So have we answered Les’s question ? My feeling is that in this case we have – there’s a fair amount of evidence that suggests that keeping this particular data set isn’t cost-effective. But in general, the question is far harder to answer. Yet we must strive harder for more general answers as the cost of not doing so is not trivial. Even if money did grow on trees, it still wouldn’t be free and at present we need to be very careful how we use it.

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.

FOTE 2009 in Second Life

We used the opportunity to include a short presentation about our CLASM project, and I shared the platform for one session with James Ballard, our resident Learning Technologist and ace Moodle hacker. The full video and slides (with audio) of our talk are available from the FOTE website; the slides are also on Slideshare.

I was particularly pleased to make contact with Jane Secker of LSE, who knows more than most about CLA, and I am looking forward to discussing some issues with her, as we try to refine the work done on the CLASM plugins and produce a finished package. Jane also published an excellent account of the day’s events on her blog

The audience was a bit different from the JISC Information Environment crowd I’ve made presentations to before, so my talk was a very high-level overview of repository work in the sector, with a few ideas about where trends and technology seem to be leading us. One particular advantage I see is that interoperability between web applications should enable us to focus on using the “right” tools – portfolio, VLE, blog, repository, etc, maybe even VW – at each stage of the institutional/educational workflow, rather than using over-ambitious and over-complicated systems that try to do everything. “Small pieces loosely joined,” and all that.

Unfortunately, while the slides on the FOTE website include audio, the video there doesn’t include the slides, which robs the talk of some context. I have, by some dark means, managed to create a new version which combines the video and slides and upload it to YouTube. (To keep it short and relevant to DA Blog readers, I’ve only included my part of the presentation.)

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.

The JISC funded SNEEP project (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints) – part of the original JISC rapid innovation programme – aimed to provide a set of social networking tools for EPrints repositories. It ran for 6 months and ended in May 2008. Since the rather low key publication of the resultant EPrints plugin interest and uptake has been slowly but surely gathering momentum.

Today I am pleased to announce a couple of significant SNEEP related developments. Firstly , thanks to my colleague Ben Wheeler here at ULCC, SNEEP 0.3.2 released this week offers an automagic installer. This does away with the (slightly tortuous) manual install procedure that we suspect discouraged all but the hardier EPrints hac… I mean administrators.

You can download SNEEP 0.3.2 and/or read Ben’s post to the EP-tech mailling list. The download page is also a good place to see SNEEP in action.

PICT

I am also pleased to announce a new project (funded as part of the 2009 JISC rapid innovation programme) that aims to build on the SNEEP work to provide SNEEP-ish services to a broader range of web resources. The goal of the PICT project (Platform Independent Community Toolbox) is a lightweight javascript tool that can be deployed across an number of web resources (not just a repository) to encompass the web-based real estate of a given research community and provide that community with collaborative tools available at the on-line research coalface.

Effectively PICT will allow resource owners to offer

• tags
• comments
• notes
• other goodies

from their web page. The data gathered by these tools will be managed by a PICT server (probably run by a community-minded resource owner) and be available for cross referencing with other resources in a PICT community.

If all that is a bit difficult to picture, rest assured that demos will appear throughout the course of the project that should help to clear the murk.

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.

I began the day by chairing the final meeting of RPAG(the repositories and preservation advisory group.) We had a short meeting mainly to follow up on discussions we had been having on how the group had operated and how JISC might make use of advisory bodies in future. Those who expressed an opinion all felt it had been useful to them, but we all had concerns about how our time, and the JISC Executive’s time, might have been used more effectively. Future advisory groups may try to split responsibility for some areas into smaller working groups. All were agreed that the face-to-face meetings were invaluable, but we weren’t all agreed on which online technology would be best to use in between times. Enthusiasts for tools like ideascale were matched by those who found them unusable.

The meeting proper opened with some background and perspective from Rachel Bruce and Neil Grindley of JISC and myself. I tried – partly seriously, but without much expectation of accuracy – to give a one-line summary of what each project set out to do. But there were two things I meant to say which I failed to do. One was to look forward to the theme of day 2 (Value) and stress that repositories are not ends in themselves, but need to be thought of in terms of value, impact and benefits to someone. The second point I omitted was to remind us that , for innovation projects, failure in one sense can still mean success, as long as we understand the nature of the failure and are able to use it to improve and adapt future work. Not achieving what you set out to do is disappointing. Analysing the reasons for that and making sure others are aware of them can be of great value.

But it was the rest of the event that provided greatest interest. The discussion sessions on text mining, research data, teaching and learning repositories and more; presentations from projects from stakeholder, developer and other perspectives; posters and demos from many of the projects; and the fever of activities in the ideas room, which deployed technology ranging from post-it notes upwards to catalyse, capture and refine ideas from the attendees. These activities gave the event much more of a participatory feel – everyone became a contributor rather than being a consumer.

I learned a few things over the course of a day or two, most of them unexpected. David Flanders (via Chris Rusbridge) passed on the neat idea of feeding funding proposals through Wordle before marking them. That’s what ULCC’s AIDA project looked like. Perhaps you ought to try the same with your proposals prior to submitting them?

I learned that talking unprepared and unscripted to a video camera doesn’t produce great results unless you’ve had practice or training – neither of which I’ve had. I knew that in an abstract sense and now have the unfortunate experience to back it up. But Andy McGregor and Dave Flanders did capture some other people talking far more sense than I did and far more clearly, and you can see the results on the dev8D youtube channel.

Andrew Prescott’s overview of the Welsh Repository Network provided us with the surprising finding that smaller institutions are more, not less, likely to want to run their own repository rather than contract it out to someone else.

And via a serendipitous typo, we all contemplated whether working in a repositoire might not be an altogether more rarified and sophisticated career option than working with a repository.

What’s prompted me to write about it now is the news that the outputs from that workshop are now visible, and the ongoing process of revising and amending them is taking place in a far more public forum on pbwiki. repinf.pbwiki.com is somewhere you should visit if you are, in the words of its homepage:

…. interested in:

1. developing coordinated action plans for specific areas of repository development

2. pursuing those plans

3. coordinating that activity internationally

An international workshop in March 2009 kicked off this process, which is now open to anyone willing to contribute.

If you have an opinion on things like interoperable identifiers, citation services, streamlining deposit workflows or (most contentiously) international repository organisations, you need to take a look at these materials. The workshop that produced them was a curious and mixed event, but it certainly had some positive features. It brought together interested experts from around the world to consider things that need doing with repositories that can only happen through joined-up international action. We did our best to focus on things that could be done in a reasonable timescale and that would produce clear benefits. At the end a group of funders – many of whom clearly weren’t quite sure what was expected of them – spent an hour or two considering the ideas that came out of the 4 workshop groups and voiced their own opinions about them. Some of the ideas drew widespread support from public and commercial organisations, whilst others were not yet clearly developed enough, or were still too parochial. Generally, there was a clear willingness to take action, but some of the plans needed more work before funders could act. The wiki is the way that that work will be done (with the contentious exception noted above.)

The idea of getting joined-up thinking between doers, thinkers and funders has succeeded. Anyone can read the material on the repinf wiki site, and anyone can edit it once they ask for a userid. Do it. Do it now.

This will be a six-month project with a double-edged purpose: to develop a SWORD plugin for Moodle, so that it can interact, platform independently, with common repository applications like EPrints and DSpace; and to explore and demonstrate the use of that plugin for managing Copyright Licensed materials in Moodle courses.

The issue of managing CLA materials for VLE courses was drawn to our attention on several occasions by colleagues from other institutions, and the superior bibliographic features of e-repositories seem to offer a promising approach to managing these objects effectively for tutors, students and library staff, while making them available within a VLE, in accordance with CLA terms and conditions.

CLASM will be developed by the same team that developed SNEEP, one of the first JISC Rapid Innovations projects, and we will also be working closely with ULCC’s E-learning team, responsible for our Moodle and Mahara service. This should be a particularly rewarding and fruitful collaboration, since there is huge potential to improve the integration between these three critical educational applications – repositories, VLEs and e-Portfolios.

You can find out more about Phil and James’s adventures in e-Learning at our recently revamped sister blog: El Blog.

Post scriptum, 18th March.

I also learned that, among the other successful bids to the JISC’s Information Environment/e-Research call, were: MERLIN, a text-mining initiative for Institutional Repositories, led by UCL Library; and PhilPapers,  a project led by the Institute of Philosophy, to extend the impressive Philosophy portal currently hosted by ANU. ULCC will be contributing, as partners, to both of these exciting projects.

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.

There will be quite a few changes from the current beta version. Many of these are the result of Professor Katharine Ellis’s extensive advocacy and consultation, among both the musical research community, who will be the system’s users, and among the repositories community, at events like the JISC Rights workshop, and the Repository Fringe in Edinburgh. Others have been made possible as a result of the experience we’ve gained on other Eprints projects, like Linnean Online, Their Past Your Future and SNEEP.

As you can see from the screenshot, we’ve freshened up the overall look, and Rory has had considerable success with the embedded Flash player, which is going to make both video and audio content in PRIMO far more usable and accessible than the present, download-oriented system.

There are more changes and enhancements and a snag list as long as your arm, but we’re confident that when PRIMO gets its full and final launch in January, it will be a major improvement. There is also exciting new content currently being reviewed by the Committee, that will showcase the potential value of PRIMO to its community, and, we hope, encourage other musical researchers to contribute their own research-in-practice.

To warm up my brain before the afternoon’s PoWR workshop on preserving web resources, I sampled James Currall’s enjoyable discussion of web archiving, and also a talk on Institutional Repositories by Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN and RRT.

In The Tangled Web is but a Fleeting Dream … but then again…, James Currall covered the essentials of web archiving in a clear and engaging way, drawing comparisons between the survival of WWI soldiers’ diaries, and the blogs of present-day servicemen in Iraq. Another example given was the trials and tribulations of the website for the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit: outsourced, host ceased trading, domain name lapsed, original website content dependent on outdated Coldfusion and Access environment. Thankfully a remote-harvested, static HTML image of the site does survive.

Why have there not been more conspicuous successes in web archiving in the past two decades? Partly because it can be difficult to decide exactly whether and when a website should be treated as an authentic (and authenticable) record, a publication channel, or a publication itself – among other things. Partly because there are always waves of innovation continually washing up more interesting things to do. Partly because archiving is a policy issue, yet is generally addressed as purely a techn(olog)ical problem (where it is addressed at all).

It was reassuring, as ever, to hear it said again that there is not one single tool that addresses all possible web preservation issues (behaviour, dynamic content, scripts, versioning, emerging standards, etc.); that depending on the Internet Archive is at best a partial and risky solution; and that “whatever you do is likely to be imperfect”.

James put the chamber’s electronic voting systems to entertaining and informative use with a number of snap votes: would, for example, present-day soldiers’ blogs still be available in 90 years’ time? Of course I could confidently vote ‘yes’, knowing that the publication of the JISC PoWR handbook is barely months away! Other ad hoc vox pops revealed that the audience was about as familiar with OAIS as with the Book of Ezra.

James is director of the Espida Project, and this was a timely reminder that we must consider the relevance of that project’s work on assessing and controlling costs to the guidance we’re assembling for the forthcoming PoWR handbook. James and I share what must be a fairly unusual distinction of citing Thomas Carlyle in support of our cause in recent presentations. Unlike James, however, I don’t bear such an uncanny likeness to the great man.

Stephanie Taylor’s talk, Institutional Repositories: Asset or Obstacle?, gave us a brief history of the Insitutional Repository, and a well-paced explanation of the value and purpose of IRs – rather more substantial, thankfully, than my Bluffer’s Guide To IRs last year. I was initially intrigued that her presentation might be leading to the conclusions that IRs are “obstacles”, but I quickly realised the alarmist title was rhetorical in nature. The talk was, among other things, an engaging appeal to the better nature of web managers and other techies to appreciate the value of, and issues faced by librarians.

In fact, the emergence of repositories, and the recognition of their place among institutional information systems, is a watershed in the evolution of electronic resources. Leaving it to researchers and teachers to manage what they create – variously on websites, blogs, Google Docs, thumb drive, or what you will – is no more sensible now than it ever was, if we want to ensure that they are consistently managed and accessible, let alone think about their preservation over the longer term.

There are many ways to approach it, none the only right and proper way. You may add extra value to it, through your choice of software or implementation (in-house or outsourced), or by using Web-Two-Oh-ish features and services. Institutional Repositories are only “one of many small conversations going on in different ways in different mediums”, but the need for an institution to manage valuable academic outputs in an orderly way is unarguable.

However one tweet that flew over the Twitosphere during the afternoon suggests that there may be more to do in assessing the pros and cons of different approaches – particularly the merits or otherwise of Google’s omnipresent panaceas. Mike Ellis commented: “I’ve never been clear why it is that institutions would trust a repository vendor more than someone like Google….?”

I won’t write up the JISC-PoWR workshop – the results of that will be on the JISC-PoWR blog - except to say that Marieke succinctly summarised the many web preservation issues we’ve accumulated, while Brian found effective waysto draw out issues and concerns around the growing range of Web 2.0 applications finding favour among staff and students at our institutions; and we were pleased that both Stephanie and James were able to contribute to the discussion.

And then it was off to the Aberdeen City Art Gallery for a glass of wine or three and some inspirational art….

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

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

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).