Repositories Exchange of Experience - Universities of York and Leeds

An interesting meeting took place on Friday between various library staff who work on "repositories" at the Universities of York and Leeds. University of York is developing a digital library - using Fedora with a Muradora front end - to manage a variety of digital content - including, for example, a collection of images from the History of Art Department (some already digitised, others which will need to be scanned). Leeds has a multimedia repository running on the Digitool platform - originally created as part of the MIDESS project and now continuing as LUDOS (Leeds University Digital Objects) . LUDOS collections include Medieval Manuscripts and images of Physics Instruments. It will also house longitudinal qualitative data from the ESRC funded Timescapes project.

There is significant overlap between the target content for the York Digital Library and LUDOS.

Both the LUDOS and York Digital Library act as a complement to Leeds' and York's VLE systems and to the shared (Leeds, Sheffield, York) repository for research outputs - White Rose Research Online (EPrints software).

Repository development can be a lonely business sometimes! It's good to get in touch with other people who are working through very similar issues. Some of the common ground identified at the meeting:

• access control : for legal reasons - but also may wish to restrict access to the metadata of non OA items in some cases.
• metadata - York is investigating VRA Core for images; Leeds decided against this standard, preferring MODS because it enables nested relationships. Potentially, much fruitful sharing of exerience to be had here.
• data input - repository workflows need to be able to cater for expert and non-expert inputters
• authentication - we need it!
• relationships between digital objects
• to customise or not to customise? - software may be flexible enough to allow lots of tailoring - but future migration should always be considered
• ingestion of really big files! Should large files be referenced elsewhere e.g. vidoes might live on a streaming server.
• multiple copies of files - if usage data is important, how to we aggregate statistics?
• trust and creditials between repository systems - for sharing data
• metasearch tools from OPAC - various tools were discussed. York and Leeds have similar interests - it would be very useful to share data on this.
• how comprehensive should metasearching be?
• embedded (human!) behaviour - how to change it?
• desktop deposit - what will it look like and is mediation always necessary?

We also had a couple of brief presentations on SWORD - Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit- by Julie and John. We're looking at SWORD as a potential deposit mechanism for to populate both WRRO and ESRC's Social Sciences repository. See the IncReASe project. It would also be interesting to look into desktop deposit using SWORD e.g. as used in the experimental Microsoft eJournal Service.

Attending:
York: Julie Allinson, Peri Stracchino, Ellizabeth Harbord, Yankui Feng, Matthew Herring, Lucy Jaques
Leeds: Jonathan Ainsworth, Michael Emly, John Salter
White Rose: Rachel Proudfoot, Beccy Shipman, John Salter, Lucy Jaques

This was a useful meeting - and raised lots of issues which there was not time to address in great detail on the day. It was agreed to have another exchange meeting in about 6 months' time.

Access statistics 07-08

The latest access statistics from Google Analytics show continued excellent usage of the repository over the year 01/08/07 to 31/07/08. Most traffic continues to come from Google - predominantly from regular Google rather than Scholar. But there are interesting examples of high volumes of traffic from individual or departmental web site where these have been linked to papers in WRRO. The traffic breakdown is as follows:

Search Engines 81,332.00 (81.97%)
Referring Sites 12,736.00 (12.84%)
Direct Traffic 5,150.00 (5.19%)
Other 6 (0.01%)

WRRO had 88,464 individual visitors, making a total of 99,224 visits to the site and looking at 229,381 pages.

Most users were from the UK, followed by the USA, Canada, India and Germany. In total, we attracted visitors from 190 countries/territories . The three most regularly downloaded papers were:

Thompson, C. (2000) Clinical decision making in nursing: theoretical perspectives and their relevance to practice – a response to Jean Harbison. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 35 (1). pp. 134-137.

Dickinson, T.M. (2005) Symbols of protection : the significance of animal-ornamented shields in early Anglo-Saxon England. Medieval Archaeology, 49 (1). pp. 109-163.

Rodrigues, A.S.L., Andelman, S.J., Bakarr, M.I., Boitani, L., Brooks, T.M., Cowling, R.M., Fishpool, L.D.C., da Fonseca, G.A.B., Gaston, K.J., Hoffmann, M., Long, J.S., Marquet, P.A., Pilgrim, J.D., Pressey, R.L., Schipper, J., Sechrest, W., Stuart, S.N., Underhill, L.G., Waller, R.W., Watts, M.E.J. and Yan, X. (2004) Effectiveness of the global protected area network in representing species diversity. Nature, 428 (6983). pp. 640-643.

WRRO and arXiv

It's well known that researchers who routinely use arXiv may be reluctant to post their work to a local repository. The work is already openly accessible through a well established, well used service so isn't posting to a local repository simply redundant extra work?

We're keen to see all disciplines and research outputs captured by White Rose Research Online but none of us wants to duplicate effort. To offer a meaningful service to the physicist, mathematicians, computer scientists etc. who use arXiv we need to allow a single deposit to feed more than one system. When depositing in WRRO, we'd like to offer an option to Depost in arXiv, whereby the metadata and any attached files are pushed into arXiv. With work underway on developing and using the SWORD protocol (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) this service development is moving closer week by week. (See the SWORD / arXiv case study by Simeon Warner). However, perhaps a more likely scenario is that arXiv users continue to deposit in arXiv but that we identify WRRO content and pull it back into WRRO from arXiv. Or perhaps depositors will be able to PUT works into WRRO from arXiv - perhaps using SWORD. There are some interesting developments coming from Microsoft which could allow desktop to repository deposit - so perhaps the longer term solution will be single or multiple repository deposit from within Word. (See Microsoft Research Unveils Free Software Tools to Help Scholars and Researchers Share Knowledge.)

We hope that before too long WRRO will have more attractive options to offer arXiv users than simply asking them to duplicate work by adding works to both arXiv and WRRO. We'd be very happy to discuss possibilities with any arXiv users from the White Rose Universities; in any case, we will be identifying and contacting arXiv users with WRRO content during the course of the IncReASe project with a view to importing content from arXiv and, perhaps, offering local WRRO to arXiv deposit.

IncReASe Questionnaire Findings / Report

This week I'm working on the questionnaire report. This will provide a more detailed discussion of the results of the questionnaire. The findings document we've already produced has been well received so far. The results of the mandates questions have sparked some particular interest. This reflects the seemingly high positive response to the question of compliance. Hopefully the report will help illustrate this is not such a clear indication that mandates would work. The figures in the findings document include both those who would comply willingly and reluctantly. There is also some variation between the institutions. At one institution only 60% of respondents would comply willingly with an institutional mandate. This suggests the introduction of a mandate there would be unpopular with a considerable number of academics.

Also this week, we are meeting to discuss the progress of our interviews with academics. We have carried out about 5 so far and need to think about who else we want to target. We will look at whether the current interview schedule is working, and how the interview data might be used to create some case studies.

Anyway, back to the report writing!

IncReASe Project Questionnaire Findings

Back in February / March this year we carried out an online questionnaire across the 3 White Rose institutions. We were interested in what people currently did with their publications and whether they put them up online. We also asked about awareness of WRRO, funder and institutional mandates and what services WRRO should be offering.

We offered a prize of £50 voucher or an iPod Shuffle. Here's a picture of Dr Tom Webb, the lucky winner, receiving his voucher.

We have produced a findings document which has just been sent out to those who responded to the questionnaire. Over the next couple of months we will be producing a report aimed at the repositories community.

Harvard Arts and Sciences Faculty recognized as newest SPARC Innovators

SPARC is the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition. Twice a year, SPARC names an "Innovator" - an individual or group - which has been "..working to challenge the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public." The latest SPARC innovator is the Harvard Arts and Sciences Faculty. There has been widespread coverage of the Faculty's decision to make research outputs openly available (a similar policy has also been adopted by Harvard's Law Faculty).

The Harvard researchers want to assert more control over the dissemination of their work and ensure wider access to their research than is the case for papers locked behind solely subscription-based access.

Some extracts from the agreed motion:
"..The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the
fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment,
the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and
Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to
exercise the copyright in those articles...
"To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an
electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative
of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s
Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access
repository."

The full agreement is online at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/February_2008_Agenda.pdf

The research is deposited in Harvard's open access repository. The equivalent system for Leeds, Sheffield and York is White Rose Research Online.

Repository Support Project Summer School 2008

I’ve just got back from the RSP summer school held at Thornton Manor in the Wirral. Well, nearly 10 days ago now I suppose. It was a very interesting couple of days, not least because of the fabulous venue and great food! In fact there must have been almost as much talk about food and Lord Leverhulme’s old house as there was about repositories.

RSP held a summer school last year that was aimed at new repositories and those just in the process of setting up. This year’s was for those with already existing repositories. A good range of topics were covered in the sessions including interoperability, copyright, advocacy, preservation and statistics.

A number of the break out sessions were extremely useful as they offered the chance to discuss the issues directly with other people doing the same / similar job. I know it’s been said many times before but it is fascinating how different institutions staff their repositories. There is such a variation in the number of staff employed, the amount of their time dedicated to the repository and also the other demands repository staff have on their time.

Perhaps one of the most interesting sessions for me was Niamh Brennan’s paper on advocacy. Niamh works on the repository at Trinity College Dublin and there they have integrated the repository with their Current Research Information System (CRIS). Academics must upload details of their publications into the CRIS, and they are now offered a button to add full text. Take up seems to have been very high, and now the repository has a lot of content to deal with. Much of the work around repositories has been about raising their profile and advocacy work. Perhaps the key is actually to make repositories invisible!