Institutional Repository Checklist for Serving Institutional Management

DCC News (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/, news item visible on 21 April 2008) draws our attention to this interesting paper:

Comments are requested on a draft document from the presenters of the "Research Assessment Experience" session at the EPrints User Group meeting at OR08. The "Institutional Repository Checklist for Serving Institutional Management" lists 13 success criteria for repository managers to be aware of when making plans for their repositories to provide any kind of official research reporting role for their institutional management.

Find out more (Note there are at least 3 versions, so comments have already been incorporated).

I liked this: "The numeric risk factors in the second column reflect the potential consequences of failure to deliver according to an informal nautical metaphor: (a) already dead in the water, (b) quickly shipwrecked and (c) may eventually become becalmed."

This kind of work is important; repositories have to be better at being useful tools for all kinds of purposes before they will become part of the researcher's workflow...

Adding Value through SNEEPing

I'm really quite taken by the SNEEP plug-in for ePrints that was showcased at OR08. It enables users to add their comments/annotations to an item stored in an eprints repository. These annotations are then made public and items can have numerous annotations added by different users. I don't know if there's a limit...? This is a great example of one way that value can be added to data collections in the context of digital curation - though admittedly the value of the added comments and annotations will be debatable! SNEEP can be downloaded from the SNEEP eprints installation at ULCC.

Open Repositories 2008

The 2008 Open Repositories conference (OR08) started yesterday in Southampton. I promised Chris I'd make a blog post whilst I was there but this fell through when my laptop started playing up. Now that I'm back (and preparing to go to Wigan to speak at a different event tomorrow), I wanted to make a quick post about the session on sustainability.

There were two speakers in this session: Warwick Cathro from the National Library of Australia, and Libby Bishop from the Universities of Essex and Liverpool (yes, she works for both). Warwick gave a fascinating overview of theAustralian Digital Library Service framework, which sets out twenty nine services involved in managing and building digital libraries and repositories. He went into more detail on a number of them, including preservation and in particular the function of obsolescence notification. The Automated Obsolescence Notification System (AONS) that was established by ASPR a few years ago will play a key part in the preservation service. The AONS toolkit includes add-ons for different repository software to build format profiles and the intention is that this will eventually link in to file format registries such as PRONOM and the GDFR to function as part of a migration service (I think). It appears complimentary to the web-based format profiling service that PRESERV established in conjunction with PRONOM - the PRONOM-ROAR service for e-print repositories. Warwick noted however that file format registries need more work before they can comprehensively provide this level of funcitonality though, particularly in providing more structured file format data.

Libby Bishop introduced the Timescapes project and gave a comprehensive overview of the way the research data is collected and used. The project uses a disaggregated preservation service, essentially using the LUDOS repository at Leeds (previously from the MIDESS project) alongside data services provided by the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. Libby had a lot of say and I'm interested to know more about the level of preservation service that is provided by the UKDA but didn't manage to ask whilst I was there yesterday.

There is another sustainabilty session running today at OR08.