Conference Presenters

Theo Andrew

Biography

Theo Andrew completed his doctorate in geology/tectonics at the University of Edinburgh. It was during this period of research that Theo became interested in investigating the role of digital media and the Internet in enhancing scholarly communication and publication. He subsequently became involved in a number of JISC-funded projects at Edinburgh University Library. His work in the JISC-funded Theses Alive project helped initiate the successful electronic theses programme at the University of Edinburgh. This has led him into a number of related activities, including, as part of the SHERPA project, investigating policy, workflow and intellectual property issues in setting up institutional e-print repositories. Currently Theo is responsible for managing the University of Edinburgh's institutional repository of research output (the Edinburgh Research Archive) and coordinating the related academic liaison and advocacy activities. With colleagues from Bergen and Edinburgh he has recently co-authored the first ever book to be published on the rapidly maturing field of institutional repositories.

Abstract

The Institutional Repository in the Digital Library

Digital repositories have been born in a fast-moving environment where internet and digitisation initiatives present many opportunities to perform the functions of librarianship in new ways. The panoply of repositories that are beginning to emerge both engage with, and support a diverse range of communities and terminologies.

Although creating a rich and fertile intellectual environment, the coming together of interdisciplinary groups like this can create significant problems in communication. We are already seeing in the published literature, and less formal communication channels - for example blogs, wikis and email distribution lists - a discrepancy in terminology and expectation between learning technologists, librarians, digital curation practitioners, open access evangelists, scientists and researchers.

By looking at the current worldwide deployment of institutional repositories, this paper seeks to explain to the audience the key core terminologies used, and highlight some of the differences in digital repository architecture/functionality. This talk should also give an overview of the wider situation in the UK, North America, Europe and Australia, whilst casting an eye to the future.

Vangelis Banos, Elisavet Chantavaridou

Biography

Elisavet Chantavaridou works as a librarian at the University of Macedonia Library. She is currently engaged in a Virtual Learning Environment called Telemathea (http://telemathea.uom.gr/) and in the development of a digital library+institutional repository. She graduated in 2000 from the Department of Library Science in Thessaloniki, Greece and completed a MSc course in Information and Library Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland in 2003. She currently teaches a course at the Department of Library and Information Sciences (Thessaloniki). In the past, she was involved with ISO 9001 certification and quality management in libraries.

Abstract

Our DSpace installation addresses two needs for the time being; that of a digital library and that of an Institutional Repository, with the intention of digitizing and hosting the University's archive. Our digital library will include two digitized Greek journals of scientific content, the digital files of South-Eastern Europe Journal of Economics , our Library's newsletters as well as digitized textbooks accessible only by the blind students of our University. Our IR is still under way as we expect the support of our University Administration in order to contact the academic community and convince them to self-archive. We have included, however, PhD theses for which we demand a license to be signed by the authors. Unlicensed content is also uploaded, but is treated differently. The digital files are uploaded in pdf and ps format.

Our needs demanded translation of the user interface into Greek, which we deposited to the DSpace wiki . We also created a new submission form for dissertations which required the addition of metadata fields to the Dublin Core registry. In addition, minor modifications were made to the web interface in order to meet our users' needs.

System authentication is implemented using IP address access lists whereas archive data and database integrity is ensured by redundant storage disks and regular backups.

Andrea Bollini, Federico Meschini

Biography

Born in 1980, Andrea Bollini graduated from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 2003, with a degree in Mathematical Applications. In 2004 he joined CILEA, a non-profit ICT support organization for accademic & research Italian institututions, dealing with electronic publishing and innovative Open Access models. At present he is Senior Analyst & Web Developer of the AePIC team (Academic e-Publishing Infrastructures CILEA), and he is responsible for local customization and development of several open-source software tools as DSpace, Open Journal Systems, EPrints, etc...

A major project is the customization of DSpace to integrate research outputs of Italian universities with a management system for research evaluation. Another project involving DSpace as digital storage is the design and implementation of an integrated management system (scientific and editorial workflows, dissemination, digital preservation, e-commerce, royalties management, etc...) for university presses and small/medium publishers [1].

[1] Bollini, Andrea; Cotoneschi, Patrizia; Farsetti, Antonella; Minore, Sebastiana; Mornati, Susanna (2006) An Innovative Integrated System for Editorial Processes Management: The Case of Firenze University Press, Preview - Scheduled contributions for the ELPUB 2006 Proceedings

Federico Meschini has a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and his main field of interest and activity is Digital Humanities, with particular interest in XML technologies, Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries. He is a member of TEI, ACH and ALLC, and has worked as a consultant and trainer in several digitization projects. Currently he is under scholarship funded by CASPUR, an Italian inter university center, for a research about Open Access, Metadata and Semantic Web standards and technologies.

Abstract

DSpace: Evolution from an Intelligent Design

Since 2004 most Italian universities subscribed the "Messina Declaration" supporting Open Access, and several Institutional Repositories (IRs) were created. But the Italian landscape is still characterized by researchers' reluctance in OA self-archiving. The academic environment in Italy, at both cultural and organizational levels, is very different from that of the United States or Northern Europe, and IRs have to be boosted to make them more attractive to faculty staff through a series of additional services. For this reason the choice of an open and customizable underlying structure, such as the DSpace framework, is a key factor for the success of the various initiatives.

The aim of this contribution is to show progress that has been done to enhance the popularity of Italian academic IRs. A main issue is the possibility to couple self-archiving to the provision of data for research accounting and evaluation, both locally at the single university level, and at the national level. We are working at the integration between DSpace and the existing software architecture of the National Register of Academic Research, so to avoid redundancy in submitting publication details, and encourage the researchers to submit their full texts together with the related metadata.

Since a tight integration between e-people management in DSpace and the university local identification system is needed, we have created a dynamic authority file with authors' names from the local personnel registry. This allows to control both the submission process and data browsing, and produce bibliographies for faculty staff. Automatic import of bibliographic records from databases such as Pubmed is also provided, but as items in progress, in order to stimulate submission of full texts.

Since a general Italian trend is to have only one installation of DSpace for the multiform intellectual production of a university, we address the consequent need of advanced management features. A community administrator has been created, with all administrator privileges limited to a single community. Another useful function has been developed to provide automatic mapping of department collections into different OAI sets, such as subjects. This provides both alternative browsing options at the archive level, and selective harvesting from service providers, thus allowing disciplinary approaches.

This a list of some dspace installations that we have realized:

DSpace in progress

Gaëlle Bozec

Biography

Gaëlle Bozec was educated as a documentalist in France. She has been working with ETDs since 1997 and is currently in charge of them in the Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) and EksArk projects at the University of Bergen Library.

Abstract

EksArk: University of Bergen ETD archive

EksArk is a closed archive of masters and doctoral theses from the University of Bergen, based on DSpace. Reasons for having a closed system, and some of the administrative implications of doing this with DSpace are discussed. It is also necessary in some cases to publish materials both in EksArk, and the Institutional Repository of the university (The Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA)). In order to avoid duplication of effort, some strategies for managing archiving both in EksArk and BORA are discussed. Some of the modifications necessary to DSpace in order to meet requirements for the internal archive are also introduced, such as customisable item listings and browse indexing, which have since become part of the main DSpace codebase.

Marco Cesarano

Biography

Marco Cesarano has a degree in Computer Science at "Federico II" University, Naples (Italy), and actually he works at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Cibernetica, Pozzuoli, for SITRIA project. His major interest regards interoperability and cooperation between data provider servers, and the adaptivity of User Interfaces.

Abstract

Customizing and adapting the DSpace package in the context of cultural heritage

In this paper we present the experience achieved on customizing and adapting the Dspace package in the context of the cultural heritage. The considered set of metadata are the ICCD metadata set (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione), the MINERVA metadata set (Ministerial Network for Valorizing Activities in digitization) and the MICHAEL metadata set (Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe, a spin-off of MINERVA project). These standards are used to build cultural heritage catalogues, storage management and online distribution of digital collections related to archaeological sites, sculptures, paintings, and to promote the cooperation about cultural heritage in Europe. On doing so it is expected to make the digital archive accessible to a wide audience and at the same time preserving the health of original sources. Among the digital collections considered there is also private collection such as those collected by the Neapolitan theater archive association.

The sources heterogeneity these metadata have been coped adapting their interpretation and granularity and merging them in a new metadata set, which utilizes an interpretation schema explained in this paper. In order to preserve the interoperability of the various platforms containing cultural heritage, we plan to use them in cooperation with an ontology server that would play the role of knowledge mediator and will be adopted as knowledge middleware for the Neapolitan museums network (ReMuNa). ReMuNa is a knowledge infrastructure, developed with the financial support of the Italian ministry of university, research and technology (MIUR), and currently adopted by the ministry of cultural heritage and activities (MIBAC) in Campania.

The ReMuNa infrastructure is built around a set of Content Management System, operated by each museum manager, to organize, promote information and service about the cultural heritages in Naples.

Jim Downing

Biography

Jim Downing is the principal software engineer on the SPECTRa project, developing workflow integrated tools to assist scientists to publish their experimental data into open-access DSpace institutional repositories.

His experience with DSpace has been gained through his experience as the programmer on the DSpace@Cambridge project, and as a committer on the DSpace project itself. Before this he worked as an IT consultant and software engineer on a wide range of internet software products and projects from policy informatics to internet applications.

Abstract

Chemistry in DSpace

This presentation gives an overview of the SPECTRa project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/spectra/index.htm) and a description of the work to date. SPECTRa1 is a collaboration between University of Cambridge2 and Imperial College, London3 that aims to improve the Open Access publication of chemistry data, by developing a set of tools that help chemists submit data items to their institution's DSpace repository.

Many of the challenges facing the SPECTRa development are cultural - OA is not generally accepted amongst the Chemistry academic community. The presentation will give a flavour of these, but the main focus will be technical. The progress made by the DSpace@Cambridge project in storing chemistry data will be described. This will be followed by an explanation of how the project intends to use some standard (OAI-PMH, Handle) and some experimental (Lightweight Network Interface, Packaging Plugin system) DSpace features to integrate repository interaction into highly specialized workflows and into Rich Client platforms such as Bioclipse (http://www.bioclipse.net/). As a concrete example, our plans to develop a repository-enabled workflow for crystallography at Cambridge and Imperial College will be described.

SPECTRa is funded under the JISC Digital Repositories Programme (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/).

  1. Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data
  2. Specifically between the Molecular Informatics Group, Unilever Cambridge Centre (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/) and the DSpace@Cambridge project (http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/)
  3. IC Chemistry (http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/), IC Library (http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/url/page/library/)

Lieven Droogmans, Ben Bosman

Biography

Lieven Droogmans and Ben Bosman have been working on deploying, analyzing and extending DSpace since august 2004, for their master thesis at the hypermedia and databases research group. They were supported by prof. dr. ir. E. Duval who can be considered as secondary author. After getting their Master of Engineering in Computer Science degree from KULeuven, Lieven Droogmans started working on deploying DSpace university-wide to capture, preserve, manage and evaluate research output. Ben Bosman started research on learning object repositories and more specifically on how to integrate different learning object repositories with different learning management systems.

Abstract

Customizing DSpace for a large research university

The main goal of the presentation is to explain how KULeuven is going through the process of developing local customizations to DSpace in order to meet enduser requirements. It is not our intention to make specific recommendations on the actual customizations to DSpace, since these are different for each individual institution. We rather want to share our experiences and gather feedback from other DSUG participants. We want to explain our approach to customizing DSpace as a university-wide research output repository, where we started, where we want to go, the obstacles we already overcame, and what still lies ahead.

The existing (old) system to maintain an “academic bibliography” did not meet the university’s needs anymore: we will present the requirements it did not fulfill. These are the minimum requirements for the new repository. Requirements gathering and an analysis of the existing university IT infrastructure were the first steps we undertook. Next, an initial proof-of-concept implementation was developed, in order to get some early feedback on the possible solutions for tackling the requirements.

The next step was to fine-tune the proof-of-concept as soon as possible and set up a pilot project for one department to prove that the proposed solutions can really meet the requirements. This exercise will also help us to more precisely estimate the development time needed.

Some important requirements are:

And finally we want to go more in detail on the technical aspects of the developed customizations and add-ons and show a demo.

Kari Garnes

Biography

Kari Garnes has been Library Director at The University of Bergen Library since 1987. She has been employd at UiB since 1978 and has a doctoral degree in geology.

Jonas Gilbert, Peter Nilén

Biography

Jonas Gilbert has a Master of Library and Information Science and has worked as a librarian since 1999. He now works at the Digital library at Göteborg University as web co-ordinator with responsibility for various electronic services. During 2006 he is managing the implementation of GUPEA, Göteborg University Publications e-publishing and e-archive, which will use the DSpace platform.

Peter Nilén, B.A, has a background as systems librarian at Lund University Library, Sweden. Since 1998 he has worked as Head of Digital Information Services at Malmö University Library. The department manages different electronic services such as web services, databases, library systems and electronic publishing. Since 2005 the department has been implementing DSpace as the platform for the University's institutional repository, MUEP, Malmö University Electronic Publishing.

Abstract

The implementation of DSpace at universtities in Sweden

During 2006 several universities in Sweden are implementing DSpace as an institutional repository service. This presentation will give an overview of the current plans for DSpace in Sweden, with focus on the plans to use DSpace for the electronic publishing of PhD theses at the universities in Göteborg and Malmö.

Marc Goovaerts

Biography

Marc Goovaerts has been responsbile for the electronic resources at the Hasselt University Library since 2001. He is coordinator of the Institutioanl Repository of Hasselt University and of OdinPubAfrica, a project of OdinAfrical and IOC-UNESCO to develop a repository for marine science and oceanography in Africa.

Abstract

OdinPubAfrica: Development of a repository for marine science and oceanography in Africa

OdinAfrica is an organization of twenty five countries coordinating the development of marine science and oceanography in Africa and supported by UNESCO/IOC. The project OdinPubAfrica was started two years ago to make scientific publications of ODINAFRICA institutions more easily and freely accessible and to facilitate publishing of research findings by African scientists.

The Hasselt University Library was asked to coordinate the project. Dspace was chosen as repository software. A central Dspace server was set up at the IOC-secretariat in Oostend, Belgium where each participating institute could have their own community.

The project concentrated on three points:

The result can be seen at: http://iodeweb1.vliz.be/odin. Nearly 1000 documents are now submitted. The project also raised interest with other organizations in marine science. OdinCarsa, a sister organization in Latin and South America, is also setting up a similar project. The OdinPubAfrica repository was developed together with the institutional repository of Hasselt University: http://doclib.uhasselt.be/dspace.

Arne Jakobsson

Biography

Arne Jakobsson has since 1 May 1999 been the Library Director for the University of Oslo Library, Library of Medicine and Health Sciences. He is project leader for DUO – the institutional repository at the University of Oslo and for NORA – Norwegian Open Research Archives. He is also president of EAHIL (European Association for Health Information and Libraries).

Abstract

NORA and the development of institutional repositories in Norway

The Universities in Norway are today engaged in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Our role has changed from manager of scholarly products to that of participant in the scholarly communication process. By setting up, promoting and managing an institutional repository the universities have create a stable location where scientific information produced by the institute can be preserved and disseminated. The institutional repositories are OAI-PMH compliant. The challenge in setting up an institutional repository is not a technology issue (although the problems of long-term preservation are very far from solved), but consists of managerial, organizational and cultural issues. This paper will focus on the progress in Norway and on NORA – the national gateway for institutional repositories in Norway

Richard Jones

Biography

Richard Jones is currently Senior Engineer at the University of Bergen Library, in Norway, where he works with the Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) and related repository projects. He was formerly an Information Systems Developer at Edinburgh University Library where he worked developing the Edinburgh Research Archive through the Theses Alive and SHERPA projects and beyond. There he developed the technological, and procedural aspects of the institutional repository, before taking up the post in Bergen. As a member of the DSpace committers group he has contributed code to the development of this platform, and is an active member of the user and developer community. He is also co-author of a book entitled "The Institutional Repository" (2006). His professional background is in web application development and information systems and he holds a degree in Astrophysics from the University of Edinburgh.

Abstract

DSpace AddOn and Component Management System

With moves towards increasing the modularity of DSpace, and the idea that DSpace should act, at least in part, like a platform for repository activities, it is necessary to consider how to manage extensions to the core DSpace system. The AddOn Mechanism is currently being prototyped at the University of Bergen, with much assistance from the wider community. The mechanism aims to re-structure the installation and update processes of DSpace to accommodate loading and unloading of components to add further features to DSpace, while simultaneously providing a structured AddOn template which will ensure successful installation of third-party tools.

Many areas of the DSpace code are affected by this process, and a major challenge has been to identify and accommodate for these areas. This is still ongoing, and this presentation will introduce some of the areas that are problematic and propose solutions for comment. The prototype build process for DSpace and external components will be discussed in some detail, with reference to the lively debate on the mailings lists over best or most workable solutions. The proposed structure of AddOns will also be introduced with justifications and discussion of the difficulty of production.

The hope is that this mechanism, or one like it, will become part of the DSpace distribution in the not-too-distant future, and will free up the capacity of the DSpace platform to be extended. The future of DSpace may then like in taking the current system and breaking it down into components that can easily be replaced or worked on independently.

Marianne Josserand

Biography

Marianne Josserand is the senior sales executive at BioMed Central and is responsible for promoting the company’s products, services and open access initiatives throughout the EMEA region.

Abstract

Open Repository: A hosted Dspace solution from BioMed Central

This presentation gives an overview of the DSpace based service offered by BioMed Central; it covers the benefits of outsourcing a repository and discusses the needs in today’s market for such a service.

Since its beginning, BioMed Central has been a leader in both online publishing technology and the open access movement. With experience in publishing over 140 online open access journals, BioMed Central seeks to respond to market needs and use its expertise to further science and assist in free worldwide dissemination of intellectual output.

Following an increasing demand from worldwide funding bodies (including the Wellcome Trust UK and National Institute of Health (NIH) US) who advocate that publicly funded research should be deposited in an open access archive, BioMed Central created Open Repository.

Built on DSpace, Open Repository offers a hosted solution that aims to set up, launch, host and maintain customizable institutional repositories on behalf of organisations. The service enables institutions to quickly set up and run their own repository with minimal effort and investment in manpower and cost.

Claire Knowles

Biography

Claire Knowles is an Information Systems Developer at Edinburgh University Library where she is working on the Institutional Repositories for Research Assessment (IRRA) project for the UK Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. She is also involved in other repository projects and the support and development of the Edinburgh Research Archive. Claire has been working for Edinburgh University since 2005 prior to which she worked for a number of software development companies providing web based solutions.

Abstract

This presentation will provide an overview of the JISC funded Institutional Repositories for Research Assessment (IRRA) project, which is investigating, developing and promoting the use of Institutional Repositories for the UK Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. The IRRA project [http://irra.eprints.org/] is a joint collaboration between the Eprints team at the University of Southampton and the DSpace team at the University of Edinburgh.

The presentation will discuss:

Vlastimil Krejčíř

Biography

Vlastimil Krejčíř works as a programmer at Institute of Computer Science (ICS) at Masaryk University. He finished studies at Faculty of Informatics last year. During this studies he started cooperating with ICS and became interested in digital libraries and institutional repositories. Now he is engaged in testing, developing and modifiing software for digital libraries and repositories (especially DSpace) to suit local needs.

Abstract

Video files in DSpace

DSpace can be used for managing various types of digital information. However, there are still some types of digital information which need a special approach to avoid inefficiency. The task we are engaged in is storing video files (recorded lectures taught at our university). These video files are usually very large (hundreds of megabytes). It is very inefficient to submit them to DSpace in the classical way because it means to copy them from one place to DSpace assetstore. We have slightly modified DSpace upload procedure to avoid this inefficiency. The modification is based on creating UN*X symbolic links to the video files instead of copying them. As a side effect of this, nobody can submit files from local computer.

Patrick Kremer

Biography

Patrick Kremer was educated as a biologist. He has been working as a neurosciences documentalist from 1992 to 2000 at INIST (French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, a "National Center for Scientific Research" service unit). He joined the Information Systems Departement as a developer in 2000 where he is in charge of the DSpace deployment among other works.

Abstract

Electronic publishing service with DSpace

One year ago, INIST (French Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, a CNRS service unit) constructed a DSpace archive for new electronic journals or online version of existing print journals. Its name was iRevues.

The structure of this service is as follows:

The first step of our work was to convert the Community / Collection system used in Dspace into a periodicals archiving system, i.e. to display journals in "title/volume/number/". The workflow process was unchanged.

The second step was, for some journals, to authorize some people to read these archives. For this we had to insert lists of people in the "e-people" DSpace database. Administrators used an interface that connect to the database and insert list of people with a "can log in" status. We modified also jsp to allow these readers to connect and ask for a password.

Stuart David Lewis

Biography

During his career Stuart has worked in various web application development posts ranging from small start-up companies to multinational companies such as BT and Compaq. More recently he spent two years working for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wales Aberystwyth in the areas of artificial intelligence and then device independent web systems. For the past two years has he worked as the web applications developer for the university's Information Services department. Part of this role has involved setting-up and supporting the university's institutional repository, and project managing the JISC-funded Repository Bridge project.

Abstract

OAI-PMH and METS for automated export of items from DSpace

The JISC-funded Repository Bridge project (http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/bridge/) is investigating the automatic export of items (specifically theses) from Welsh university DSpace repositories to a fedora-based regional repository at the National Library of Wales (NLW). We decided to use established standards to ease installation and maintenance whilst allowing support for repositories that run on other software, such as GNU Eprints.

The NLW uses METS and MODS for the descriptive metadata. The METS crosswalk file provided in the METS-OAI patch for DSpace is a useful starting point for using OAI-PMH for the metadata export. This exports the metadata as XML and the item id contained therein can be used to get the content bitstreams. We found problems with using this file as it stands, so created new METS export code that allowed our OAI crosswalk file to include:-

We have written Java code to automatically perform the import into Fedora, and a Web front end for management of the export system.

This allows the existing arrangement where all research degree theses from Welsh universities are deposited in the NLW to be continued automatically and also allows the NLW to act as a regional hub for the UK Database of Theses being developed by the British Library.

Peter Morgan, Julie Walker

Biography

Peter Morgan is an arts graduate with degrees from Leeds and Sheffield universities in the UK. He has 30 years' experience as an academic librarian, first in Manchester and, for the greater part of his career, at Cambridge University Library. In Cambridge, where he officially holds the post of University Medical Librarian, he is currently working as Project Director on the DSpace@Cambridge project, a collaboration between Cambridge and MIT Libraries to build an institutional repository for Cambridge University using the DSpace platform. The project team also organised the 2005 DSpace User Group at Cambridge in July 2005.

Abstract

Federation and Community Update

Since DSpace v.1.0 was released in November 2002 the DSpace user institutions have grown steadily into a worldwide network of repositories. At the same time the original DSpace vision has developed both in terms of the software platform's technology and in an evolving concept of the purpose of a digital repository.

The DSpace Federation has acted as the informal infrastructure for DSpace users, providing a framework for discussion, sharing of experience, and co-ordination of effort. But as the technology and the policy issues become increasingly complex, so the nature, role, and responsibilities of the Federation have come under scrutiny. Participants at the 2nd DSUG (Cambridge, July 2005) approved a proposal that the governance of the DSpace Federation should be examined by an advisory board set up for the purpose, and that the board should be asked to make recommendations that would help to ensure the sustainability of the open source technology platform and protect the investment that individual institutions have made in DSpace.

This presentation will review significant developments in the worldwide DSpace user community during the past year, and in particular will report on the outcomes of the meeting of the DSpace Federation Governance Advisory Board in March 2006.

Rune Nilsen

Biography

Rune Nilsen has been Deputy Rector at the University of Bergen (2002-2005). He became professor of international health in 1988 and has been employed at UoB since 1974. Nilsen was one of the founders of the Centre for International Health and held the director's position there until 1995. He has held several honorary offices in Norway, internationally and at UoB, and had research stays abroad, including Armauer Hansen's research institute in Addis Abeba. Rune Nilsen is a long-time promoter of Open Access.

Abstract

Making Knowledge Available

Knowledge is a global public good, and universities have a leading role in promoting and protecting it; a mature use of the power of the digital library in knowledge management is a key responsibility of knowledge managing institutions. Only in this context can research reach its international communities, from the leading research environments in USA and Europe to the universities in the developing world. Libraries have always been the stewards of knowledge, and this is a fundamental mandate as we move into the digital age. They have a crucial and active role in the future process of scholarly communication, from providing portal services, access to e-journals and e-books, and, of course, to strive for Open Access on scholarly materials. It is also important to acknowledge that the biggest research challenges and need for knowledge are in the marginalized parts of the world: 90% of the world's population but with less than 10% of the world's research budget at its disposal.

Open Access, therefore, is a fundamental goal for universities themselves; in particular Open Archives are important to enhance global knowledge, high-quality learning and an overall globally meaningful knowledge management environment. We can also see that Open Access and other alternative publishing models, in addition to the increase in availability, also allow for faster and wider dissemination of research results. We will look at all these issues as an introduction to institutional repositories, and how they can help libraries provide the services that will allow them to fulfil their roles in the digital age.

Libraries who are given and take on the challenges of a globally oriented quality knowledge management strategy are the institutional memory and the steady motor for active research institutions. In this way we can combat the threat of academic apartheid.

Obiajulu Odu

Biography

Obiajulu Odu is a Senior Consultant at the IT Department, University of Tromsø Library, in Norway, where he works with the Digital Publishing Services and Research Archive (MUNIN) and related repository projects. Now he is engaged in testing, developing and modifying software for digital libraries and repositories (especially DSpace) to suit local needs. Previously, Obiajulu worked among others to establish Nordlyd (Tromsø University Working Papers on Language and Linguistics) and the University of Tromsø ETD database developed at the Virginia Tech. He earned a Masters of Science in Computer Science from the University of Tromsø.

Abstract

Munin is an institutional digital archive that contains/will contain research work publications at the University of Tromsø, Norway

Customizing the web user interface in Munin using A mouseover tabs menu

The default DSpace install was not ideal for the Munin project; it needed a better presentation of the contents (Search, Browse, My Dspace, etc). We decided to restyle the default menu that comes with default installation of DSpace. The re-styling is essentially moving the DSpace default menu to a mouseover tabs menu. To achieve this, we needed to modify the existing javascript and css files, so that when one moved the mouse over designated links, additional "sub links" appear beneath it; think of it as an inline two level menu. Some of the advantages of mouseover tabs menu compared to default style in DSpace are better utilisation of width/height of a page and minimizing page scrolling syndrome.

Customizing the web user interface in Munin using Tailored pages

The DSpace content is organized around Communities which can correspond to administrative entities such as schools, faculties, departments, labs and research centers. Within each community there can be an unlimited number subcommunities and an unlimited number of collections. Browse by Community/Collection takes you through the communities before getting down to collections within each (sub)community. This might involve a lot of clicking before getting down to a targeted collection. Furthermore, we would like to add new pages to serve other functions in our DSpace installs, and have them pick up the correct layout components. One of the most obvious need is for tailored About pages; the About link is a standard DSpace install takes one to the DSpace home page.

The Munin project decided to add pages to our DSpace, among others to list only collections. This will reduce the number of navigations from home page to any collection. The browser by Collection will list all collections sorted by their document types.

To achieve this, we needed to create a Java servlet, add the servlet name in dspace-web.xml and add some additional message keys and finally new JSPs where necessary. We have implemented both functions.

David Prosser

Biography

David Prosser was appointed the first director of SPARC Europe (an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries) in October 2002. Previously, he spent ten years in science, technical, and medical journal publishing for both Oxford University Press and Elsevier Science. During this time he was involved in all aspects of publishing from production through to editorial and financial management of journals. Before becoming a publisher he received a PhD and BSc in Physics from Leeds University, UK.

Abstract

Milestones on the Green Road to Open Access - Policy and Practicalities

Technical advances have placed us on the brink of a revolution in scholarly communication. The ubiquity of the internet in general and the development of repository software packages (such as DSPACE) and internationally-agreed standards (such as the OAI-PMH) have allowed scholars to share their outputs as never before. However, with some notable exceptions, scholars have not rushed to take advantage of repositories. This is about to change as repositories mature and move from projects to services and as funding bodies and institutions look to develop policies on the dissemination of research outputs. This paper surveys some of the major policy activity around the world and concludes that the coming together of technology and policy mean that we are in the calm before the storm!

William Reilly

Biography

William Reilly joined the MIT Libraries' Digital Library Research Group (DLRG) two years ago as Technical Analyst and Project Manager of the MIT iCampus project CWSpace, archiving MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) to DSpace. After taking his M.L.I.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, William's career has involved work in electronic publishing, software development firms, and technology consulting for web development for Fortune 500 companies, prior to this current position in academic digital library research.

Abstract

Technical Introduction To and Initial Use Of the Lightweight Network Interface (LNI)

The "Lightweight Network Interface" (LNI) is a work in progress to provide (yet) another way to gain networked access to the DSpace application-level API. Initially developed to support the requirement that "Web Services" be used on the CWSpace project (archiving MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) to DSpace), the ensuing vibrant (!) discussion regarding possible technical approaches (SOAP, RESTful, WebDAV, XML over HTTP) led us to define some high level goals for how this new interface ought to be shaped (e.g. platform-neutral; based on mature standards; readily extensible; work with (not replicate) existing remote APIs (SRW, OAI-PMH); comprehensive view of DSpace model; etc.).

Dubbed the "Lightweight" network interface, the intent has been to largely adopt the robust and proven protocols (and "verbs") of WebDAV and HTTP, and to establish a proposed mapping of WebDAV's Resource-centric view onto the DSpace object model. (Note that a set of SOAP methods has also been developed on top of the WebDAV functionality, such that in fact either approach is supported.) The details of the resulting proposed API were posted on a lengthy page to the DSpace Wiki; a "smoketest" Java client to the LNI was posted to the CWSpace Wiki (along with detailed instructions on how to work with SSL and the LNI).

This presentation introduces the technology, the API, the rationale for the approach, and a discussion of the mapping to the DSpace data model as well as example uses of the LNI to DSpace (e.g. submit; disseminate; copy to another collection; list collections; etc.).

Closely related DSpace development activity of the Plugin Manager, Packager Plugins, and Crosswalk Plugins will be addressed briefly as well, as these are used in conjunction with the LNI on the CWSpace project for submission (and dissemination) of IMS Content Packages of OCW content (courseware websites).

Richard Rodgers

Biography

Richard Rodgers joined MIT's Digital Library Research Group in 2003, and has been involved in several DSpace-related research projects, including a NARA-sponsored effort to examine the integration of DSpace with data grids, using SDSC's Storage Resource Broker. His current focus - with the SIMILE project (MIT & W3C) - is to apply semantic web models and technology to DSpace. He is also involved in promoting an open source development community around DSpace. Prior to MIT, he worked in the commercial sector in a variety of software development engineering and managerial positions.

Abstract

DSpace Contributing and Development

With the imminent release of DSpace 1.4, we look at some of the work that has gone on to produce what we hope will be the most stable and feature-full version of DSpace yet. New and interesting features will be introduced, with some discussion as to the contribution and committing procedures that had to be gone through to evaluate and integrate the diverse range of patches from a variety of sources. We recently engaged in the first DSpace 'testathon', which aimed at finding and fixing as many bugs as possible in a high participation real-time all time-zone event covering IRC, the mailing lists, and the wiki. The findings of this event, both in terms of its impact on the community, and its impact on the codebase are discussed. In addition we will look at what it takes to contribute to DSpace, and what is required to become a core developer or committer, with a view to encouraging as many participants as possible to get involved in this side of the project.

Eloy Rodrigues, Ângelo Miranda

Biography

Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the University of Minho Documentation Services. In recent years he has devoted much of his work to the development of digital libraries, education and training of librarians and library users and the study of the scholarly communication system. In 2003, Eloy Rodrigues lead the project to create RepositoriUM - the institutional repository of Minho University, using DSpace, and he has directed the project ever since. At the end of 2004 he drafted the formal policy of Minho University on open access to its scientific output. The other main focus of Eloy's current activity is promoting and advocating Open Access and institutional repositories in Portugal.

Born in 1974, Angelo Miranda graduated from the University of Minho in 1998, with a Degree in Information Management. Since his graduation he has been involved in the developing of software as a system analyst and project supervisor. Over 4 years now, he is the systems administrator and coordinator of the computer services within the Documentation Services of the University of Minho. Since its beginning he is involved in the implementation, administration and monitoring of RepositoriUM, the Institutional Repository of Minho University.

Abstract

Development of usage statistics for RepositóriUM

The usage statistics software developed at Minho University, for RepositóriUM, the institutional repository based on DSpace is presented. The system was developed based on the principles and some of the components of the statistics application created and released by ANU.

Despite the fact that the development was made to respond to the specific needs of RepositóriUM, the system is completely adjustable to other environments, because their components can be easily configured, changed or extended, to respond to different information needs.

The system is composed by 3 main components: Log Processor, Data Model, Web Interface. The first one is responsible for the gathering, real time processing and storing of event logs generated by DSpace. It is composed by different event processors, each one adjusted to a specific event. The second component is the data model stored in a data base management system (DBMS), where the relevant, and properly processed, information is archived. The Web interface is flexible, allowing to configure - according with a base structure -the display of the information in the user interface.

The structure of the system is based in the organization of information in two dimensions: type of information (access, content, administrative) and aggregation level (repository, community, collection, item). These two dimensions are also the base for the definition of user access policies, enabling the definition of different usage profiles.

Statistics are configured and grouped in the system as SQL queries. Their presentation (layout) is constructed with a XML-XSL mechanism that can be configured at the individual query level. Other interesting features of the system are: automatic exclusion of crawlers, detection and processing of the origin (country) of accesses, access permissions at data level (e.g., restrict access to data from one particular community to members of that community).

Elin Stangeland

Biography

Elin Stangeland has been working as a librarian at The University of Bergen Library since 2002, and is one of the administrators of the Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA). She is currently coordinating a collaborative initiative between the University Library, the NHH library and the Bergen University College Library, facilitating the dissemination of research from the various instutions from the BORA interface. Elin also works with advocacy issues and facilitating self-archiving of journal articles.

Abstract

Collaboration in BORA: Three institutions - one interface

The Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) started out as an institutional repository (IR) for the University of Bergen Library. It is now in the process of being extended to also include the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH) and the Bergen University College (HiB). In order to facilitate this we are setting up three DSpace instances which will be available from one common interface. Issues concerning local configuration and policy issues will be discussed.

Jill Walker

Biography

Jill Walker is the Head of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen. Her research is in the field of digital textuality with an emphasis on electronic literature, hypertext and narrative in digital media. Jill was one of the first academics to begin blogging, having started writing jill/txt in 2000. Her publications are availble on her website and (increasingly) in BORA.

Abstract

Researcher point of view

Jill Walker will present a researcher's perspective on BORA, comparing her experience as a researcher contributing to BORA with her experiences in publishing her work on her own website. For several years, Jill has shared her research online at the idea stage, in drafts and as completed, peer-reviewed papers. What differences are there between this kind of unofficial self-publishing and an institutionally sanctioned research archive like BORA? Jill will give some examples of researcher-centric online dissemination and sharing of research and suggest ways in which BORA and other research archives might connect with these.