Thanks for highlighting the work we are doing with the ACErep project. I thought it would be useful to share one or two of the issues we have encountered and that have, for the time being, stalled progress and perhaps ask for some feedback from the community.

The project, as you note, is looking at selective deposit and cross-search of the various repository platforms used by the ALPS partners. The approach we have been exploring is to use a 3rd party service to selectively harvest institutional repository content using OAI-PMH and develop a bespoke portal to search that aggregated metadata. Initially I hoped to link in with the national UKOER infrastructure by utilising Jorum but the national repository does not currently offer OAI-PMH harvest or an Open API though it is possible that both will be developed in the future.

In fact, we have now developed a search prototype using Xpert at the University of Nottingham which both supports OAI-PMH and offers various flavours of open API. (There may be issues of sustainability, however, as the main developer from the project is moving to another post.)

In order to achieve the deposit side of things we hope to develop Stuart Lewis’ EasyDeposit but this has run into (hopefully surmountable) problems at an institutional level in that the software requires various server settings including write permissions that we are negotiating with our IT services to grant.

More importantly, perhaps, there are ongoing issues with SWORD and OAI-PMH implementation from the repository platforms at some of the partner institutions…

Even if all these problems can be ironed out I’m acutely aware that this approach is rather complex with lots of components and processes that might break and we should, perhaps, be aiming to “keep it simple”…?

Nick