• http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2009/11/03/part-1-of-2-report-on-depost-deposit-tool-show-tell-meeting-2009-12-10/
• http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2009/11/03/part-2-of-2-evaluation-of-the-deposit-tool-show-and-tell-features-and-flows-of-deposit/

In the midst of the afternoon sessions there where a few of us with an interest in learning materials (and particularly Open Educational Resources) who had a think about what might be different about a tool for depositing learning materials in a repository (Rory McNichol, Richard Davies, Julian Tenney, Pat Lockley, Phil Barker, J.M.Gray, Antony Corfield and myself). In our discussions we didn’t talk that much about mechanisms but focused more on the features that such a tool might require. [Subsequently Phil has blogged an inital view on the possible deposit/ harvest mechanisms http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/philb/2009/10/28/feed-deposit/ – his post is about the questions we need to address now; this post and our discussions on the day looked at the what next question]

Our short list of possible differences centered, not on technical diferences as much on the importance of context. In particular the context of the use of the learning material. We thought that future developements should look not only at the deposit of a learning material but also consider the ongoing ‘deposit’ of usage information in some form- allowing the repository to gather feedback about the resource. From this point, it’s fair to say that our conception of a deposit veered somewhat towards including elements of a repository interface (tool or otherwise) that would allow discovery and ongoing data excahnge about a learning material. As such the following isn’t so much of a requirements specification as a trying to pin down information from the user or other systems that would help improve how learning materials are managed and accessed.

Our shortlist of key features was:

• richer user profiles both for depositors and users
• resources to include a link to the source/ master object
• import asset plus usage info (such as which courses it’s used for) from VLE
• import asset plus usage info (such as comments and tags) from Web 2 tools
• need support for instituional management and release of assets

Having written this I’m very aware that SWORD works because it’s so simple. Partly this is because putting papers into repositories is, mostly, a one directional technical process [it is of course a much more interactive social/ political / administrative process] and SWORD has been very careful to limit in what it is trying to do. Consequently any work in this area looking to expand the scope of deposit tool/ repository interface functionality should be very cautious in adding mandatory extras. However, feedback and usage information are becoming increasingly important for scholarly communciations and data sets are likely to prove to be much more interactive resources (in a similar way to learning materials) as how they’re being used is key information). In a similar way institutions (as well as authors) are increasingly becoming the creators and/or distributors of resources so the ‘corporate’ deposit interface is likely to become more prominent.

Our discussion created more questions than answers in my mind, but it’s clear that, however deposit tools develop, we’d like them to be able to capture more context, but that this has to be done in lightweight ways that reuse rather than recreate information – we’ve had complex standards that ask for this type of information for a while but we have always asked users to input it.

Our full discussion is pictured below.

Notes about features of a repository deposit tool for learning materials

Fedora

(in the process of writing I’ve noted that indepth coverage of most of the Fedora items can be found on the fedora Hatcheck newsletter blog: http://www.fedora-commons.org/resources/newsletter.php )

Recent/current development

• A new version of the rest api has been developed by the Fedora community
• An updated Muradora front end.
  “The Muradora project aims to develop a web front-end for Fedora repository and to re-factor Fedora authentication and authorization into pluggable middleware components.” Some of this security work is likely to become part of fedora proper
  https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/MURADORA/Muradora
• Islandora – new drupal based front end
  http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/ISLANDORA/Islandora
• An update of the fedora GSearch service plugin ( full text indexing) http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/hatcheck/2008/02/27/fedora-gsearch-20-release-takes-advantage-of-lucene/
• Plug-ins for popular applications are under development (wikis, zotero, MSWord)

Developments (preOR09)

• improve out of box administrative gui – move towards a web-based gui
• improved api for backend storage (akubra api)
• This is linked to discussions with DSPACE, ePrints on a common storage abstraction to develop a
• Pluggable storage sub-system integration.
• Support for SWORD 1.3

Longer term developments

• Work on webdav – to lower ingest barriers by supporting drap and drop
• More enhanced content models
• Active Fedora (based on/ similar to active record in Ruby
• Hydra – working towards an out of the box Fedora to support faculty create/store object directly; longer term support for more complex arrays of digital objects. http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project

duraspace: DSpace and Fedora collaboration

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/hatcheck/2008/11/11/dspace-foundation-and-fedora-commons-receive-grant-from-the-mellon-foundation-for-duraspace/
Moving to sharable module development – the initial project will be the development of storage module. The investigation of possible durable storage service layer (broker) offering: pluggable storage, ‘Cloud’ storage, ‘interCloud’- university offered storage services

DSpace

Jim Downing presenting an update on DSpace at Dev8D but (afaik) most of what he presented either realted to the work on duraspace mentioned above or is now part of the new 1.5.2 DSpace release. The details of this release have been summarized by Stuart Lewis’s blog post http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2009/04/15/dspace-152-whats-
in-it-for-me/. A few of the new things from his highlights are:

• Support for SWORD 1.3
• “Shibboleth support has been added.”
• More refined ldap integration options
• support for uketd_dc and exposing it via OAI-PMH (out of the box)
• export tools have been improved

ePrints

ePrints is now around 10 yrs old and despite close ties to the Open Access movement, ePrints is also developing support for the gamut of institutional processes. In particular, it’s developing greater support for statistics, research management, and better desktop integration.

ePrints are planning to have beta version of ePrints 3.2 by or09 . Key updates planned for this release:

• metadata values can now be resolvable references not just literals.
• extendable data types – will support CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) out of the box.
• integration of work of IrStats project – stats and citations improvements to system.
• Support for a tiered storage layer plugin. http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/02/cloud-researcher-and-repository.html

Edit: a fuller list of updates in this release is available http://wiki.eprints.org/w/New_Features_Proposed_for_EPrints_3.2

Microsoft

Microsoft Research’s team working on repositories and scholarly communications have produced a number of free tools based on Microsoft products (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx). I’ve talked about the Creative Commons plugin before but they’ve also developed beta versions of an ejournal service, a document conversion service, an onotlogy plugin for word, a research information centre (with the British Library), they’ve worked with the ePrints to develop a windows-based version of ePrints, and a research repository.

Version 1 of the research repository is going to be formally released at workshop at OR2009 (https://or09.library.gatech.edu/workshops.php). Work on related tools for the desktop and mobile devices is planned after this launch.

The debate about free / somewhat open tools built on commercial products is a separate issue but it’s worth remembering that most insititutions are going to have and support all the required comercial software anyway – irrespective of what the repository software they consider (I’ll come back to this in another post).

Microsoft also have released some of their development tools to education. In an initiative called dreamspark users can download full versions of Microsoft development software under an academic license. Computer Science departments have had this sort of deal for a while but the two good things about this are: it’s open to any student/ academic and it’s no longer a ‘mediated’ rather it uses shibboleth and your own institutional login to verify status.

Developer happiness days http://www.dev8d.org/ was a week long JISC-sponsored event organised by David Flanders and Andy McGregor. It set out to bring “together the cream of the crop of educational software developers along with coders from other sectors, users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.” The event was a  success and its own blog http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/ contains short profiles of some of the development projects that sprung up and interviews some key developers in the domain. As I’m more of a user than a programmer I attended the two community days of dev8D. The first day I went to a session on virtual learning environments in the morning and a session on repositories in the afternoon. The second day was also about repositories with updates and plans from four repository systems (ePrints, DSpace, Fedora, and Microsoft’s ‘Famulus’) – I’ll blog about that day and the updates and plans of the other repository systems separately.

VLE session

The vle session kicked off with three mini case studies from members of the vle teams at Birbeck, Imperial, and LSE who are using Blackboard, WebCT->Blackboard, and Moodle respectively.  The presenters talked about the different integration or development issues ongoing in their institution. There was then some general discussion and demos of Blackboard 9 and Sakai. The session identified three key areas for development (one from each presenter but fitting the experience of those present as a whole); these are:

• support for anonymous marking;
• automation of enrollment (at module level/ integration with registry systems);
• integration with learning object repository.

There was one development team in the room but they were already working on their project – SpACE tool- blackboard Api and IMS tools interoperability specification being codebashed by team from Edinburgh, Strathclyde, and Blackboard. See http://spvsoftwareproducts.com/powerlinks/space-w/ for more details.

Repositories session

The afternoon session on repositories went quite differently with Les Carr steering us to think about repository heresies, and question the current norms within the repository community. There was a lively discussion which ended up clustering around a couple of key themes: the problem of managers shaping development, the problem of the paper-based format, and the opportunity of preservation. The discussion roughly went as follows:

The problem of managers shaping development

As institutional managers, driven by new models of research assessment or demonstrating value, become more interested in statistics there is a risk that development of repository software may be skewed to focus on support for reporting functions at the expense other, more critical, development [such as functionality to support content ingest, content visibility, and end user services]. There was a general concensus that, in part, this concern is obviated as long as the repository provides suitable APIs and access. Much of the data needed for institutional reporting should be able to be provided to external applications – the repository software itself doesn’t need to be customised to include these functions.

The problem of the web-based format

There was a clear feeling that repositories are still tied to paper-based formats; organisationally and technically they are not particularly suited to web-enhanced documents and born digital/linked documents. This is not to say that they can’t cope with such documents, but that thy don’t cope with them well and inevitably stifle their richness. Participants noted that there needs to be revolution in publishing to create web native publications. One area where this is beginning to happen is in the repository-supported linking of datasets and publications. There is, however, an even greater potential to enhance articles through supporting better facilities to link articles and comment inline.

The opportunity of preservation

Throughout the discussion there seemed to be an ongoing thread about the role of repositories in preservation. This touched on many areas including the problems with pdfs (both as a web-based format and as a preservation format) and the possible role for repositories in overcoming difficulties in preserving wiki’s and some web2.0 content. There was a sense in which the underlying thread of this was that a repository is more of a state of mind than a particular piece of software. An institutional repository should be able to change between products or switch between all-in-one repositories and suites of tools without fundamentally changing what it does.

demos

• ePrints Soton demomonstrated a javascript plugin that automatically scans a webpage for citations and creates previews from an identified repository on the fly
• a research community in the humanities which using wordpress was demonstrated http://ap0riasofar.wordpress.com/ (I think it’s providing a forum for discussion around bits of data but I’m not exactly sure; the site’s about page linked to a youtube video but the video has been removed…)
• Indirectly splashurl was demonstrated – this creates a shortened url or QR code and displays it in a large font on the webpage for projection splashurl.net

reflections:

vle session

The presentations were interesting but there was perhaps a slight mismatch as, at least initially, the presenters were speaking to the audience as if we were developers. Unfortunately developers were thin on the ground in our session as it suffered from being in parallel not only with a strand on OPACs but also with the Dragon’s Den event for developers, as a result I suspect our session had many more users/ vle administrators than developers.

repositories session

Our discussion about repositories kept returning to preservation. Although I think this is a vital role that repositories and there is much to discuss about how well repositories preserve stuff, I feel very uneasy about the dominiance of this idea and its apparent status as the key use case. Questions about repositories, preservation, and learning materials is a blog post in its own right but my concern with preservation as the use case for repositories is, in part, simply that it doesn’t sell particularly well, it’s really quite unproven,  and frankly we’ve had the idea of a single key use case before with Open Access (which was hardly mentioned in the discussions). The reasons repositories (in the technical and organisational sense) work is that they don’t just do one thing. They may provide the basis for initiatives for any of the following: open access, preservation, institutional research management, knowledge management, asset management and storage, and new forms of publication.

Having expressed that concern, I’d note that the discussion about the role of repositories in archiving web2.0 and web native publication formats was really useful and reinforced the idea that repositories may be maturing to the point where theyare able become part of the background/ institutional infrastructure.

A wordle of my tweets during the repository session is available http://tinyurl.com/b5wncy

I’m glad I was at dev8d but arriving as the coding at the event tailed off meant I missed much of the frentic bar camp atmosphere and, as it worked out, saw very little of coding projects in progress. I can appreciate why the dragon’s den wasn’t open but hope that any future events find a way to showcase the projects in progress a bit more. As it was much of the coding seemed to pass the Thursday’s events by.