Transcript Implementing an institutional repository: management, organizational and cultural issues ___________________ Pauline Simpson and Jessie Hey TARDis Project University of Southampton University of Bergen Visit 25 Mar 2004

Implementing an institutional
repository:
management, organizational and
cultural issues
___________________
Pauline Simpson and Jessie Hey
TARDis Project
University of Southampton
University of Bergen Visit
25 Mar 2004
The Passion and the Pain
• Passion =
enthusiasm, committed, motivated…
• Pain
issues
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Policy Decisions
Management / Organizational Issues
Cultural Issues
Lessons learned
Southampton’s way
Southampton University Institutional
Repository
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk
• TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Disclosure and Dissemination)
• Set up with HEFCE/JISC funding to Jan 2005
• Other UK Universities :
Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow,
Nottingham (CURL), Edinburgh, Bristol, London Univs : Imperial,
UCL, SOAS, Kings College etc
• JISC FAIR Programme – Focus on Access to
Institutional Resources
– ways in which university output can be made freely available
- more accessible, more rapidly
– Built on rapid progression of the Open Access movement –
IRs part of the solution
– IRs part of the building block of e-Research
Policy Decisions (Pre) – 1
• Informed by environmental assessment –
– Personal and school websites, research survey
– Variety of practices – to build on, assist with, not to destroy
– Research reporting – IR can offer a real support
• e-Print Archive (full text) vs Institutional Repository –
– is it specific media (postprints or preprints of refereed journal
articles) or a record of all organisational output;
• Responsibility level if IR –official record, definitive
• Decision informed by
• Scope
– What to deposit - potentially all organisational output (research,
educational, and administrative)
–
– Southampton – all Research Output, but not learning objects or
administrative documents (at present)
– Current research and/or legacy literature?
Who can deposit?
What size of footprint?
Policy Decisions – 2
• Database/s?
–
depending on scope will all document types be included in
one database or a separate database for different document
types or organisational unit?
Southampton building one database for ease of maintenance
and upgrade but close collaboration with individual schools to
meet their needs
Nottingham has a Theses database separate from its e-Prints
database
Glasgow has three separate databases: Published and peer
reviewed academic papers, Pre-Prints and Grey Literature and
Theses (and uses three different softwares!)
Policy Decisions - 3
• Software
– which software to choose? Now a selection:
GNU EPrints,
DSpace, CDSWare, Fedora, I-ToR, MyCoRe, MPG eDoc, ARNO.
• Or will you write your own!
– Open Archive Initiative compliance essential to make repositories
interoperable and searchable
• TARDis Project working with GNU EPrints (developed at
Southampton) and feeding experience back into software
development (eg improved underlying structure in recent new
version)
Research Deposit Types – rationalized (13 to 8)
Policy Decisions – 4
• Resources
– Team
• Technical support is v. important – you will want to customize
software (skills – Perl, MySQL for GNU EPrints; Java for DSpace)
• Strong Advocacy, Admin
• TARDis – 2FTE (+ support of academic library staff)
– Hardware – server – size and growth
– Funding – business model, project, core library budget
• Stakeholders/Partnerships
– Who owns the activity, who leads?
– Southampton – external liaison, researchers, research support office,
library, planning and marketing, Information Systems all involved in
parts of research dissemination
• Uses
– what other services available from IR. Likely buy-in if value added is
offered. Consider: education agenda, e-Publishing, Knowledge
Management, Preservation, Research Assessment Exercise
Research Assessment Exercise Collection
draft interface
Management and Organizational Issues - 1
• Deposit options
– Researcher self deposit and /or assisted deposit
– Southampton experience indicating a need for Fast track – deposit
the file without supplying metadata
• Metadata quality
– Ensuring quality and rich metadata is labour intensive – to what
level?
• Mandatory metadata fields
– Sufficient to produce a citation?
– Too many a barrier to deposit – as low as possible
• DSpace/MIT = 3, Soton = document dependent
Management and Organizational Issues - 2
• Digitization
– Will you offer to scan hard copy if electronic not available
• Figs often only available this way
• File formats
– What file formats will you accept
– Southampton accepts all (but…). Formats requiring special
viewers – ensure viewers available eg.
Postscript/Ghostscript.
– Nottingham accept only pdf
– Will you offer file conversion service.
• Conversion can alter content format
• Word should be converted
– Southampton - Word files are archive only
Management and Organizational Issues - 3
• Preservation guaranteed?
– No definitive answer – projects and Digital Preservation
Coalition
• Southampton – ‘secure storage’
• MIT offer preservation options - mission
• Only full text database or a publication
database?
– Accept non full text records?
• Policy linked to organizational needs
• Copyright
– Will you actively seek permission to deposit papers
– RoMEO Publishers Copyright policies
• http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
Management and Organizational Issues - 4
• Deposit Agreement and Use Agreement
– Important to define for both depositors and users
– Legal document?
– Acceptance by click or proceeding through
• Withdrawal of records, access etc
• Plagiarism
• Quality assurance
– Not of the content – peer pressure
– Appoint editors at school/department level
Cultural Issues - 1
• ADVOCACY –
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Dedicated responsibility within the team
Sensitive to organizational culture and background
Enthusiast
Presentation and debating skills
Community size
• Busy researchers, huge task to convince all
• Sheer size of exercise to visit all schools
• Logistics – pilots before full introduction
– Ocean and Earth Sciences, Social Sciences, Education, Physics and
Astronomy
– Strategy
– Identify stakeholders, management committees - who are the
policy makers that can make it happen – need high level champions
–need to be convinced
Cultural Issues - 2
• Prior art
– Do researchers already deposit in a subject archive eg
computer science, economics, physics, education?
– Does a publications database already exist?
• import data?
• Copyright
– Real concern of researchers
– University Legal Affairs Office
Cultural Issues - 3
• One record – for many purposes
– Funding proposals, Research Assessment Exercise, research
reporting, CVs, personal and school web pages
• Positioning – where to place access to the Institutional
Repository
– Access through Library website, main web site,via School websites?
– Southampton developing School ‘views’
• Branding
– Schools/departments want their own branding
Some key lessons learned
•
Choose optimum time to introduce new service or adapt to
circumstances –
– Challenge - Southampton restructuring emphasised need for any new service
to save time rather than imposing extra tasks!
– Database introduced with new structure – moving target
•
Last version not always stored by author – often not totally digital –
figures may be hard copy or text + figures held separately – need to zip
files etc
– Author may have publisher’s journal version
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Peer review, impact factors, citations are paramount to many
– until alternate scientometric measures available – Citebase offers citationranked search service for freely available text.
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Full range of research output significant to others
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Some disciplines are often not so IT familiar
– eg what is a pdf?
– will receive tailored support
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Assisted deposit and quality control can be extremely time consuming
Providing a value added service?
• Researchers are less interested in institutional visibility or profile
and open access issues
– want services to save them time with research related admin
• Our feedback showed a growing need to develop (in order to be
able to offer) value added services such as export to a web
page, cv, funding proposals and reporting, group research
visibility
• Import facilities may be necessary for established departmental
databases or where subject based deposit is common
• Useful to offer a fast track deposit alternative –somebody else to
do it (although might be research office, secretarial, library or
database support)
Southampton’s Practical Steps
• Choice of deposit options including full mediation
• Accepting variety of file formats – discipline specific –
but thinking about easy dissemination versus
preservation
• Some conversion offered – would like automatic
conversion tools (eg CERN conversion service)
• Copyright permission – advising and encouraging
rather than proactively seeking permission
Southampton’s Way Forward
• Anticipate migrating to an Institutional Repository of
publications (= Research Soton) with full text where possible,
from solely e-Print Archive (full text)
– current copyright precludes all output being full text
– a bigger task but required and more effective in the long
term?
• Research Output (perhaps linked to data) – but keeping abreast
of developments with learning objects or administrative
document initiatives
• Shared use of other JISC projects outcomes and services vital to
success eg RoMEO copyright project
• Harvested by global and national search services
– Oaister: 3,045,063 records from 268 institutions
– ePrints UK
TARDis
e-Prints Soton
A national vision: ePrints UK
ePrints UK architecture
www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk
Global Service provider - find the pearls
And Google!
Towards a vision of joined up
research – IRs at the hub
Diagram from eBank UK project
On to Les Carr , Electronics and
Computer Science – developers of
EPrints software
TARDis
http://tardis.eprints.org/
e-Prints Soton http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/
Pauline Simpson
Jessie Hey
Tim Brody
Natasha Lucas
Les Carr
Project Manager
Researcher, Advocacy
Technical Support
Admin Support
Technical Advisor