** Apologies for cross-posting **
Please note that the deadline for hotel registration and early
conference registration is December 22nd. The user group meeting
programs are now posted on the website at http://
www.openrepositories.org
Sayeed
Sayeed Choudhury
Associate Director for Library Digital Programs
Hodson Director of the Digital Knowledge Center
Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
[log in to unmask]
Preview of the Open Repositories Conference 2007, January 23-26, 2007/
San Antonio, Texas
<http://openrepositories.org/>
Last January the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
gathered visionaries for the first time in Sydney < http://
www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/> to share information about
how Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints repositories were changing the nature
of scholarly and commercial information communities of practice. The
upcoming Open Repositories Conference will bring user communities and
others a step closer to understanding the pivotal role that
repositories play in the emerging information landscape.
Institutions such as universities, research laboratories, publishers,
libraries, and commercial organizations are creating innovative
repository-based systems that address the entire lifecycle of
information—from supporting the creation and management of digital
content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information,
to ultimately ensuring long-term preservation and archiving. Open
Repositories 2007 (OR07) will bring global stakeholders together
again to discuss the challenges inherent in the conference tagline,
“Achieving Interoperability in an Open World.” What are the policy
issues that are implied in an open world? What are the technical
challenges in achieving interoperability across heterogenesous
repositories and related services? How can advanced repository-based
systems enable the collaborative processes around “e-science” and
scholarly communication? What are the challenges in enabling users
to discover and access information across distributed repositories?
What does open access to content mean across cultures? These are just
some of the questions that attendees will ponder during the three-and-
a-half day conference scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San
Antonio, Texas.
Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints User Group meetings will be held on Jan.
23 and 24, followed by combined conference plenary sessions on Jan.
24, 25 and 26. The conference reception and poster session will take
place on Jan. 24.
James Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the
University of Virginia, and Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for
Technical Computing, Microsoft, will discuss the opportunities and
challenges in making human knowledge accessible and interoperable in
an open world in keynote addresses on January 24 and January 26.
The Conference plenary program focuses on presentations in six
categories that offer new ideas and solutions for online
collaborative science and scholarship, along with insights into how
to manage policy and decisions for the creation and preservation of
distributed institutional knowledge <http://openrepositories.org/
program/presentations>.
Management Strategy and Policy
The ARROW Project at 3 years: Looking Backwards, Aiming Forwards.
< http://arrow.edu.au/>
Since 2003 Arrow has been funded by the Australian Commonwealth
Department of Education, Science and Training to identify and test
solutions for best institutional repository practices. Andrew
Treloar, Monash University, will offer an analysis of how their
objectives have evolved, views on repository technology then and now,
software development issues, and implementation decisions culled from
three years of practice using Fedora.
How the Principles and Activities of Digital Curation Guide
Repository Management and Operations
< http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/>
Leslie Johnson, University of Virginia Library, will share four
overarching principles of digital curation that have been successful
in making it easier to build trusted discovery and delivery services
and tools for the use of digital objects. Principles for Selection,
Principles for the Use of Standards, Principles for Trustworthiness,
and Principles for Preservation and Sustainability are local
principles that have provided a model for the creation of collection
development policies, the identification of service goals for a
repository and related policies and activities.
CURATOR: Its Developmental Strategy
< http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/curator/index_e.html>
How do you enable indexing of Japanese character strings for
searching? This presentation describes practical and strategic
approaches adopted by Japan's first institutional repository launched
by a university library–Chiba University's Repository for Access to
Outcome from Research (CURATOR).
Preservation
Policy Frameworks for Institutional Repositories
As repositories begin to federate and interoperate at a large scale,
the inability to express local policies as part of the context of the
digital collections becomes more problematic. MacKenzie Smith, MIT
and Reagan Moore, SDSC, will report on work by the MIT Libraries and
the University of California, San Diego Supercomputer Center on the
PLEDGE project (PoLicy Enforcement in Data Grid Environments). The
project is funded by the US National Archives and Records
Administration.
Using OAI- PMH Resource Harvesting and MPEG- 21 DIDL for Digital
Preservation
< http://www.modoai.org>
To successfully preserve a web site, its resources must be crawled
and the structure and relationships among the resources must be
maintained. Joan Smith and Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University,
propose involving the web server in the preservation process through
“mod_oai”, an Apache module to harvest a web site packaged with its
associated metadata thereby contributing to its long-term preservation.
CRiB: Preservation Services for Digital Repositories
< http://crib.dsi.uminho.pt/>
The active lifespan of digital materials is much longer than the
lifetime of individual storage media, hardware and software
components, as well as the formats in which the information is
encoded. As hardware and software become obsolete, digital materials
become prisoners of their own encodings. Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice
Baptista, and Jose Carlos Ramalho from the University of Minho,
Portugal will present the CRiB recommendation service that is
designed to help institutions determine optimal migration strategies
within a range of choices to preserve authentic materials.
User Services and Workflow
Making Fedora Easier to Implement with Fez–A Free Open Source Content
Model and Workflow Management Front-end to Fedora
< http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/>
The University of Queensland, Australia has developed Fez, a world-
leading user-interface and management system for Fedora-based
institutional repositories, which bridges the gap between a
repository and users. Christiaan Kortekaas, Andrew Bennett and Keith
Webster will review this open source software that gives institutions
the power to create a comprehensive repository solution without the
hassle.
Real-time Duplicate and Plagiarism Detection
< http://arxiv.org/ >
While electronic access to documents provides unprecedented
opportunity for plagiarism, it also provides an unprecedented
opportunity to automate the detection of plagiarism. Simeon Warner,
Cornell University, will describe the implementation and the
underlying algorithm of a service to compare the full-text of each
new submission against all existing submissions in real-time used in
managing the arXiv.org repository. ArXiv contains over 390,000
articles, and will grow by more than 10% in the next year.
An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Repository Librarians: Their
Experiences of Usability
< http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/cgi-bin/library>
The usability of current repository software and its tools is largely
unknown when it comes to understanding whether they are adequate and
appropriate for the tasks performed by repository managers. Sally Jo
Cunningham, Dave Nichols, Dana McKay and David Bainbridge from the
University of Waikato, New Zealand, will share their observations
based on their ethnographic study of local librarians who support the
inclusion of new material in institutional repositories.
Semantic Web and Web 2.0
Realizing the Role of Digital Repositories in Educational
Applications: Supporting Content and Context
< http://teachingboxes.org/>
DLESE Teaching Boxes are customizable, digital replicas of the
traditional collections that most educators create, store (in boxes),
re-use and improve on during their years of teaching. Huda Khan and
Keith Maull from DLESE: Digital Library for Earth System Education,
will review development of the Teaching Box Builder application and
discuss questions raised with respect to repository integration with
real-time Web 2.0 technologies as well as how this application design
provides support for educators’ creation and adaptation of
pedagogical content and context.
Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project
< http://simile.mit.edu/>
Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content
is found in and among new repositories--is each repository an island
or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic
Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments)
has developed an extensive 'tool chain' for gathering and
manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT,
will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be
used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery,
exploration, and curation of metadata.
The BibApp–Enabling Rapid Repository Population
< http://oscp.library.wisc.edu/response.html#libraries>
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries recently launched the
Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing (OSCP) and uses
BibApp to consolidate campus directory information with citation data
gathered by librarians, departments and research centers into a
single online interface. Eric Larson will describe how BibApp alerts
OSCP to content that may be suitable for fast “mashup” repository
ingest. OSCP has prepared 1,200+ papers for ingest using BibApp.
Interoperability
The OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE) Initiative
< http://www.openarchives.org/ore/>
There are numerous examples of the need to re-use objects across
repositories in scholarly communication. Carl Lagoze, Cornell
University and Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory,
will discuss the ORE (Object Re-Use and Exchange) Initiative that
seeks to implement an interoperable fabric consisting of service
interfaces shared across repositories, and some shared
infrastructure. Repository federation efforts such as aDORe, CORDRA,
the Chinese DSpace Federation, DARE, and Pathways (NSF IIS-0430906)
suggest that such object re-use is achievable and will create the
building blocks of a global scholarly communication federation in
which each individual digital object will fuel a variety of
applications.
Repository Deposit Service Description
< http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx>
Rachel Heery, Julie Allinson, Jim Downing, Christopher Gutteridge and
Martin Morrey, UKOLN, University of Bath, will update attendees on a
three-year UK program that is developing repository infrastructure
aimed at increasing open access to scholarly material, while
improving management of assets in higher education institutions. This
effort is designed to ensure that the emerging network of JISC (Joint
Information Services Committee) Digital Repositories is well
populated with content. They will present their work towards defining
a lightweight Common Repository Deposit Service Description.
An Analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows
This presentation will set out the preliminary results of a study for
a cross-section of the diverse repository developments ongoing in the
United Kingdom. To date, over 80 scenarios and 20 use cases have been
collected covering contexts such as: delineating the community
dimensions of learning object repositories, depositing geospatial
data, storing versions of content in a repository, developing
metadata workflow in a laboratory repository holding research data,
and adding digital rights information. Mahendra Mahey, Rachel Heery,
Julie Allinson and Robert John Robertson UKOLN, University of Bath,
will present the methodology developed to collect, compare and
analyze scenarios, use cases and workflows for the identification of
common functional internal components and interactions with external
services in the information landscape.
e-Science and e-Scholarship
The Eprints Application Profile: A FRBR Approach to Modeling
Repository Metadata
Julie Allinson, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of
Bath, present recent work on developing a Dublin Core Application
Profile (DCAP) for describing 'scholarly publications' (eprints).
They will explain why the Dublin Core Abstract Model is well suited
to creating descriptions based on entity-relational models such as
the FRBR-based (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records)
Eprints data model. The ePrints DCAP highlights the relational nature
of the model underpinning Dublin Core and illustrates that the Dublin
Core Abstract Model can support the representation of complex data
describing multiple entities and their relationships.
EsciDoc–a Scholarly Information and Communication Platform for the
Max Planck Society
< http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html>
Digital libraries have become tools for everyday work. But are they
ready for e-Scholarship? Scholarship produces additional types of
information that are not curated by traditional libraries such as
primary data, simulations, informal results, and annotations.
Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe, will discuss eSciDoc, a joint project
of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe that will create a next-
generation platform for communication and publication in research
organizations.
ChemXSeer: A Chemistry Web Portal for Scientific Literature and Datasets
ChemXSeer portal is designed to be a hub for research in chemistry by
facilitating search and access to both scientific literature and
experimental datasets, while bridging these information sources in a
unified framework. Levent Bolelli, Xiaonan Lu, Ying Liu, Anuj
Jaiswal, Kun Bai, Isaac Councill, Prasenjit Mitra, James Z. Wang,
Karl Mueller, James Kubicki, Barbara Garrison, Joel Bandstra and C.
Lee Giles, Pennsylvania State University, will present an overview of
ChemXSeer, a portal for academic researchers in environmental
chemistry that integrates scientific literature with experimental,
analytical and simulation result datasets. The hybrid repository of
ChemXSeer will be comprised of information crawled from the web,
manual submissions of scientific documents, and user submitted
datasets as well as scientific documents and metadata provided by
major publishers.
Advance registration for the conference is open until December 22,
2006. More information including an at-a-glance conference schedule
and plenary, keynote and user group session descriptions is available
at <http://openrepositories.org/>.
