If you plan on attending ECDL 2007 (or even if you haven't made up
your mind yet), consider signing up the half-day tutorial called
"Creating a more full-featured institutional repository: Combining
DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool". For more information, see the URL and
details, below:

   http://www.ecdl2006.org/tutorial6.jsp

BTW, ECDL is a great conference. It a wonderful place to catch-up on
and learn more about the most recent advancements in the development
of digital libraries. 'Well worth the time.


   * Title - Creating a more full-featured institutional repository:
Combining DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool.

   * Abstract - DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool are all well-respected
systems designed to facilitate aspects of an institutional
repository. Each have their own particular strengths and weaknesses,
but none of them are perfect. By exploiting the OAI data repository
features of each system the developer is able to amalgamate their
content, automatically classify it, cache it centrally, and provide
sets of enhanced services against the cache. Building on the
strengths of each system developers are able to provide a more full-
featured institutional repository system. The primary goal of this
tutorial is to outline the benefits and drawbacks of such an
implementation, demonstrate how it has been implemented at the
University of Notre Dame, and discuss how it can be implemented with
other software components. By the end of the tutorial participants
will be able to: highlight the problems IR systems are expected to
solve, be able to compare and contrast three IR systems, address meta-
data issues regarding the organization of information in IR systems,
state the advantages of amalgamating IR content into a centralized
cache, discuss ways these same ideas can be implemented with a
variety of software.

   * Duration - Half day

   * Experience level - Intermediate

   * Outline - The problems institutional repositories are trying to
solve - What is an institutional repository, and what problems is it
intended to solve? What qualities characterize successful
institutional repository implementations? The group answers to these
questions become the benchmarks for evaluating the success of
repositories.

Functional overview of DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool - Each of these
applications have strengths and weaknesses. This section will
enumerate them and in the process compare and contrast the applications.

Developing an over-arching information architecture - In order to
create a synergistic whole from the three repository applications it
is necessary to apply aspects of information architecture to the
systems - aspects of users, context, and content. This section will
focus on the content issues and elaborate upon methods of logically
organizing it using a faceted classification system.

Using OAI to harvest content and cache it centrally - At first, this
seems like the easy part. Point your harvester at the repository and
save the output locally. After a bit of examination, issues regarding
homogeneity and variations in OAI compliance come into play and
adjustments need to be made. This section describes some ways to
address these issues.

Creating user-centered services against the cache - This is the fun
part. Here we provide services against the cache. Searching (via
SRU). Browsing. What's new? services. Syndicating content to campus
portals. Syndicating content via RSS. Creating dynamically generated
Web pages listing author publications. Calculating Google page rank.
Each of these things will be described in more detail.

Discussion of other ways the same things could be implemented - The
implementation of Notre Dame uses specific tools to accomplish its
goal. By exploiting protocols, not specific applications, these tools
could easily be changed out for other tools. This section discusses
these issues and provides an opportunity for participants to
brainstorm other ways these techniques could be employed in their
institution.

   * Biographical sketch - Eric Lease Morgan is the Head of the
Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the
University Libraries of Notre Dame. He considers himself to be a
librarian first and a computer user second. His professional goal is
to discover new ways to use computers to provide better library
service. Some of his more well-known investigations and
implementations include MyLibrary and the Alex Catalogue of
Electronic Texts. An advocate for open source software and open
access publishing, Morgan has been freely distributing his software
and publications for years before the terms "open source" and "open
access" were coined. Morgan also hosts his own Internet domain,
infomotions.com.


--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame