Our library has done a little bit of this.
Several years ago, we managed an installation of OJS (Open Journal System) to host an online journal for which one of our faculty was the editor. We subsequently set up OJS for a student organization's publication as well. Those started out in the library, but eventually migrated to our IT folks.
The library has a non-campus server with a regular commercial hosting company to use for ventures that our IT department doesn't want to deal with, and we've used that for other campus entities as well, such as a faculty member who wanted a WordPress installation for one of her research projects. We also host the WordPress site for our student newspaper on that server.
In all of these cases, the library has command-line access to the servers and the other campus users only have access to the admin web layer of OJS, WordPress, etc.
I've talked with and offered to help some of our digital humanities researchers to set up more involved projects involving custom software and database management, but so far I haven't had any takers.
Ken
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Companjen, B.A.
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2016 11:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] University libraries supporting research databases/websites?
Hi,
I'm probably thinking about this too hard, but perhaps someone can shed a different light on this so here goes :)
We are investigating if and how me and my colleagues at the university library's Centre for Digital Scholarship, in cooperation with central IT, should support researchers who want to present and possibly collaborate on their research data on the web. In the past researchers received little to no support and resorted to SharePoint (with support, but limited possibilities) or setting up a website on a department server, paying an external developer or putting a PhD student in charge. Some chose to use another institution's project website, others may have used a home server.
I'm looking for examples of (university) libraries that provide support for hosting websites centered around data(bases), hoping to get answers for questions like:
· how do you collaborate with researcher and IT?
o do you help build websites or just guide the researcher through the IT department's offers?
o do you collaborate closely with IT to provide this service?
· do you offer managed websites in which the researcher has some degree of freedom to do anything she wants?
o e.g. offer webhosting with a control panel like DirectAdmin/cPanel/… access and 'package manager' like Installatron/Scriptalicious?
o e.g. offer a small range of software packages like WordPress, Omeka, MediaWiki, … and database management like phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin?
· what kind of support would you offer for researchers' existing custom built websites and/or databases if the owner wants to transfer control to the library?
Of course there won't be a single simple solution for all situations. For database hosting with a web UI we looked at the Online Research Database Service<http://ords.ox.ac.uk/index.xml>, but the University of Oxford are phasing out the service and will stop supporting the (open source) software. We are building an Islandora repository for various library collections and in some cases it might serve as virtual research environment too, but it isn't a natural fit for e.g. actively used relational data.
Thanks for your help!
Ben
Ben Companjen
Digital Scholarship Librarian
Centre for Digital Scholarship, UBL
Universiteit Leiden
Witte Singel 26/27, kamer 025
Postbus 9500
2300 RA Leiden
Telefoon +31 71 527 88 58
E-mail [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
https://twitter.com/bencomp
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