Open Repositories 2012

This year's Open Repositories conference was held in the wonderful city of Edinburgh, where a number of our Cottage Labs partners live or spend some of their time. This week-long event combined community-run workshops on the Monday and Tuesday morning, the main event on Tuesday through to Thursday, and User Group meetings for DSpace, EPrints and Fedora on Thursday and Friday. Gruelling but thoroughly enjoyable!

We contributed this year in a number of ways:

Open Access Repository Registries: unrealised infrastructure

Richard presented the results of some work from last year on OARRs which he and Malcolm carried out along with UKOLN and Key Perspectives to investigate the current usage and potential of the existing Open Access Repository Registries (OpenDOAR and ROAR in particular).

SWORDv2 solution for Norwegian master's thesis submission portal

Kristian from the University of Oslo (DUO project) and Richard co-presented on an update of our work from that project, where we have now developed a SWORDv2 compliant deposit interface embedded in Norway's national student management interface. There was considerable interest in this from the audience; not just from other Norwegian institutions who will be able to take advantage of the work, but also from other countries and institutions who are interested in similar kinds of integrations for their own systems.

FacetView+SWORD IT!

This year Mark and Richard entered the developers' challenge with a focus on bringing researchers closer to their repositories without them even noticing. They used JavaScript widgets embedded on pages that researchers /do/ use, in order to connect them to their repositories. We'll do a more detailed blog post about the entry soon!

As well as presenting our own work, we also went to many sessions to catch up on the state of the art. These are our picks of the event (presentations should become available soon on the conference website):

DSpace developers and DCAT meeting

A full day on Monday spent catching up with our friends in the DSpace developer community, committers group and the DCAT (DSpace Community Advisory Team). Lots of new goodies coming up in DSpace 3.0 to be released later this year (including enhancements to SWORDv2 developed in the DUO project).

OER: Workshop: Multi-repository Deposit to OER and IR at the Same Time

OERPub API for Publishing Remixable Open Educational Resources (OER)

Both run by Kathi Fletcher and her team from the Shuttleworth Foundation/Rice University, this was a great opportunity for us to see some of the cool work that has been going on with SWORDv2 outside of the remit of the project itself. We're very excited to see that SWORDv2 this year at OR12 has been a persistent theme, and Kathi and her team are in the vanguard of this work.

Cameron Neylon's plenary address

What more needs to be said? Cameron was, as usuall, eloquent and persuasive in his arguments for Open Access, presenting a view based on financial incentives and business cases which should appeal to a more senior management focussed audience.

SWORDv2 Pecha Kucha, Stuart Lewis

Stuart did a great job of presenting the SWORDv2++ work in this short presentation slot. It was a great disappointment that the conference organisers did not regard this work on SWORDv2 as worthy of a main-track presentation, so he was unable to expand on the detailed analysis and recommendations that the project made, but go and check out the [report (upload to media)] and you'll get the flavour.

Building an institutional research data management infrastructure, Sally Rumsey

We do quite a bit of work with the University of Oxford, particularly around Data Management Planning and Data archiving (through the OxfordDMPOnline and DataFlow projects), so it was great to see Sally presenting us with an overview of how the all the pieces (including, but also way beyond the projecs we are involved in) fit together.

Contributions for DSpace 3.0 and Tutorial on configuration & Usage of DSpace Configurable Workflow, @mire

The annual update from @mire on the incredible things they've been doing with the DSpace platform since the last Open Repositories conference. Among those things, the configurable workflow system which is part of DSpace 1.8.2 was covered, and looks to be a very valuable extension to the software. We're certainly thinking about ways that we can put it to use!

Surfacing Google Analytics in DSpace, Claire Knowles

Claire's presentation was moved to a different slot at the last minute, which meant that it probably didn't get the audience it deserved. Showing us in very simple terms how effectively you can gather and present your usage metrics via Google Analytics, you can see how researchers would like it, and thus hopefully engage more with their archived research outputs.

Conference dinner and Ceilidh

No write up of the conference would be complete without mention of the spectacular dinner and dance at the National Museum of Scotland. A wonderful building, great food, and exhausting Ceilidh dancing into the wee hours. Also spotted were JISC's Balviar Notay and Glasgow's William Nixon showing us all how it is done:

Looking forward to seeing you all next year on Prince Edward Island!