Richard and I are at RepoFringe, and I have been working on a little tool to demonstrate our approach to increasing engagement with digital repositories, digital publishing, and open scholarship in general.
We have been working on ways to collect up links to and information about scholarly publications, and in the process, we have developed tools that enable us to easily collect up large sets of data and make them easily available, not only on a site that we control, but on any site to which the content may be relevant.
There will be further demos of this taking place at RepoFringe, but the main point of this particular demo is to show how quick and easy it can be to do useful things with relevant open data. As RepoFringe runs concurrently with the Edinburgh Fringe, I decided to get hold of data about the Fringe and see what we could do with it. So, I have taken that data and slung it into our tools, and now I can make it available where relevant.
For example, here:
(only tested in firefox, known not to work in opera yet; find events on near RepoFringe by filtering by venue_name Assembly George Square and dates 20110803, 20110804,20110805, for example)
And more usefully, on the RepoFringe website!
http://rfringe11.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2011/08/03/liveblog-final-notes-on-day-1-networking-hackathon/
(Unfortunately at short notice, we could only embed via iframe, so it may not display too well; but the concept remains.)
This is relevant to repositories because it demonstrates a way of taking content and making it available and interactive directly at the point where it is most useful - instead of taking content and putting it in a store that sees little traffic. Whilst putting it in the store is no bad thing (and has benefits like helping us keep stuff safe), engaging people with those stores will always be difficult - like trying to get someone excited about the contents of your spare cupboard.
Instead, what we must do is use the power of our stores - the fact that they are connected online - to maintain valuable content for the long term, and show off that content in places where people are already looking - the pages of our websites, and the publications we write. Our spare cupboard can also be our shop window - but we should not make our cupboard look like a window - we should put the cupboard in the window.
Thus, this challenge entry is an attempt to show how we can take interesting content and make it interactively available directly in places that people are already looking. Whilst doing this with the contents of the Fringe catalogue makes for a good topical demonstration, we can do the same with content that is a tad more serious and useful on a longer term scale. I will demonstrate that further during RepoFringe pecha kucha talks and afternoon activities, using these same tools in the context of open bibliography.
