Accepted Presentations for the Eprints User Group Sessions

Session 1: EPrints Experiences (I)

  • A World-Wide repository: the technical challenge of E-LIS
    Zeno Tajoli, CILEA, Italy

    E-LIS is the largest world-wide disciplinary repository for Library and Information Science. It stores and delivers metadata and digital papers in different Unicode scripts (Latin, Chinese, Greek and others). Contributions come from more than 80 countries in all continents. At present it contains around 4,500 full-text documents. The presentation describes the technical improvements implemented in order to manage linguistic differences in uploading, searching and disseminating contents, and to help the editors share their review tasks according to their country. We conclude with an analysis of the beta version of EPrints 3 against some problems that are still open.

  • Research Funding Agencies: repository requirements to support open access mandates
    Pauline Simpson, National Oceanography Centre, UK

    The last few years have seen a number of research funding agencies worldwide mandate the deposit of publications, resulting from their research grants, into institutional or subject repositories. In the UK, the Wellcome Trust led the way, but in 2006 after a long consultation the Research Councils UK published its Position Statement and each Research Council issued their individual mandates, encouraging or requiring their grantees to deposit full text in open access repositories. Some research councils had existing repositories, others needed to build one. Funders repositories, whilst primarily supporting open access, also wish to exploit the data for other purposes and require more from repository software, than its vanilla version supports. Some examples from a university and a research council exemplar are used to illustrate how mandates and the Ôone record for many purposesÕ advocacy has contributed to bespoke repository software repurposing.

  • "Latest News": Eprints meets Web 2.0
    Anita Coleman and Joseph Roback, University of Arizona, US

    A key Web 2.0 tenet is that users add value and expand the usefulness of the software. Eprints, originally envisioned as software for building a digital repository, is now being extended in many ways by its users. We report on the development of ÔLatest NewsÕ a small feature, we added to our eprints-2.0 based archive, dLIST. Latest News is wildly popular as a social networking tool with the dLIST communities. dLIST is an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional archive for the Information Sciences with about 10 editors who connect the fragmented communities in these related areas. It has become obvious that a News module that is more blog-like whereby multiple editors can post News to stay in touch with their respective communities would greatly enhance our efforts to grow active users for the repository. We are now investigating the development of News as an Eprints 3.0 plug-in. Scholarly behavior, including self- archiving, varies by discipline but features such as News help all scholars to see themselves as active participants not just in repository growth and use but also its design and software development.

Session 2: EPrints Experiences (II)

  • Aquatic Commons
    Stephanie Haas, University of Florida Libraries

    The International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC) is a global non-profit organization that provides a forum for discussion of information issues related to marine and aquatic science. During the last ten years, its members have developed resource sharing mechanisms that support research throughout the world. With an existing Z39.50 Distributed Library that supports interlibrary loan functions, a more comprehensive integrative Aquatic Commons model was developed to address the need for and growth of repositories and harvesters. This presentation will discuss the model and the development of the E-prints Aquatic Commons repository.

  • The Classification of Open Source Software and its Implications for Open Access Research
    Fernando Elichirigoity (University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science) and Cheryl Malone (University of Arizona), US

    The open source/open access movement can be seen as both "pushback" to counter the increasing protection of copyrighted information at the expense of use, even fair use, and as a new mode of production. But as open source software has developed into an industry demonstrating that traditional copyright protection is not necessary to earn profits, other factors have begun to drive the development of new kinds of software, such as EPrints for creating open repositories of information. At the same time, the difficulty of conceptualizing and classifying open source software production apparent in information infrastructures such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) suggests a parallel difficulty in conceptualizing and classifying open access research. NAICS organizes economic data on a principle of "like production processes." For the Information Sector of the economy, as formulated in NAICS, a key production process is the acquisition and defense of copyright. With open source, copyleft licensing eliminates copyright acquisition and protection as major production processes, suggesting that the open source software industry warrants a separate NAICS category. Similarly, the open access movement presents its own challenges in terms of appropriate categories and metrics, and it's not clear that traditional copyright and open access can coexist in the scholarly publishing industry, despite evidence from ROMEO (romeo.eprints.org) that many publishers allow self-archiving. In this presentation we will analyze the intertwined historical development of EPrints software and EPrints repositories in an effort to suggest the implications.

  • Preservation Services: External Expert Support for EPrints Managers
    Jessie Hey, University of Southampton. UK

    "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a repository in possession of a good collection of digital objects, must be in want of a preservation solution." Finding the best prospect for long-term preservation is quite as taxing for a repository manager as it was for Jane Austen's characters. The complete range of digital preservation activities is complex and is likely best managed by specialists Ð preservation service providers - and unfortunately we donÕt yet know what a preservation service provider looks like. This presentation shows the work of the JISC PRESERV project in developing the beginnings of a cross-platform preservation service for digital repositories. In conjunction with The British Library and The National Archives, the first of a planned portfolio of preservation tools was deployed through the Registry of Open Access Repositories to demonstrate the utility of Preservation Services to EPrints (and other) repository managers.

Session 3: EPrints Training (I)

  • EPrints Tutorial
    • How to Configure EPrints
    • Description of EPrints Capabilities
    • Walk Through the EPrints Configuration Files

Session 4: EPrints Training (II)

  • EPrints Hands-on Exercises - Bring a laptop!
    • Branding with Confidence
    • How to Make New Views and Searches
    • How to Manage New Kinds of Digital Object for Deposit
    • How to Manage New Metadata Requirements
    • Configuring the Deposit Workflow

Session 5: Official Launch of EPrints 3.0

  • EPrints 3, walkthroughs and user demos including:
    • Streamlined eprint deposit and management interface
    • Comprehensive multimedia deposit types
    • Auto-completion of author & journal names for metadata quality enhancement
    • Full eprint audit history to support preservation applications
    • Comprehensive import and export facilities via RSS, BibTeX, EndNote, METS, OpenURL ContextObjects, XML, spreadsheets etc.
    • Support for Web 2.0 data facilities - e.g. Google Maps, Timelines etc.

Session 6: Official Launch of EPrints 3.0

  • EPrints 3, the technical issues
    • Installing a new EPrints v3 repository
    • Upgrading from v2 to v3
    • Customisation and personalisation of deposit workflow
    • Support for third party plugins
    • Improved XML native import/export format
    • Programming applications with Web Services