DSpace – institutional repositories – dissemination of research results: A local case study

DSpace is an open source software package intended for creating digital archives. It is primarily used as a platform for open access repositories and it enables (1) archiving various types of documents in a variety of digital formats and describing them using a standardized set of metadata; (2) searching the repository content (metadata and full-text content, in case of textual documents); (3) importing and exporting the repository content and (4) disseminating it via OAI-PMH. At the administration level, it is possible to assign and control user roles and access to metadata and deposited documents. The platform is customizable and it is available in multiple languages (community translations). The software package is developed and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by the non-profit organization Dura Space. DSpace is the most commonly used repository software: 43% of all repositories registered in OpenDOAR use DSpace as the platform. DSpace is also the backbone of Serbia’s (still underdeveloped) repository infrastructure, which heavily relies on a number of DSpace instances installed, customized and maintained by the Computer Centre of the University of Belgrade. These are namely the national repository of PhD theses (NaRDuS) and institutional repositories of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and three research institutes of the University of Belgrade. This case study deals with the institutional repositories established and maintained by the Computer Centre of the University of Belgrade. It presents the challenges faced during the processes of customizing the software platform, ensuring interoperability and integration with major international open science infrastructures, devising standardized workflows and procedures, and training administrators and users – librarians and researchers. The established institutional repositories serve as a powerful research dissemination platform, especially in those disciplines where print publications in local languages still prevail

Building scalable digital library ingestion pipelines using microservices

CORE, a harvesting service offering access to millions of open access research papers from around the world, has shifted its harvesting process from following a monolithic approach to the adoption of a microservices infrastructure. In this paper, we explain how we rearranged and re-scheduled our old ingestion pipeline, present CORE's move to managing microservices and outline the tools we use in a new and optimised ingestion system. In addition, we discuss the ineffciencies of our old harvesting process, the advantages, and challenges of our new ingestion system and our future plans. We conclude that via the adoption of microservices architecture we managed to achieve a scalable and distributed system that would assist with CORE's future performance and evolution

Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report

The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library. The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located. A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world. The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are: The British Library University administrators (registrars) Graduate students and recent PhDs Librarians Institutional repository managers Other e-theses services including: DART-Europe DiVA DissOnline Australasian Digital Theses Theses Canada Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations The EThOS tea

Digital Curation and the Citizen Archivist

The increasing array and power of personal digital recordkeeping systems promises both to make it more difficult for established archives to acquire personal and family archives and less likely that individuals might wish to donate personal and family digital archives to archives, libraries, museums, and other institutions serving as documentary repositories. This paper provides a conceptual argument for how projects such as the Digital Curation one ought to consider developing spinoffs for archivists training private citizens how to preserve, manage, and use digital personal and family archives. Rethinking how we approach the public, which will increasingly face difficult challenges in caring for their digital archives, also brings with it substantial promise in informing them about the nature and importance of the archival mission. Can the Digital Curation project provide tools that canbe used for working with the public

Engaging with the Dory Fleet: A Panel Discussion on a Collaborative College and Community Oral History Project

This peer-reviewed program was presented at the annual Northwest Communication Association Conference in Coeur d’Alene Idaho on April 15, 2016. The presentation features an overview of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project and includes detailed notes from each speaker. Special thanks go to Mary Beth Jones and Brenda DeVore Marshall, who served as transcriber and editor for the detailed speaker notes

HopScotch - a low-power renewable energy base station network for rural broadband access

The provision of adequate broadband access to communities in sparsely populated rural areas has in the past been severely restricted. In this paper, we present a wireless broadband access test bed running in the Scottish Highlands and Islands which is based on a relay network of low-power base stations. Base stations are powered by a combination of renewable sources creating a low cost and scalable solution suitable for community ownership. The use of the 5~GHz bands allows the network to offer large data rates and the testing of ultra high frequency ``white space'' bands allow expansive coverage whilst reducing the number of base stations or required transmission power. We argue that the reliance on renewable power and the intelligent use of frequency bands makes this approach an economic green radio technology which can address the problem of rural broadband access