Eprints and the Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between eprint repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, eprint repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. In this article I present a brief survey of OAI eprint repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from eprint repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). I then discuss several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of eprint archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.Comment: 13 page

Moving data into and out of an institutional repository: Off the map and into the territory

Given the recent proliferation of institutional repositories, a key strategic question is how multiple institutions - repositories, archives, universities and others—can best work together to manage and preserve research data. In 2007, Green and Gutmann proposed how partnerships among social science researchers, institutional repositories and domain repositories should best work. This paper uses the Timescapes Archive—a new collection of qualitative longitudinal data— to examine the challenges of working across institutions in order to move data into and out of institutional repositories. The Timescapes Archive both tests and extends their framework by focusing on the specific case of qualitative longitudinal research and by highlighting researchers' roles across all phases of data preservation and sharing. Topics of metadata, ethical data sharing, and preservation are discussed in detail. What emerged from the work to date is the extremely complex nature of the coordination required among the agents; getting the timing right is both critical and difficult. Coordination among three agents is likely to be challenging under any circumstances and becomes more so when the trajectories of different life cycles, for research projects and for data sharing, are considered. Timescapes exposed some structural tensions that, although they can not be removed or eliminated, can be effectively managed

Using semantic indexing to improve searching performance in web archives

The sheer volume of electronic documents being published on the Web can be overwhelming for users if the searching aspect is not properly addressed. This problem is particularly acute inside archives and repositories containing large collections of web resources or, more precisely, web pages and other web objects. Using the existing search capabilities in web archives, results can be compromised because of the size of data, content heterogeneity and changes in scientific terminologies and meanings. During the course of this research, we will explore whether semantic web technologies, particularly ontology-based annotation and retrieval, could improve precision in search results in multi-disciplinary web archives

A digital library for the University of York

The University of York has recently launched a project to set-up a multimedia repository service for the University?s research resources, both those produced out of and used within research. This project is being given a kick-start by funding from the JISC repositories and preservation programme start-up and enhancement strand, under the name SAFIR (Sound Archive Film Image Repository). Institutional repositories are growing in number within the UK and offer a variety of services, such as asset management, dissemination, preservation. For multimedia, research data and other resources, institutional-level stewardship is quite new. Often such resources are managed, or mismanaged, on a Departmental or personal level, or alternatively by large data centres and data archives. With the possible demise of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), York is among institutions faced with a duty to find a safe, secure and long-term home for a large collection of image materials. We would like to submit a poster to Open Repositories 2008 to cover some of the challenges we face in building a repository for non-text resources

Conducting a Self-Assessment of a Long-Term Archive for Interdisciplinary Scientific Data as a Trustworthy Digital Repository

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 03:00 PM – 04:30 PMLong-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information is paramount to the future of science and scholarship. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities representing various scientific and scholarly disciplines. However, meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository presents challenges to ensure that archived collections will be discoverable, accessible, and usable in the future. Assessing whether scientific data archives meet the requirements for trustworthy repositories will help to ensure that todayâ s collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify improvements needed to become a trustworthy repository for managing and providing access to interdisciplinary scientific data by future communities of users. Recommendations are offered for archives of scientific data to meet the requirements of a trustworthy repository.NAS

OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Archive Managers v1.0

OpenAIRE gathers together research output related to European funding streams, with the aim of supporting open science and tracking research impact. This content consists of open access publications and related contextual information such as datasets, supplementary material, and research/project information. Two other sets of OpenAIRE guidelines exist for repository managers: OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories 3.0 OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS systems (CERIF standard) – In draft The OpenAIRE Guidelines for Data Archive Managers 1.0 provides instruction for data archive managers to expose their metadata in a way that is compatible with the OpenAIRE infrastructure. The metadata from data archives should be included in the OpenAIRE information space, and exposed when data are related to an open access publication e.g. a dataset cited by an article. By implementing the OpenAIRE Guidelines data archive managers are facilitating the creation of enhanced publications and building the stepping-stones for a linked data infrastructure for research. Exposure and visibility of content from a range of European repositories will be significantly increased when a common and interoperable approach is taken and care to adhere to existing guidelines. OpenAIRE is happy to assist in adherence to these guidelines. This compatibility will lead to future interoperability between research infrastructures, and structured metadata is of benefit to individual data repositories and the scholarly community at large

OpenAIRE guidelines: supporting interoperability for literature repositories, data archives and CRIS

Paper presented at the: CRIS2014: 12th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (Rome, May 13-15, 2014)OpenAIRE – Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe – is moving from a publication infrastructure to a more comprehensive infrastructure that covers all types of scientific output. To put this into practice an integrated suite of guidelines were developed with specific requirements supporting the goal of OpenAIRE and the European Commission. This poster outlines the OpenAIRE Guidelines, highlighting the set of guidelines for Literature Repository Managers, for Data Archive Managers and for CRIS Managers.The work presented in this paper has been developed under the OpenAIREplus Project (Ref No: 283595) of the EU-funded FP7- INFRASTRUCTURES Programme