Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

Overlay journals, repositories and the evolution of scholarly communication

This paper examines the part overlay journals can play in developing new roles for repositories in the scholarly communication process. This requires that we answer some outstanding questions about the overlay journal model: · How are overlay journals distinct from other overlay services and other journals? · What business models are applicable? · What opportunities do overlay journals offer to repositories? And, perhaps most importantly: · What value can an overlay journal bring to the process of scholarly communication? As a result of the answer to the first of these questions, this paper gives a definition of an overlay journal as an entity that performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities. It finds that the overlay journals that already exist use a variety of business models, which means that repositories can engage with overlay journals in many different ways. Research and practice show that overlay journals offer new possibilities for publishers, repositories, authors and readers alike, and as such have a great deal to offer to scholarly communication

Protocols for Scholarly Communication

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has operated an institutional preprint repository for more than 10 years. The repository contains over 850,000 records of which more than 450,000 are full-text OA preprints, mostly in the field of particle physics, and it is integrated with the library's holdings of books, conference proceedings, journals and other grey literature. In order to encourage effective propagation and open access to scholarly material, CERN is implementing a range of innovative library services into its document repository: automatic keywording, reference extraction, collaborative management tools and bibliometric tools. Some of these services, such as user reviewing and automatic metadata extraction, could make up an interesting testbed for future publishing solutions and certainly provide an exciting environment for e-science possibilities. The future protocol for scientific communication should naturally guide authors towards OA publication and CERN wants to help reach a full open access publishing environment for the particle physics community and the related sciences in the next few years.Comment: 8 pages, to appear in Library and Information Systems in Astronomy

A national showcase

Gordon Dunsire updates us on the development of IRI-Scotland, the national digital library that aims to be a showcase of Scotland's research activity

Case study: managing open access with EPrints software

Recent additional open access (OA) requirements for publications by authors at UK higher education institutions require amendments to support mechanisms. These additional requirements arose primarily from the Research Councils UK Open Access Policy applicable from April 2013, and the new OA policy for Research Excellence Framework eligibility published in March 2014 and applicable from April 2016. Further provision also had to be made for compliance with the UK Charities Open Access Fund, the European Union, other funder policies, and internal reporting requirements. In response, the University of Glasgow has enhanced its OA processes and systems. This case study charts our journey towards managing OA via our EPrints repository. The aim was to consolidate and manage OA information in one central place to increase efficiency of recording, tracking and reporting. We are delighted that considerable time savings and reduction in errors have been achieved by dispensing with spreadsheets to record decisions about OA

An introduction to overlay journals

An overlay journal performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities. This paper offers a briefing on the contribution overlay journals can make to scholarly communication. It explains what ‘overlay’ services are, how overlay journals have evolved and what makes their contribution to scholarly communication so valuable

Web-based support for managing large collections of software artefacts

There has been a long history of CASE tool development, with an underlying software repository at the heart of most systems. Usually such tools, even the more recently web-based systems, are focused on supporting individual projects within an enterprise or across a number of distributed sites. Little support for maintaining large heterogeneous collections of software artefacts across a number of projects has been developed. Within the GENESIS project, this has been a key consideration in the development of the Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR). Its most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross project global views of large software collections as well as historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR is widely adopted and various steps to facilitate this are described

Kerala Libraries Network (KELNET): a Proposal

Visualizes the conceptual framework and propose the development of a Kerala Library Network (KELNET) by exploring and exploiting the available and the existing social infrastructures, social softwares, open standards and technologies