RepoMMan : delivering private repository space for day-to-day use

In the spring of 2005, the University of Hull embarked on the RepoMMan Project, a two-year JISC-funded endeavour to investigate a number of aspects of user interaction with an institutional repository. The vision at Hull was, and is, of a repository placed at the heart of a Web services architecture: a key component of a university's information management. In this vision the institutional repository provides not only a showcase for finished digital output, but also a workspace in which members of the University can, if they wish, develop those same materials. The RepoMMan Project set out to consider how a range of Web services could be brought together to allow a user to interact easily with private workspace in an institutional repository and how the Web services might ease the transition from a private work-in-progress to a formally exposed object in the repository complete with metadata. Three key decisions had been taken before the project proposal was submitted and will not be further discussed here: that open source software should be employed for the project, that the Web services should be orchestrated by an implementation of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and that the Fedora repository software should be used

Technical report

A summary of the technical sessions during the OAI4 workshop: what's new about OAI, OAI-PHM, identifiers and repository interoperability

The CLIF Project : the repository as part of a content lifecycle

At the heart of meeting institutional needs for managing digital content is the need to understand the different activities that the content goes through, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation. Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point. Different systems can be involved at different points: one of these may be a repository. To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they thus need to be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle. In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one system. The JISC-funded CLIF (Content Lifecycle Integration Framework) project, which concluded in March 2011, was a joint venture between Library and Learning Innovation (LLI) at the University of Hull and the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London. It undertook an extensive literature review and worked with creators of digital content at the two host institutions to understand how they would like to deal with the interaction of the authoring, collaboration and delivery of materials using three systems used within Higher Education institutions that are targeted at the management of digital content from different perspectives and for different purposes: the Fedora Commons repository software, Microsoft SharePoint, and the virtual learning environment, Sakai. Each of these systems addresses a range of lifecycle stages in the functionality provided; yet they were not designed to encompass the whole lifecycle. Armed with this background information, the project team went on to design and produce software that would allow the transfer of digital content between the systems to meet lifecycle requirements: Fedora and SharePoint, on the one hand, Fedora and Sakai on the other. The CLIF software has been designed to try and allow the maximum flexibility in how and when users can transfer material from one system to another, integrating the tools in such a way that they seem to be natural extensions of the basic systems. This open source software is available for others to investigate and work with. This article draws on several of the pieces of documentation produced by the project

UK open access life cycle

In the centre circle, we have used the 7 stages of the publishing process as described by Neil Jacobs (Jisc), this is followed by institutional processes – of course not all institutions will have all of these processes up and running, e.g. we don’t all have a CRIS. We then included publisher services that directly impact upon the work of the open access team and also Jisc OA services. We then went on to map Jisc OA and above campus services to the life cycle – doing this we immediately found an issue with Publication Router, which is why we have included it twice, once where it currently affects the life cycle and once where we think it should sit – at point of acceptance. Finally, we added the 6 sections of OAWAL showing where we think that fits with the life cycle

From Hydra to Samvera: An open source community journey

The Hydra Project started in 2008 through a partnership between the University of Hull, the University of Virginia, Stanford University and Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace) to create tools that support use of the Fedora digital repository. Hull adopted the software outputs from this collaboration for its institutional repository in 2011 and remains an active Partner in the community, serving on the Steering Group and fostering development of the community and software in the UK and mainland Europe: The community now has 35 formal Partners and over 70 known adopters internationally. In June 2017 Hydra changed its name to Samvera, Icelandic for 'being together', to recognize the value gained from multiple institutions working together to create the underlying common basis upon which multiple different repository solutions have been implemented. Samvera can be adopted through a set of tools to develop your own repository (using a package called Hyrax as the starting point) and is also available as a complete repository solution, hosted or local, through the use of Hyku. The community has been at the heart of making Samvera a success, and will continue to underpin its future direction

Building the Hydra together: Enhancing repository provision through multiinstitution collaboration

In 2008 the University of Hull, Stanford University and University of Virginia agreed to collaborate with Fedora Commons (now DuraSpace) on the Hydra project. This project has sought to define and develop repository-enabled solutions for the management of multiple digital content management needs that are multi-purpose and multi-functional in such a way as to allow their use across multiple institutions. This article describes the evolution of Hydra as a project, but most importantly as a community that can sustain the outcomes from Hydra and develop them further. The data modelling and technical implementation are touched on in this context, and examples of the Hydra heads in development or production are highlighted. Finally, the benefits of working together, and having worked together, are explored as a key element in establishing a sustainable open source solution

Building the ‘Digital’ Library: Routes to Managing our Institutional Digital Learning, Teaching and Research Assets Together

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014General Track Papers and PanelsThe session was recorded and is available for watching (this presentation starts at 0:25:15)As libraries are evolving they have to consider more and more how they adapt their services to meet the demands of managing digital resources, and gain the benefits from these. This adaptation is primarily focused on resources sourced from outside the library, as the shift to the network level gathers pace for many library services. Digital repositories have emerged as part of library operation over the past decade. In managing local resources within these systems, repositories have the potential to evolve into full digital equivalents of libraries. This presentation describes the case for such a role and, through work carried out by a Working Group of the Northern Collaboration in the UK, describes the investigations into how repositories need to evolve to take on this role. The case is made for collaboration as a route for sharing this work, and also enabling institutions to overcome institutional limits that can affect purely local development. A vision will be outlined for a future digital library and how repository development can underpin this.Awre, Christopher Louis (University of Hull, United Kingdom

Hydra to Samvera

Poster presented by Chris Awre, University of Hull - Hydra to Samvera

Making repositories work through collaboration (in all its guises)

Presentation at RepoFringe 2018 - Making repositories work through collaboration (in all its guises) by Chris Awre, Head of Information Services, University of Hul

The open access tube map

The HHuLOA project has combined its four UK open access life cycles for libraries, research managers, researchers and publishers to create one set of workflows, which we have called the open access tube map. This is version 1.0, we may add more as we receive feedbac