Supporting the 'Sharing Institution' - Practical Steps Towards a More Open Teaching and Learning Culture

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PresentationsDate: 2009-05-19 03:00 PM – 04:30 PMInstitutional repositories for research output have developed progressively over the last few years. Although a primary motivation is Open Access both institutional and academic needs must also be met in order to foster this spirit effectively. There is now a greater emphasis on creating a more open culture for teaching and learning and institutions are again beginning to play their part more readily. On a larger scale, there are pioneering global examples of courses being preserved and complex learning materials being deposited in national and international databases. But what does fostering a more open culture in the practice of teaching mean for the institution itself and its academics? The virtual learning environment has given greater opportunities for effective administration of courses but in other ways it has had the opposite effect on sharing and re-use. There is potential for institutional solutions which are complementary to the global landscape. In this paper we report on the practical experiences and issues met, in setting up a institutional resource, EdShare, as a vehicle for sharing educational materials more easily in a multi-disciplinary institution. With constructive feedback from faculty, within the EdSpace project, EdShare has migrated into a more visual, web 2.0 style, resource with a flexible deposit process promoting 'micro-sharing'. It now offers a range of sharing options to support the teaching workflow in an encouraging atmosphere. Other features will support the growing emphasis on multidisciplinary teaching and collaboration - both internally and externally.JIS

Quality and quantity : tackling real issues in an institutional research repository

The TARDis project has examined and tackled many practical issues in scaling up from the current individual departmental scholarly communication practices towards an active institutional research repository. This repository must, of necessity, serve a variety of goals for a wide spread of disciplines. We illustrate the steps that have helped move the University of Southampton's institutional research repository into a key position within the university's research strategy for both visibility and reporting. We demonstrate the practical activities being developed to manage research assessment in conjunction with the EPrints software. These balance others which we show help fulfill the broad vision of disseminating all research output. These steps are enabling the visions of open access and institutional repositories to come closer together in a constructive fashion

Advocacy in practice: some thoughts from the TARDis Institutional Repository Project

This presentation draws on experiences in the JISC funded TARDis project in developing advocacy and collaboration activities with faculties while developing the multidisciplinary University of Southampton Research Repository - e-Prints Soton. Although these experiences can act as an exemplar to the KULTUR project, the KULTUR project is also initiating other archives with a specific emphasis on the Creative Arts and so future activities will need, in a similar way, to fit their own institutions and discipline cultures

Building Quality Assurance into Metadata Creation: an Analysis based on the Learning Objects and e-Prints Communities of Practice

This paper challenges some of the assumptions underlying the metadata creation process in the context of two communities of practice, based around learning object repositories and open e-Print archives. The importance of quality assurance for metadata creation is discussed and evidence from the literature, from the practical experiences of repositories and archives, and from related research and practices within other communities is presented. Issues for debate and further investigation are identified, formulated as a series of key research questions. Although there is much work to be done in the area of quality assurance for metadata creation, this paper represents an important first step towards a fuller understanding of the subject.

PRESERV (PReservation Eprint SERVices)

This poster explores outputs, outcomes and benefits of the PRESERV project http://preserv.eprints.org.PRESERV (PReservation Eprint SERVices) - a JISC funded project investigating and developing infrastructural digital preservation services for institutional repositorie

Fast flows the stream: tackling the workflow challenge with the University of Southampton Research Repository

Setting up an institutional repository (IR) is just the beginning. The next challenge is to respond to evolving university needs while building on the repository’s core vision. Embedding a repository involves engaging with key processes and academically driven deadlines. We illustrate the ramping up and enhancement of workflows, in 2006, to respond to the initial UK research assessment commitments at the University of Southampton. This task included training and managing a growing team for metadata validation and enhancement, creating new tools to manage a large input buffer and negotiating a variety of practical input processes to tight deadlines. It required a sensitivity to current practices in diverse departments. The great benefits were a closer interaction with all the disciplines and a recognition of key library contributions to a complex process. The School of Humanities required a more specific effort with itsmore varied metadata and research outputs.A core library team - working with Computing Services, EPrints Services in Electronics and Computer Science, administration and the academic schools - provided a coherent focus on the target. Each school is now represented in the IR and, as the workflow calms down, the concentration is now on how to build on these relationships using the library liaison team and evolving procedures to maintain the momentum towards achieving the best representation of the university’s output. There can now be a renewed emphasis on opening up access to text, images and audio and facilitating the repurposing of bibliographic information for personal services.<br/

Turning the Web into a Library

It is often supposed that an electronic library is synonymous with a database: a closed world with strict access to only the materials inside the database. The World-Wide Web, by contrast, is an open environment with many participating sites but no enforced control and therefore no guarantees of data permanence or consistency. In this paper we compare the advantages of the open- and closed-world views in terms of two systems which embody them, and describe an Electronic Libraries project which is taking advantage of the open perspective

Citation Linking: Improving Access to Online Journals

The most innovative online journals are maturing rapidly and distinctive new features are emerging. Foremost among these features is the hypertext link, popularised by the World Wide Web and which will form the basis of a new, highly integrated scholarly literature. Journal integration in this instance seeks to recognise, extend and exploit relationships at the level of journal content-the papers-while maintaining some of the familiar contexts, in some cases journal identities, that define the content hierarchy and inform decision-making by readers. Links are a powerful tool for journal integration, most immediately in the form of citation linking. The paper reviews examples of citation linking in practice, and describes a new system, a link service, which is being developed to support novel and flexible linking mechanisms on the Web. One application of this link service is the Open Journal project, which is working with journal publishers to investigate the most effective ways of applying these powerful link types to enhance online journals