A repository song

This was my first attendance at the Repository Fringe (#rfringe11) and as mentioned previously, I was there with the JISCrte portfolio of 6 projects, which featured in the programme on day 2 and delivered presentations on the progress and activities of their repositories take-up and embedding projects.

One of the JISCrte project partners, Robin Burgess from the Glasgow School of Art, delivered his presentation via the medium of…SONG. A link to Robin’s performance will shortly be available and I will make a link to it from this posting once it has been released! UPDATE 30/08/2011 – ‘Repository song’ is now available from here.

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Image courtesy of eurovision_nicola's photostream [http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurovision_nicola/6010558301/

I thought this event was excellent and some of the innovative and interesting projects and initiatives really do require further exploration. Personally I found the following really interesting, and it was a new initiative to me:

FigShare – a permanent research data storage and sharing platform founded by Mark Hahnel. For use by researchers worldwide, FigShare aims to improve science and avoid duplication by encouraging all data to be shared, including negative results.

The stated ethos of FigShare is:

“Unless we as scientists publish all of our data, we will never achieve access to the sum of all scientific knowledge.”

All the event videos and presentations will shortly be made available by the event organisers, and I think they will be linked to from here.

Social and mobile: a threat to open access?

Online Information 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/5224484862/

This week, I’ve been at Online Information 2010 so managed to avoid the heavy snow at home. As a presenter, I had a free place so fortunately was able to stay for the whole three days. However, for a blogger this creates a problem – what do I include and exclude! So instead of trying to do that, I just want to focus on the theme highlighted by the keynote speaker, Dion Hinchcliffe, in his talk entitled “Network Shock: How the dominance of social and mobile are remaking life and business”.

RSP Winter School

Armathwaite Hall

The RSP Winter School will be held from 9th – 11th February 2011 at Armathwaite Hall in Cumbria. This is a three day residential course which aims to provide a varied programme addressing topics related to repository management.

The programme includes: Keynote address from Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford, updates on projects relevant to repositories, in depth workshops on embedding repositories and measuring performance/demonstrating value andpreservation.

Further details and booking are available here.

ISKO-UK Conference on Linked Data

Yesterday I attended the ISKO-UK one-day conference on Linked Data. I have to admit to attending with an interest (what will be the impact of Linked Data on institutional repositories?) but also a degree of scepticism. The Semantic Web/Linked Data movement is about ten years old now – ten years that I spent in commercial web companies with some high profile clients but never once had a query regarding Linked Data. We all know about the growth of the web in its first ten years but Linked Data seems to be finding it harder to catch on. Perhaps this is because there doesn’t yet seem to be a compelling commercial application. It was telling that the commercial companies on the attendees list were generally Linked Data service providers, not commercial companies looking to find out what Linked Data can do for their company. I think one of the main drivers of growth for the web was that companies realised that they could use it to make money and it isn’t clear, to me at least, how this applies to Linked Data at the moment.

Technical themes from OR2010

Open Repositories 2010 wrapped up on 9th July. This post summarises some of the main technical themes from the conference.

OR2010 Developer Challenge

With just a few days left to Open Repositories 2010 in Madrid many people’s thoughts will be turning to the developer challenge. For those of you who are not aware the challeng this year is:

Create a functioning repository user-interface, presenting a single metadata record which includes as many automatically created, useful links to related external content as possible.

While it is fine to work on the challenge beforehand the organisers are providing a ‘developer lounge‘ at the conference venue too. Entries will be presented/demonstrated on Wednesday 7th between 17:30 and 19:00.

One of the aims is to get teams together who are a mix of developers and non-developers so everybody should be able to contribute something useful to the entries.

Paul Walk explains more and provides useful links in his blog.