JISCrte at Repository Fringe 2011

The JISC Repositories: take-up and embedding projects (JISCrte) will be presenting at the Repository Fringe 2011 in Edinburgh next week.

All six JISCrte projects will be providing an overview of their project progress and activities thus far.

JISCrte aims  to build on the investments already made in repository developments and improve repository services (consolidate and embed repositories with other institutional services and processes) and spread good practice more widely.

The six projects involved in this strand of work (projects run from February through December 2011) are:

• Bringing a Buzz to Nectar – University of Northampton
• EXPLORER – De Montfort University
• eNova – led by the Visual Arts Data Service
• Hydrangea in Hull – University of Hull
• MIRAGE 2011 – Middlesex University
• Enhancing a research repository – Glasgow School of Art

Further details of each project (including project plans) are available from here.

We look forward to seeing you and our session is on day 2 of the RepoFringe at 09.30 on Thursday 04th August.

RSP event: repositories and CRIS – working smartly together

Conference Theme – the interaction of repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and the dissemination of the findings of the JISC-funded RePOSIT project.

On Tuesday I attended the RSP conference and software exhibition ‘Repositories and CRIS – working smartly together’ which was held at the East Midlands Conference Centre, located on the University of Nottingham Campus. This event was well attended (more than 70 delegates) which is an indication of how important this topic is to our community.

 The keynote presenter was Simon Kerridge from the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) and his presentation provided an interesting insight into the role of research managers and administrators, and more importantly the internal and external drivers for research managers and administrators and what they want and require from a CRIS.

In his presentation Dr Mark Cox talked about the development of CRIS systems and open access repositories, the integration of the CRISes and open access repositories, euroCRIS, the benefits of using CERIF, and the REF.

Valerie McCutcheon from the University of Glasgow provided an overview of how repository and research system staff work collaboratively with great success.

 

 

The RePosit project facilitated interactive break-out discussion sessions covering the following topics:

• Motivating and engaing academic staff
• CRIS and repository advocacy
• Branding
• Legacy data and repository issues
• Community and communications to support the CRIS model

The project team then shared some of their findings with a series of valuable presentations.

The event programme and all of the presentations for the event are all available here.

Two new toolkits to ‘Kultivate’ artistic research deposit

Guest Post by Marie-Therese Gramstadt, KULTIVATE Project Manager, VADS.

Funded through the JISC Information Environment programme 2009-11, the Kultivate project makes available two new toolkits for the UK Higher Education community: an advocacy for arts research toolkit aimed at repository managers; and a decision-making toolkit for artistic researchers. The Kultivate project has arisen out of the Kultur II Group, which consists of researchers and repository staff engaging with arts research deposit in institutional research repositories, and is led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts.

JISCrte and De Montfort University Open Research Archive (DORA)

Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/62442369@N02/5683138587/sizes/m/in/photostream/ Jack. O Sullivan, Flickr

My second JISCrte visit was to the project partners at De Montfort University (DMU) where I met Beth and Alan who are working on the EXPLORER (Embedding eXisting & Propriatary Learning in an Open-source Repository to Evolve new Resources) project. It is hoped that EXPLORER will enable the enhancement and embedding of the DORA repository within the DMU research environment.

DORA uses DSpace open source software and two key areas of this project are:

• Development and implementation of workflows and processes in order to embed DORA within the DMU research environment
• Adaptation and integration of tools from other JISC projects – they are looking at an appropriate CERIF4REF tool and will investigate outputs from the KULTUR project to see if they are appropriate for DORA and displaying non-text items

You can follow project progress via the EXPLORER blog and twitter channel, all accessible from here.

Umbrella 2011

University of Hertfordshire by phatcontroller

I will be presenting at Umbrella 2011 on “Research Repositories: the role of library staff in their management”. I’ll be referring to a survey which the RSP carried out last year on the role and skills of staff in UK repositories. I’ll also describe the role of the RSP, including its training events, and refer to UKCoRR. It will include some future gazing as to the role librarians might play to meet the ever growing demands of research data management.

Hope to see some of you there.