Building a successful national network: how we did it in the UK and where we’re going

The Repositories Support Project is hosting a workshop on “building a national network” at the Open Repositories 2012 (OR2012) conference, on Monday July 9th, 1:30pm. This workshop will showcase research repositories in UK higher education. It would demonstrate how widespread the network is, how coordinated the UK is as a community, what the Repositories Support Project has done to encourage this, the role of United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories and what JISC has done in terms of a national approach to support and development.

Delegates from outside the UK will have the opportunity to get an in depth understanding of the repository network in the UK and also to talk to repository staff about their experiences.

Workshop outline

•   Introduction by JISC to the programmes which have supported repository development over the last seven years and to future plans for repository development and support in the UK – including the UKRepositoryNet+ service.
• Examples of JISC funded Support projects: SHERPA and RSP
• Support for institutions: the University of Glasgow case study
• The role of UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories)
• There will then be a number of concurrent sessions where UK staff will use their institutions as a case study to engender discussion about what can be achieved. They will focus on two main themes:
  •  The integration of research repositories with university systems, processes and policies especially those connected with research management.
  •  Projects and initiatives to promote the repository within the institution in order to increase the deposit of full text items. This will have multi-disciplinary focus and include arts and humanities content as well as STEM subjects.

Register here. 

Contact: Jackie Wickham [Jacqueline.wickham@nottingham.ac.uk], RSP Coordinator, tel:0115 8466389

Scholarly Communications: New Developments in Open Access

On the first day of June, the Wren room, at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), was filled since early in the morning with librarians, repositories specialists, research officers and copyright consultants, who came to attend the Repositories Support Project (RSP) event on scholarly communications and open access.

Photo of the Wren room balcony during the tea/coffee break

During the event, a great number of delegates were active in Tweeting, producing a high traffic, as it is captured in David Clay’s story. All eight presentations explored issues related to scholarly communication and open access and demonstrated innovative projects and ways of disseminating research results.

For those who were not able to attend, all presentations were videotaped and can be viewed online. In addition, two excellent blog posts, one from Stuart Lawson and another one from Neil Steward provide more details about the speakers’ points. For a quick look on the event details and the recorded presentations you can also check our storify story.

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.

”]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.