State of the Nation

 

Photo – State records NSW

State of the Nation – well at least the UK repository bit of it.  Repository staff find it helpful to have information about how others manage and deliver their research repositories and frequently ask questions of the Repositories Support Project or post questions to mailing lists. Questions such as What level of mediated deposit do you provide? and How many staff work on your repository? are common.

At the RSP, we are aiming to support this need by collating some key data about individual institutions. This week, we issued a survey to repository managers asking for information about their repositories, staffing, policies on such things as mediation, full text requirements, preservation etc. We’re also asking for details on how far the repository is integrated with other university systems, for example research management systems.

We’ll then publish the responses on the RSP website – it will be specific to institutions and will not be anonymous. The existingting RSP Wiki will house the data so that individuals will be able to update their own information in the future. It is hoped that it will become a valuable source of information provided by the community for the community and save people time asking similar questions on mailing lists.

The survey invitation was sent to individual institutions so if you think you should have received it and haven’t please do get in touch with us at support@rsp.ac.uk.

RSP EPrints Training Day

On 19th January RSP in association with EPrints ran a training event on the EPrints repository software. We were deliberately aiming the training at institutions that already had a repository up and running so that the focus could be on managing and customising the repository rather than the installation process.

RSP EPrints Training Day

The Repositories Support Project has teamed up with ECS at The University of Southampton to offer a free one-day training course on EPrints in London on 19th January 2011.

Dave Tarrant and Patrick McSweeney from EPrints will be the trainers and the course will be aimed at technicians managing established repositories. This will mean that the course content will focus on maintaining and customising the software rather than installation and setup.

For more details and booking information see the RSP web site.

Installing DSpace on Debian 5

This post is very similar to my recent post covering installation on CentOS but some of the processes are slightly different for the Debian flavour of Linux. This post should cover everything Debian users need to get up and running with DSpace, although it does not cover configuration of the Handle server.  This is described adequately by the official documentation.

Software Survey 2010

Today we have made public the results of our 2010 survey of repository sofware.  We first carried out this survey in March 2009 so this November 2010 version shows the changes that the software vendors have made over the last 18 months or so.

RSP Software Survey

In March 2009 RSP ran a successful Software Day at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. To accompany this event we ran a survey of the major repository applications, the results of which can be seen on the RSP site. The survey was very well received and remains one of the most popular pages on the site.

We’re planning another Software Day next year (watch the RSP site for details) but think that the survey itself is overdue for an update given how the repository landscape has developed over the last 18 months.

The survey targets repository software (realistically we’re talking about OAI-PMH compliant applications) capable of storing digital objects, e.g. article full text. If you would like to be included in the survey drop us a line.

Installing DSpace on CentOS 5

Installing DSpace is a reatively long and involved process due to the requirement to build the software using Maven and Ant. The installation is additionally complicated if you want to proxy DSpace through Apache, which will be probably the case if you wish to run any other web software on the server and don’t want to have to enter port numbers to access DSpace. This article will step through the installation process on CentOS 5.5 although some elements with be relevant to other linux distributions and Unix-like OSes.

Installing MePrints on Windows

MePrints is an extension to the EPrints repository software that adds functionality for personal home pages for users with profile information and details of uploaded documents, most popular eprints etc.

The MePrints documentation is quite *nix centric but I have found that it is not impossible to get the extension running under Windows. Doing so requires installing a tool to process patch files and a small tweak to the MePrints code. You should also be comfortable with running programs and scripts using the Windows command prompt.

Installing EPrints on Windows

EPrints provide a Windows installer for their product. However, because it is a Perl based web application it cannot be installed by running this installer file alone. There is a set of required software that is somewhat outside what might be considered the ‘normal’ range for Windows. Part of this includes running the Apache web server. If the machine on which you are intending to run EPrints has other applications that depend on the IIS web server then we would recommend choosing a different server for EPrints and, preferably, a Linux platform. If Linux is not an option and the server you are using does not run IIS (or you are comfortable with running Apache alongside IIS on different ports) then this article, in conjunction with the official EPrints documentation may prove useful.