DigitalKoans

Sunny Yoon, Digital Resources Coordinator at the City University of New York, posted a query on the CODE4LIB list about the use of e-journal publishing software and its integration into institutional repositories.

She has now posted an interesting summary of responses to her query.

You can also read the replies that were posted to the list under the heading "e-journal publishing software."

The RIOJA project has released Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff, librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal - defined, for the purposes of the project, as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.

The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the RIOJA toolkit.

To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report.

The project team will also undertake formal and informal discussion with publishers and with academic and managing members of editorial boards. The survey and supplementary discussions will help to ensure that the RIOJA outputs address the needs and expectations of the research community. Finally, the overall long-term sustainability of a repository-overlay journal will be assessed. The project will examine the costs of adding peer review to arXiv deposits, of implementing and maintaining the functionality which the survey shows to be most valued by researchers, and of providing long-term preservation of content, and will aim to identify and appraise possible cost-recovery business models.

Presentations from the Open Repositories 2008 conference are available in the OR08 Publications repository.

The easiest way to find presentations is to use the Browse by Subject capability; however, both simple and advanced search functions are available as well.

Currently, the repository holds over 90 documents. You can track new additions at the Latest Additions to OR08 Publications page (RSS feed). It's anticipated that all documents will be available by 4/13/08.

Here's a brief selection of available presentations:

• Best of Both: Connecting a Institutional Digital Repository and a Digital Preservation Service
• Breaking the Repository Ingest Barrier
• Collaboration in Building a Sustainable Repository Environment: A National Library's Role
• EThOS: A National OAI and Digitisation Service for E-Theses in the United Kingdom
• Issues for Academic Authors, Institutional Repositories, Open Access Journals and End-Users
• The Key Role of Registries and Registry Standards in the Transition to a Federated Network of Repositories
• Manakin: Lessons Learned
• SWORD: Simple Web Service Offering Repository Deposit
• Version Identification Framework: Requirements and Proposed Resolutions

Project reports from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2008 Research in Information Technology retreat are now available.

Here are selected project briefing reports:

• Fedora
• Open Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange
• OpenCollections
• Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research
• Sophie
• Visual Understanding Environment
• Zotero

Below are selected Weblog reports from Open Repositories 2008.

• Faroes at Open Repositories 2008
• Fedora Day at OR08 Kicks Off with Organizational and Technical Overview
• The Geographic Spread of Crystallography
• Open Repositories 2008
• Open Repositories 2008 Conference
• Open Repositories 2008 in Southampton
• Open Repositories 2008, Part 1
• Open Repository Leaders Meet in Southampton, UK
• OR08: Eprints 3.1
• OR08: Eprints Track, Session 2
• OR08: Open Repositories 2008
• OR08: Session 1 Part 1
• OR08: Session 1 (Part 2)
• OR08: Session 2b: Sustainability Issues
• OR08—The Presentation Layer Is Destroying Our Data
• Session 1: Web 2.0
• Session 2: Social Networking
• Session 3: Interoperability
• Session 4: National & International Perspectives
• Session 5: Legal
• Session 7: Usage

The Fedora Commons has released version 2.2.2 of Fedora, which fixes 2.2.1 bugs and enhances the system's journaling and policy enforcement modules. (Version 3.0 Beta 1 is also available for testing.)

Chris Keene, Technical Development Manager at the University of Sussex Library, has released UK Repository Records Statistics, which provides U.K. institutional repository record growth data from July 2006 onwards based on ROAR statistics. For example, the site has a table showing monthly record totals.

DigitalPreservationEurope has released Repository Planning Checklist and Guidance.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary and Introduction to Platter":

The purpose of this document is to present a tool, the Planning Tool for Trusted Electronic Repositories (PLATTER) which provides a basis for a digital repository to plan the development of its goals, objectives and performance targets over the course of its lifetime in a manner which will contribute to the repository establishing trusted status amongst its stakeholders. PLATTER is not in itself an audit or certification tool but is rather designed to complement existing audit and certification tools by providing a framework which will allow new repositories to incorporate the goal of achieving trust into their planning from an early stage. A repository planned using PLATTER will find itself in a strong position when it subsequently comes to apply one of the existing auditing tools to confirm the adequacy of its procedures for maintaining the long term usability of and access to its material. . . .

The PLATTER process is centred around a group of Strategic Objective Plans (SOPs) through which a repository specifies its current objectives, targets, or key performance indicators in those areas which have been identified as central to the process of establishing trust. In the future, PLATTER can and should be used as the basis for an electronic tool in which repositories will be able to compare their targets with those adopted by other similar (suitably anonymised) repositories. The intention is that the SOPs should be living documents which evolve with the repository, and PLATTER therefore defines a planning cycle through which the SOPs can develop symbiotically with the repository organisation.

The DSpace Foundation has published the March 2008 issue of its NewSpace newsletter, which includes "DSpace 1.5 Features," "Summary of User Community Survey" "Stuart Lewis and Richard Jones on SWORD" and other articles.