DigitalKoans

Leslie Carr, Wendy White, Susan Miles, and Bill Mortimer have deposited a for-discussion draft of the "Institutional Repository Checklist for Serving Institutional Management" in OR08 Publications repository.

Here's the abstract:

This document is a For Discussion draft that came from the Research Assessment Experience session of the EPrints User Group at Open Repositories 2008. Comment is invited from managers of all repository platforms to share experience of the demands of the processes involved in supporting research assessment at an institutional level. The aim of institutional repositories has focused on serving the interests of faculty—researchers and teachers—by collecting their intellectual outputs for long-term access, preservation and management. However, experience shows that in order to attain the engagement of the faculty, it is necessary to obtain the support of the institutional management. But in order to gain management support, a repository has to demonstrate a measureable and effective contribution to current management agendas and concerns—e.g. research management or research assessment. Such contributions are achievable, but only if the repository fulfils a number of criteria that are in addition to its usual library-faculty roles. This document lists the success criteria as distilled from the authors' recent experience.

The Repositories Support Project has released two briefing papers: Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Workflows (i.e., digital repository submission workflows). Both briefing papers provide succinct introductions to the topic at hand.

The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange project has released version 0.3 of the ORE Specification and User Guide.

Read more about it at "OAI-ORE Alpha Specifications Updated."

The Repositories Support Project has released a number of UK, other European, and North American digital repository case studies that were prepared for the Open Repositories 2008 conference.

JISC is funding two projects to do small-scale OAI-ORE tests:

TheOREM (Theses with ORE Metadata), at the University of Cambridge, aims to:

• Test the applicability of the ORE standard in a realistic scholarly setting—thesis description, submission and publication.
• Demonstrate the advantages of the ORE approach in complex object publication, by combining it with existing web-standards compliant technologies.
• Provide examples to fully exercise the ORE specifications in order to provide validation and future direction.

FORESITE (Functional Object Reuse and Exchange: Supporting Information Topology Experiments) will create Resource Map descriptions of JSTOR's holdings, and then ingest them into the DSpace institutional repository system via the SWORD protocol, creating external references back to the original files. The description work will be automated, and the system for achieving this implemented at the University of Liverpool. The SWORD protocol will be implemented within DSpace by HP Labs along with other extensions necessary.

For further information, see the FORESITE proposal, A Preview of the TheOREM Project, and the TheOREM proposal.

Isilon Systems has announced that its IQ Clustered Storage System will be used to support the Michigan Digitization Project and the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about Michigan:

Isilon Systems . . . today announced that the University of Michigan (U-M) has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as the primary repository for its Michigan Digitization Project. In partnership with Google, the University of Michigan and its Michigan Digitization Project are digitizing more than 7.5 million books, ensuring these valuable resources are available to the public into perpetuity. This enormous undertaking includes the storage of digital copies of all unique books within the libraries of the entire Big-Ten Conference and directly supports Google Book Search, which aims to create a single, comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages. The University of Michigan, in partnership with Indiana University (IU), is leveraging Isilon's IQ clustered storage system to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) of the universities' published library materials. Using Isilon IQ, U-M and IU are able consolidate digital copies of millions of books into one, single, shared pool of storage to meet the rapidly growing storage demand of its massive book digitization project. . . .

In conjunction with the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an academic partnership formed by the universities of the Big-Ten Conference and the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Indiana University are working to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) which will mirror the content from U-M and the CIC libraries found in Google Book Search. Using Isilon IQ clustered storage, featuring its OneFS operating system software, U-M has eliminated disparate data silos to create a shared pool of storage for the digitization efforts of these partner institutions. Each digitized book is approximately 55 MB in size, downloading at a rate of 3 MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entire six year duration of the project. Isilon IQ reduces storage management time, enabling U-M to accelerate the book scanning process, preserve valuable materials, and ultimately expand the research and learning capabilities for millions of users across the globe.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about Rice:

Isilon . . . today announced that Rice University has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as its central repository for digital multimedia, including video of selected speeches by international dignitaries and musical performances from the Shepherd School of Music. In an effort to preserve the many historic events held at these prestigious venues and ensure the productions are available to the public into perpetuity, Rice has deployed Isilon clustered storage to consolidate hundreds of recorded musical performances and keynote speeches into a single, highly scalable and reliable shared pool of storage for the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive, an institutional repository based on the DSpace software platform. . . .

Through a cooperative effort between Rice University's Digital Library Initiative, Fondren Library and Central IT department, the university has created a central repository for all its critical multi-media content, enabling a variety of departments to execute on vital, content-driven projects simultaneously, activity that was impossible with traditional storage. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Rice's storage management for the Digital Scholarship archiving system was unable to effectively support management of large digital video and audio files that required streaming for delivery. These assets, therefore, were stored on a variety of streaming servers by various groups across campus, creating multiple access bottlenecks that led to inefficient storage management and undue IT cost and complexity. By unifying all of its digital content onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage system, Rice University has removed costly data access and management barriers and dramatically simplified its storage architecture. Additionally, using Isilon's SmartQuotas provisioning and quota management software application, Rice is also storing its Language Center's multi-media course work and its Central IT department's webcasts on Isilon IQ, delivering immediate, concurrent data access to multiple users and user groups, further reducing storage management costs to maximize system efficiency.

Rice University will stream its collection of musical performances from the Shepherd School, as well as its video library of the many world leaders and dignitaries that have spoken at the Baker Institute, to thousands of users online. This operation necessitates the use of multiple media servers, using Windows, Quicktime and Real Player formats. Isilon clustered storage communicates natively over CIFS, NFS FTP, and HTTP, as well as interoperating with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enabling seamless integration with Rice's variety of server formats and enabling all content to be streamed from one, central, easily and immediately accessible storage system. With Isilon IQ, Rice's entire collection of multi-media is accessible to all its servers 24×7x365, ensuring that the media streaming operations are not only efficient and cost-effective, but prepared to meet high user demand.

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."

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<