JISC has released SWORD v2.0: Deposit Lifecycle.

Here's an excerpt:

SWORD is a hugely successful JISC project which has kindled repository interoperability and built a community around the software and the problem space. It explicitly deals only with creating new repository resources by package deposit a simple case which is at the root of its success but also its key limitation. This next version of SWORD will push the standard towards supporting full repository deposit lifecycles by using update, retrieve and delete extensions to the specification. This will enable the repository to be integrated into a broader range of systems in the scholarly environment, by supporting an increased range of behaviours and use cases.

Ann Hanlon and Marisa Ramirez have self-archived their presentation "Asking for Permission: A Survey of Copyright Workflows for Institutional Repositories" in DigitalCommons@CalPoly.

Here's an excerpt:

Most survey respondents reported providing mediated deposit (material is deposited on behalf of the author by a third party, usually someone associated with the IR), whether it is completely mediated by the library or whether the author, in partnership with the library, deposits their work. The only respondents to report author self-deposit as the primary method of IR deposit were in Australia and Europe.

DuraSpace has announced its new Registered Service Provider Program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization announced its new Registered Service Provider Program to establish partnerships with companies that provide support services to institutions using the DSpace and Fedora digital repository software.

The new program will establish an network of service providers offering a range of services including customer support, technical consulting, software development, and systems integration. The program will benefit universities, libraries, museums, research institutions, and others that require support in building or maintaining repository-based systems built with DSpace, Fedora, and related open source and commercial technologies.

Registered Service Providers will be easily identified. They will be featured on the DuraSpace web site (duraspace.org) and relevant project websites, with contact information and a profile of their service offerings. Providers will also exhibit their affiliation with DuraSpace by displaying the special DuraSpace Service Provider Logo on their marketing materials and websites.

Registered Service Providers share the DuraSpace commitment to ensuring that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Service Providers are active participants in open source software communities and are committed to providing expertise and technical consulting to enable customers to achieve their goals with open technologies.

The BibApp development team has released BibApp 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

BibApp is a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on your campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it is easy to see what publications can be placed on the Web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional repository.

BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus.

BibApp is the result of a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois (https://www.informatics.illinois.edu/icubed/) provided generous funding for the development of the 1.0 release of BibApp.

BibApp is a Ruby on Rails application, coupled with the Solr/Lucene search engine, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its datastore. It uses open standards and protocols such as OpenURL and SWORD and automatically pulls in data from third party sources such as Google Books and the Sherpa/Romeo publisher policy database. BibApp imports publication data in RIS, MEDLINE and Refworks XML bibliography formats and exports data in several citation formats (APA, Chicago, IEEE, MLA, more) via CiteProc. BibApp also provides a web services API for delivering data as XML, YML, JSON, and RDF. BibApp is released under a University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php).

RIAN, Ireland’s national open access portal, has been launched by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Ireland’s new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research goes live today. RIAN – http://www.rian.ie will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Stuart Lewis has announced that a multiple-deposit function has been added to the EasyDeposit SWORD client.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

For those of you unfamiliar with EasyDeposit, it is an online tool that allows you to configure your own SWORD client. It is intended that you run multiple copies of EasyDeposit and configure each for a specific tailored use, such as thesis deposit, journal deposit, multiple deposit etc. The deposit process is made up of a set of 'steps' which you can configure and change into a preferred order to make your chosen client. . . .

The new multiple deposit functionality allows the administrator to 'hard code' the details of a set of repositories, and upon completion of the deposit process the item is deposited into each of those repositories. EasyDeposit has been designed with extensibility in mind, so if you wish to write your own 'steps,' for example to allow the depositor to select which repositories from a given list they would like to deposit into, this is easy and straightforward to write in PHP.

DuraSpace has released DSpace 1.6.1.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

DSpace 1.6.1 is primarily a bug-fix release, which means it does not introduce any new features but improves existing features and fixes bugs discovered in earlier versions of DSpace. This is also the first [minor] version of DSpace to use a “time-driven” approach to release, rather than a “feature-driven” approach: we set a deadline and worked towards releasing on that date, instead of releasing when a certain number of issues were resolved. DSpace 1.7 will be the first major time-driven release.

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Harvester Systems 2.3.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This is a major rewrite of numerous parts of the Harvester code, including metadata storage and indexing. It increases indexing flexibility to support plugin-based indexing, including Lucene/SOLR support. It also adds OAI Data Provider support, including the potential to convert between metadata formats (currently from various formats into Dublin Core).

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations now contains records for over one million electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The NDLTD, OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), VTLS and Scirus maintain and provide access related to the NDLTD Union Catalog of ETDs available in institutional repositories around the globe.

The NDLTD is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the creation, dissemination, use, adoption, and preservation of digital theses and dissertations. The NDLTD assists students and universities in using electronic publishing and digital libraries to more effectively share knowledge in order to unlock potential benefits worldwide. The NDLTD also promotes student efforts to transform the genre of the print dissertation through the use of innovative software to create cutting edge hypertext/multimedia ETDs.

The NDLTD is comprised of many individual member institutions and consortia, each of which has or plans to put in place a process for archiving and distributing ETDs; others are welcome to join if they have similar interest. The Union Catalog Project is an attempt to make these individual collections appear as one seamless digital library of ETDs to students and researchers seeking out theses and dissertations.

In 1997 the first ETD program requirement was instituted at Virginia Tech. Over the course of thirteen years ETD programs have now been implemented in thousands of colleges and universities around the world. The one millionth ETD milestone indicates that ETD implementation is beginning to reach a critical mass. Indeed, in January, the count exceeded 800K records, while as of April 19, the record count reached 1.6 million, though there may be some duplicate records.

In the higher-GDP countries, institutions are rapidly adopting ETDs on a per-institutional or state-wide basis. Many lower-GDP countries are adopting ETDs at a national level as one means of jump-starting and disseminating research and development activities. The NDLTD anticipates that the number of ETDs worldwide will increase rapidly as more schools in every region around the globe implement ETD programs.. . .

Many institutions around the world are represented in the NDLTD Union Catalog. Universities can participate by implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to contribute metadata records to the union catalog. The NDLTD provides free resources to implement OAI-PMH in an institutional repository.

The Digital Curation Centre has released Digital Curation and Preservation Policies in Scottish HEIs: Survey Results.

Here's an excerpt:

The survey showed that repositories are still relatively young, and that preservation is not yet the highest priority for them. The situation with preservation policies also reflects the early stage of repository development, where the need to apply explicit curation policies is only beginning to be acknowledged.

The survey did not identify any institution level preservation policies, but given the heterogeneity of digital information across any higher education institution, it is not surprising that institution-wide preservation policies have yet to be formulated. Repository level policies were found to be in place at four institutions that also reported to be offering preservation services.

The survey reported a very low level of awareness of both existing preservation policies and digital preservation issues in general, especially amongst administrative and research staff. Enforcing preservation policies and making them effective are challenges that all HEIs face; at the same time, this formative period could be considered an opportunity for the ERIS project to develop supporting tools and guidance, especially since the prospect of additional guidance and the possibility of centralised services for preservation were welcomed by the respondents.