Speaker biographies
The IR Workshop has the following speakers.
1. ProQuest Digital Commons
- Abstract
- Digital Commons repositories, launched in 2004, provides a package of digital publishing and support services aimed at distributing the academic research of universities and colleges. Julie Stevens will present a case study of the development of a leading institutional repository, describing the issues framing the creation and expansion of the repository, where it is heading, the lessons that have been learned to date, and how these lessons may be applied to other repository implementations.
- Julie Stevens
- Julie is the Regional Director, West Asia Pacific for ProQuest Information and Learning. Julie is a librarian, who has moved to the vendor world. Julie has been with ProQuest for the past 10 years growing the business and promoting services in Australia and New Zealand, and from this year has taken responsibility for the South East Asian territories also. Julie has been actively involved in Digital Commons discussion and implementations across India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
2. Monash University
- Abstract
- The ARROW project is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, under the Research Information Infrastructure Framework for Australian Higher Education, to identify and test software or solutions to support best practice institutional digital repositories comprising a range of content types, including e-prints and digital theses. The ARROW Consortium members are Monash University (lead institution), National Library of Australia, the University of New South Wales, and Swinburne University of Technology.
The ARROW project includes a resource discovery service developed by the National Library of Australia, incorporation of open access electronic publishing and the development of institutional repository software, which is based on Fedora open source software and is being developed in partnership with VTLS Inc.
In November repositories at the consortium member institutions will go live with a range of content types, including eprints, etheses and images. The core ARROW objective is to establish repositories at the heart of institutions’ information management activities. Increasingly this means building the repositories to play their part in the impending Research Quality Framework processes. As a result, the ARROW project has considered a number of issues; it has, for example, explored the tension between open and closed access, and it has embedded flexibility and future-proofing into the software.
The presentation will provide an overview of progress the ARROW project has made to date, an outline of development work to be undertaken over the next months and a summary of the key lessons learnt.
- Cathrine Harboe-Ree
- Cathrine is the Monash University Librarian. She is a member of the CAUL Executive, the CAUL representative on the national eResearch Coordinating Committee and a member of the EDUCAUSE 2007 Programme Committee and of the Editorial Board of Australian Academic & Research Libraries. Cathrine has a particular interest in digital library initiatives. She has established an electronic press for the university and is the project leader of the Australian Commonwealth Government funded project ARROW.
- Katie Blake
- text to follow
3. University of Queensland
- Part 1 abstract
- ePrintsUQ was created in 2002 and now has more than 2100 original papers deposited. Academics are coming on board to self-archive at the rate of about 10 per month. The system currently runs on eprints.org software but UQ is about to migrate the material to FEZ, a new digital repository system based on Fedora. Setting up a repository from scratch involves a range of issues, many of which only become obvious once the project is up and running. But anyone starting afresh has to deal with a number of issues — choice of software, the business model, funding and infrastructure planning, the scope and purpose of the repository, the intended user group and audience, how to build support for the repository among busy and often sceptical academics, how to populate it, what metadata schema(s) to adopt, how to classify material, how to comply with, or bolt on to, existing and probably incompatible university academic reporting systems, how to ‘sell’ it to the university community and how to measure its usefulness through statistics and indicators. An exit strategy has to be established as well, in case the software or system selected is inadequate and material must be migrated to a different system. And then there’s copyright…
- Andrew Bennett
- Andrew has worked for more than 17 years in the ICT industry in Australia, both in the corporate sector and in higher education. For almost all of the past decade he has worked in higher education institutions, the last eight in University Libraries. He is currently the Executive Manager of the Library Technology Service at the University of Queensland and represents UQ on the Steering Committee for the DEST-funded Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) project. His current professional interests include the development of a flexible, digital repository and workflow management system which will be released under open source license by the end of 2005 — codenamed FEZ.
- Part 2 abstract
- FEZ is a flexible, digital repository and workflow management system built using Fedora, and based on PHP and MySQL. Designed around Fedora 2, it uses RELS-EXT to describe relationships between objects for communities, collections, and records. All records will also be associated with a controlled subject thesaurus. The software will handle multiple metadata schemata, i.e. Dublin Core, EAD and so on. The digital repository will handle an unlimited number of document types, such as PDFs, ASCII text, HTML, digital audio and video formats, and image files, with the system flexible enough to allow the addition of new document types at any stage. Each object will have layers of associated metadata — structural, rights, preservation and so on. The system is designed to be open access, with records harvestable under OAI-PMH. The system is also designed to handle a number of different roles — creator, editor, viewer, approver, commenter, comment-viewer, annotator and so on. The workflow system will cover the life cycle of an object in Fedora — from the create or deposit stage, through approval and edit, to the publish stage. It will also cover security and the creation of an archival copy.
- Christiaan Kortekaas
- Christiaan is the Projects Officer with the University of Queensland’s Library Technology Service, and is the lead programmer for UQ’s eScholarshipUQ testbed for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories Project where he has almost single-handedly developed a digital repository management and workflow system based on Fedora. He has a Bachelor of Information Technology from the Queensland University of Technology.
4. University of Tasmania
- Abstract
- The presentation will focus on the main messages that need to be digested by anyone setting up an open access (eprint) server, as coloured by research undertaken and experiences at the University of Tasmania and internationally.
It will also explain the reasons behind the Tasmanian software, which is being used by two other Australian universities to allow the Australian Digital Theses Program to selectively harvest from an eprint server, and to provide contributor-oriented statistics on document usage. The eprint server is also linked into the University’s mandatory publication reporting system (WARP).
The University offers its assistance to any New Zealand institution that wishes to establish a server using Eprints software, and will also provide free open-source access to its locally-written software. This will enable fast access to the ADT service and OA generally.
- Arthur Sale
- Arthur Sale is currently Professor of Computing (Research) at the University of Tasmania and Research Coordinator for the School of Computing. Prior to this appointment he was the University’s Pro Vice-Chancellor (Information Services) from 1994–1999. In his role as Research Coordinator he set up the first eprint server in the University in 2004, and through active advocacy convinced the University to set up an open-access server as a University-wide service.
Arthur is active in the international Open Access movement, and a co-investigator in an international £153 000 research grant titled Interoperable Repository Statistics. He has been described by Stevan Harnad as Australia’s ‘archevangelist’ of OA.
5. The Australian National University
- Abstract
- Demetrius is The Australian National University’s recently launched institutional repository intended to preserve academic output for the long-term. Demetrius is based around the DSpace open source software package. Peter Raftos will present on the issues and strategies associated with establishing a digital repository based on the experience at ANU. Scott Yeadon will then demonstrate some experimental work undertaken to determine possible mechanisms for management of compound digital objects within a repository framework.
- Peter Raftos
- Peter Raftos is the Program Leader for Digital Resource Services at The Australian National University. This program is responsible for the creation and deployment of Demetrius, ANU’s Institutional Repository, which uses the DSpace application. He has a background in XML-based publishing and holds a PhD in anthropology.
- Scott Yeadon
- Scott Yeadon is a software developer for Digital Resources Services at the ANU working primarily on Demetrius. He is also a DSpace committer, part of the small team who manages the DSpace core code and software releases. He has experience in XML publishing and prior to joining ANU he managed the development of an XML-based legislation repository for Thomson Legal and Regulatory.
6. Rice University
- Abstract
- text to follow
- Chuck Henry
- Chuck Henry is Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice University, responsible for the libraries, the Digital Library Initiative, and the Electronic Resources Center. He has served on the steering committee of the Coalition for Networked Information, is currently a Trustee of the Digital Library Federation, and a member of the Mellon Foundation Scholarly Communication Institute in the US. He is also chair of an advisory council to the International University Bremen, and a member of the national Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Commission report is due to be published in the (northern) spring, 2006.
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