The University of Queensland has 2 initiatives of interest, both part of its work in eScholarship:
- a 2,000 records ePrints repository
- a project to develop eSpace — an out-of-the box repository solution built on top of the Fedora tool-kit
When they set up their repository in 2002, ePrints was the best solution on offer — DSpace was still on the horizon at that time. They adopted the ASRC thesaurus for subject classification and see this as the backbone that holds the system together. They see this as a particular strength of ePrints over DSpace, which uses a keyword indexing mechanism. Some 140 faculty out of 5,000 are actively submitting content.
They have found ePrints has some important limitations, including:
- have to add items one by one (no bulk import) [Arthur Sale: Eprints has an XML bulk import mechanism which many universities use.]
- not easy to harvest content (no bulk export) [Arthur Sale: Eprints has an XML bulk export mechanism.]
- not easy to customise for local needs [Arthur Sale: Doubtful without further information regarding specific difficulties. Tasmania has made many interventions with relatively little effort. Advice from Southampton University is similar.]
- supports a limited range of content formats [Arthur Sale: Eprints can work with any format - but it is up to the administrator to say what formats it will support, in accordance with the institution’s policy. Video, audio, powerpoint, Word, Open Office, drawing, image, zip, software and many other formats can be uploaded to the out-of-the-box version. The University of Tasmania repository contains several examples of these, and also see eBank http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/ebank.]
- slow to search once it has more than about 2,000 entries [Arthur Sale: Unless the definition of ‘slow’ is unusually small, this is incorrect as a statement about Eprints. It could relate to the Queensland hardware. A repository of 10,000 entries (Southampton) took 2.5s to return 241 results. However, the same query on Queensland (1,800 entries) returned 34 results in 2.0s.]
The University is a partner in APSR and is creating eSpace as a more advanced open-source repository solution. Key features will include:
- research outputs in their entirety, including surrounding objects such as data sets
- support for any kind of research output object, published and unpublished
- information about an object’s preservation and presentation, through support for multiple dtd and xsd types to self-describe content
- a metadata gateway (an enhanced version of the service already in place) as well as a repository manager (under development)
- eSpace will be usable “out of the box” and able to be customised for local needs
- use XACML to set access rules and roles (although their focus is on content for which UQ has the rights so rights management is a lower priority at this stage)
- export data to support “researcher profile” reporting to DEST
- based on Fedora, so robust and scalable
They see the eSpace solution as complementary to the ARROW work. Key differences being:
- ARROW will use licensed software, not open source
- ARROW primarily offers federated search capability, rather than repository content management
Building repository content is hard work and they have put a lot of effort into selling the benefits to academics:
- article and abstract download statistics
- high Google search rankings
- respond to requests for copies by sending a url, not a pdf
- using professors to promote the benefits to their colleagues
- help early career academics to gain visibility, late career academics to preserve their work
And make it easy for people to self-submit:
- provide a standard clause for authors to use when submitting articles to journals, reserving the right to place a copy in an open access repository
- make sure they know to re-create a new version for the repository, not re-use the published version
- draw people’s attention to the Sherpa service, which lists the policies of many journals in regard to open access
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