Institutional Repository Report 27/01/09

October 2008 through to January 2009 has been mainly a period of defining and implementing technical details around institutional repository hardware and software. Significant work has been done on the first phase of ETD trials. In November, Tom Grahame joined the Implementation Team on a one year position as the Team’s client-side technologies software developer. In January, Will Standring was appointed on a 3 month contract to help with data migration tasks.

Work during October 2008 to January 2009 has focused on the following areas,

a. Project management/governance

i. The ETD Working Group has met twice on 13th November and 8th January. Based on issues raised during the first phase of ETD trials (see bullet c below), the Working Group have agreed for us to proceed to the next phase of work with the following caveats. The Working Group agreed to delay the ‘launch window’ for PhD theses (provisionally set to April 09) to July 2009. This was done to give: Faculties and Schools more time to implement any necessary local changes e.g. update PGR handbooks; Faculties and Schools more time to communicate with students guidance around electronic submission; the IR Project, working with administrators, more time to address the significant number of issues raised; the IR Project an opportunity to FULLY pilot the submission process with real-world examples. Final confirmation of the launch window will occur in early April. During February and March the IR Project will address all issues. From April to July the IR Project will pilot real-world ETD submissions. Some Schools have questioned the value of adopting electronic submission of Masters Dissertations. As a result the ETD Working Group agreed to adopt an ‘opt-out’ option.

ii. The Technical Advisory Group has met once on 18th December.

iii. Professor Shôn Lewis has been nominated to replace Ivan Leudar in representing MHS on the Steering Group.

b. Communication and advocacy

i. A competition to name the IR was carried out in December. Around 500 individuals were asked to vote for one of five suggested names and contribute creative alternatives. Seventy individuals voted and many of these suggested alternative names. The most voted for name was “Manchester eScholar”. The Library Leadership Team approved this name.

ii. EM and PB have drawn up plans for a launch event. The Library Leadership Team have agreed this will take the form of a one day symposium on ‘scholarly communication’ followed by, at the end of the day, a reception where we will officially launch IR services. The event will occur on 23rd April 2009 at Manchester Conference Centre. A message announcing the event has been sent out in eUpdate and is posted on StaffNet. This will be followed by a message in the February issue of UniLife. We are preparing a package of promotional materials to send to key stakeholders in February. We are working up a programme of speakers and contacting possible sponsors for the event e.g. Research Information Network, Elsevier.

iii. PB and CG gave an update of the Project to the University Research Group. Simon Gaskell noted that launch of IR services should occur not later than the first quarter of 2009.

iv. PB attended the MHS Research Directors meeting on 10th November.

v. PB attended the School of Languages Research Committee on 8th December.

vi. PB has been invited to attend the MBS Research Committee on 28th January.

vii. PB attended the Research Information Network workshop entitled “”What does it cost and who pays? Scholarly communications globally and in the UK” on 11th December, the DPC/RSP/DCC/JISC workshop, “Tackling the Preservation Challenge: Practical Steps for Repository Managers” on 12th December and then JISC Information Environment and e-Research call for projects briefing day on 15th December.

viii. TG attended the UK and Ireland Fedora Users Group Meeting on 20th January.

ix. NG will attend the FedoraEU meeting at JISC dev8D on 13th February

c. Usability

i. During Nov, Dec and Jan, our usability work focused on capturing requirements and issues around submission of ETDs. We interviewed around 70 individuals from key stakeholder groups – students, supervisors, internal examiners, administrators (PGR and PGT) and librarians. Almost all individuals interviewed supported the University-wide adoption of electronic submission of theses. Some Schools expressed concerns over the benefits of electronic submission for Masters Dissertations. We logged around 70 issues in total. Although individual issues were minor, and each easily resolved, the high number of issues was unexpected.

d. Technical implementation

i. Hardware infrastructure has been procured and installed. This includes: dual-sited load-balanced and clustered Sun Solaris servers; dual-sited and replicated high performance storage for repository indexes; dual-sited and replicated cost-effective mass storage for repository metadata and full item records (~800Gb); virtualised operating system and oracle server software; virtual production, user acceptance and development servers.

ii. Mark Los (a Graduate Trainee), working one day a week has captured comprehensive metadata and full text for around 5,000 RAE2008 records ready for migration into the repository.

iii. In discussion with Faculty representatives we have drawn up provisional plans to migrate metadata from MHS, LS, EPS and HUM databases (~70,000 records). Work is on going to implement and demonstrate the integration of repository services with existing central (e.g. Portal) and faculty (e.g. intranets) services.

iv. We have defined a set of repository services that will constitute the core areas of functionality at launch. Significant work has been done towards implementing these services. Work is on going.

 

Institutional Repository Report 04/12/08

• Hardware to host the repository has been purchased and is in the process of being installed, it has been specified to handle 60000 pdfs which is enough storage for all of the identified migrated content and the projected requirements for the next 2 years.
• Electronic Thesis and Dissertation trials are well underway with approximately half complete. People being approached include Students, Supervisors, Internal Examiners, Faculty Post Graduate Trainers, Researchers and Administrators.  We also have names from the library and they are involved.
• Provisional Workflow for ETDs has been established.
• The team has a new starter, Software Developer Tom Grahame, and as such working practices have been adjusted to allocate work using an issue tracking system (JIRA) and share code using a versioning system (Subversion).
• Work on submission interfaces is on target to demonstrate within the month.

Institutional Repository Project Update – 16th September

Hi all

Just a quick update of what’s been going on in the Institutional Repository Project during August and September 2008.

August was a fairly quiet month, holidays for everyone on the team.

Work has progressed on various fronts. Here’s the headlines

1. We have now released a functional specification for the institutional repository (available on the Project website). This summarises requirements gathered from our early adopter work and evaluation of alternative technologies. The specification currently lists 95 requirements so is fairly detailed but also somewhat abstract in particular places. We anticipate this to be a living document and will be refined over the coming months.

2. Now the scale-up budget is approved, Nilani has started work towards launching production level services. She has mapped the functional requirements to a set of deliverable modules between now and December. In December, we expect to have our first set of production quality repository functions available for demonstration and testing.

3. Technical discussions during August and September have focused mainly on ‘bolting-down’ various issues with dependent systems. These have been

• authentication mechanism which will be via CAS
• authorisation and user assignement to security groups using LDAP attributes
• interoperability with the library catalogue to support meta data describing electronic theses
• data migration and data integration with Faculty publication databases
• specification of production level hardware (which looks like it will be Redhat Linux and Oracle on virtual machines), IT Services have provided us with a set of virtual machines to test Fedora on before we procure the production hardware

4. We’ve continued our early adopter work and can now add Manchester Business School to our list. Scott is finishing writing-up he’s findings and we expect to publish a paper on the Project website shortly.

5. Scott has completed an extensive series of interviews with University staff on ‘how should we support the IR in the future?’. These views are being summarised in a discussion paper which has a number of recommedations. We expect to complete the first draft in the next day or so (we’re running a bit lat on this one!).

6. Scott and I have been looking a lot closer at metadata requirements, and yes this is pretty boring, but needs to be done. We now have 33 content types we believe the repository will support (in the first instance).

7. Mark Los (a Graduate Trainee) has joined the Project Team for one day a week. Mark will be help us capture metadata and fulltext for RAE2008 content and transfering this into Fedora. We hope the majority of this work will be complete by December.

8. We’ve advertised a new position ‘IR software developer 1 year fixed term’, deadline for applications is 18th September.

In summary, we are now into the real details, we are starting to tick off some of the technical issues but a lot still remains to be done between now and March 09 when we hope to launch repository services to the whole University.

Hope this helps, Phil

Seminar event : The Library’s Institutional Repository Project – Part 2 guinea pigs, pilots and ETDs

From Dr PR Butler, Institutional Repository Manager

The Library’s Institutional Repository Project is now well under way. You may be interested to know about what progress we’ve made since last November, when many of you attended my presentation entitled “Introducing the Library’s Institutional Repository Project – why, what, who and when”. As a result I’ve arranged the following event,

Date/Time: Monday 23rd June 2008, 2pm (30 minute presentation followed by questions)
Venue: User Education Room, Blue G.19, JRUL (Building 55 on Campus Map) Seminar title: The Library’s Institutional Repository Project – Part 2 guinea pigs, pilots and ETDs
Speaker: Dr Phil Butler, Institutional Repository Manager, John Rylands University Library

All Library staff are welcome to attend. Numbers are limited only by the room size. Please seek permission from your line manager where appropriate. The seminar is of particular relevance to Faculty Librarians, Academic Liaison Librarians, Library Assistants and other library staff involved in the management and dissemination of digital content.

Hope to see you there.

Regards, Phil

***********************************
Dr PR Butler
Institutional Repository Manager
Red 1.3 The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PP, UK
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 1514 (internal x51514)
Email: p.butler@manchester.ac.uk
Web: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/institutionalrepositoryproject