Enhancing Institutional Repositories One Line of Code at A Time

Mar 23, 2009 by julian-cheal

Back in February I met with quiet a few UK HE institutional repository managers over a period of two weeks, the meetings were designed in order to gather some basic requirements on what additional light-weight software could be developed for repositories; that would aid not only repository managers, but also repository users and depositors.Once back in the office I read over my notes that I took down from the meetings and wrote them up in a big list and pasted them through the wordle.net tool. What this gave me was a tag cloud of all of my notes, which looks like the following. (Click the image to view a larger version in a new window.)

However as you can see it’s hard to read due to the relative size of the words repository and repositories. Which you’d expect in a meeting about repositories, but not too helpful in this case. So here is an updated version with the repository words taken out.In the meeting the main topics we asked about were:

• Deposit
• User Workflows
• Metadata creation
• Managing copyright
• Preservation
• Using the content of repositories
• Integrating with institutional software
• Integrating with other software, services and websites outside of the institution

Looking at the wordle output, it is easy to notice that the main topics discussed at the meetings where:

• Search
• REF
• SWORD
• Import
• Arxiv.org (or any other type of subject specific repository)
• Funder
• Statistics
• And so on

These are all good topics to start development on. During our first meeting we had a flip chart and drew out some ideas of a couple of applications, that could be developed for the desktop to aid in repository deposit and then one to deal with publications output.The following are mockups of what such applications could look like.

Software Ideas

Desktop Repository Deposit Tool

The idea behind this is for a simple and easy to use application for academics to simply drag and drop their files into the application, fill out some basic metadata and simply click deposit. That’s all they’d need to do to deposit into their institutional repository. Behind the scenes SWORD will be taking care of talking to the repository and uploading the files, so then the repository manager can check the upload just like any other deposit.

Software Ideas

Multiple Feed RSS Publications Output

The idea behind this application is sometimes academics would like to have some control over their publications output and embed them into either their personal pages or departmental pages. This application would run on their desktop the user would copy and paste their own rss feeds from their institutional repository. The application would then show the feed in a list, which the user can then decide which publications they wish to view in their new feed. The idea is for an academic to include multiple input feeds maybe from different repositories, where they have items deposited. Also to create a formated output or a widget for ease of inclusion in an existing website.

Next steps

This post is really the starting point of these ideas. What we really want is for user interaction, so please feel free to comment on any of the ideas mentioned in this post, or to add new ideas and discuss possible applications that can be written for UK repository users.