CAIRSS

CAIRSS Weekly Update 2010-04-28

Summary

On the event front, only 5 days until the first of the CAIRSS Copyright Workshops is conducted by Robin Wright and Derek Whitehead in Sydney (4 May). Registration is closed and full to capacity so should be a good event. Once again a big thank you to Sten for assisting with the venue.

Testing of the SEER IR access is nearing the end of the week 7 of the 8 week testing window (closes on 7th May 2010). These are some outstanding issues remaining outlined below. Please contact Tim if any queries/updates required.

CAIRSS repository manager surveys will be sent out this week to all CAUL repository managers. Katy will be in touch with you about these.

Remember you can contact CAIRSS on cairss@caul.edu.au for any CAIRSS queries/assistance required.

Events

  • 5 days until CAIRSS Copyright Workshop in Sydney on 4th May
    http://cairss.caul.edu.au/www/copyright/cairss_copyright_workshop.htm.
    37 registrations. Participants reminded to consult ‘CAIRSS and Copyright: A good practice guide’ http://cairss.caul.edu.au/www/copyright/a_good_practice_guide.htm in preparation for the workshop.
  • Details for CAIRSS Community Day 2010 to be announced shortly.
  • CAIRSS staff have had 2 papers accepted for OR2010 Open Repositories conference later this year (http://or2010.fecyt.es/publico/Home/index.aspx). Still waiting to hear on a poster proposal.

Activity

Provide a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia

  • Planning for CAIRSS Community Day 2010 progressing thanks to assistance from RMIT repository staff. Details to be announced shortly.
  • CAIRSS Repository Manager 2010 survey will be sent out this week. This will go to all CAIRSS repository managers. The survey purpose is to obtain an update on the state of IRs in CAUL institutions, as well as to obtain feedback for targeting CAIRSS services for the remainder of 2010.

Provide support for ADT

  • CAIRSS continuing to assist CAUL with the ADT changes planned for 2010.
  • Manual updates of content from institutions (in current ADT system) continue to be undertaken as required by Tim.
  • Tim continuing working with 3 CAUL sites in planning their move of theses content from VT-ETD to their IRs.

Provision of best practice and policy advice for areas such as data migration, metadata, standards compliance, import and export, harvesting, ingest of new forms of digital material.

Assistance with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises.

  • Continuing to work with ARC on their SEER IR testing with institutions (nearing the end of week 7 of the 8 week testing period). Some institutions still to log-on to SEER system and commence testing. Tim continuing to assist numerous institutions with their test progress.
  • Still waiting on ARC advice on the following known issues: 1. SEER not rendering CSS correctly (SEER is working to implement changes to combat this issue); 2. Internet Explorer unable to access research output when using SEER testing system (suspect Cache-Control property in HTTP headers generated during SEER proxy process *VITAL*).
  • CAIRSS continuing to submit general ERA queries to ARC on behalf of CAIRSS Community members. Good response times coming back from ARC on these for general queries.
  • CAIRSS technical staff had had another phone conversation with ARC SEER technical staff today and will be having another phone discussion this Friday to cover areas in SEER testing outstanding.
  • Information on Scopus EID tagging update available on CAIRSS elist at http://groups.google.com/group/cairss/browse_thread/thread/953911ff3f83b2cc.

Assistance with the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment.

Assistance with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ANDS and the associated Australian Data Commons.

Links of possible interest

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Response to ‘Innovative Ideas for CAIRSS’

Greg from the team at ADFI wrote a response to Peter Sefton’s last post here – we we are giving him a guest post.

By Greg Pendlebury

I love the presentation style and I look forward to the video. I agree 100% with Kent’s message, but I always worry that the consumers of such messages get lost in the debate of ‘online’ vs. ‘print’ as a gross simplification of the issues.

As you rightly point out Peter, University libraries are mass migrating to online content already, and have been for the last decade (at least). I think USQ is at something like 75% of our acquisitions budget being spent on online resources, and that number would be higher if appropriate resources could be found. However most staff working in those libraries would probably agree they still have a role to play there, and if anything workloads are going up for two reasons.

The service delivery and training aspects of providing access to those resources are becoming more involved, and turning into rooms full of students sitting at PCs learning how to access electronic resources and troubleshoot difficulties. This seems to be a combination of poor tools and access methods (generally provided by vendors) compounded by an often mistaken assumption that the technical competence of the average student or staff member can keep up with our technology ‘improvements’.

On top of that of course is the increased difficulty of selecting resources to even spend your money on. Different packaging and financial models are throwing increased complexity into an area already difficult to navigate because of the significant amount of data now on offer to choose from.

For public libraries I always recall manning a service desk on pension day when the bus would pull up in front of the Library and hordes of elderly customers would stream through the front doors heading for the romance and western sections (depending on their gender). Of course this is one tiny anecdotal example of customers, but it is a perfect example of why I think the issues are far less urgent in public libraries. They are going to have to go through the same transitions, but at a far slower rate whilst their customer base largely demands access to traditional resources. The minority customers requiring newer service models can be satisfied with lower resourcing levels then we see in the University sector.

Now having myself grossly simplified the above points, I wanted to mention the part of Kent’s presentation that almost had me cheering: “…who is making our tools? …and why?”. Kent specifically touches on Google’s digitisation efforts which certainly has a lot of debate surrounding it, but largely revolves around where the content is housed and the cynical, but not irrelevant, ’super-vendor’ concerns of who controls it. I’m not an expert on the topic, but my current understanding of the concerns from the Library sector revolve around ensuring enough consideration is going to access from patrons physically inside (North American?) libraries as well as ensuring that Google doesn’t simply decide to change the playing field entirely once they’ve established dominance.

For all that however, Google exposes APIs for us to feed into our Library catalogues. We can get book covers, metadata, and even sample content for free in real-time. I’m kind of happy its there really. What I’ve always found amusing about such debates is that the University sector has put up with FAR, FAR worse behaviour from our vendors for a long time. The vast majority of the 75% of resources I mentioned above goes to our eBook and eJournal ’super-vendors’ who not only control the data we need, but are now moving into controlling the tools we need to access the data with next-gen discovery layer options. And if the value for money we get on the data is any indication, the costs are only going to rise.

Last year I was delighted to watch this video of Joe Lucia’s keynote at the Evergreen International Conference 2009. It resonated so strongly with me, not only because of its discussion regarding librarianship and ‘the intellectual commons’, but because of the resounding message that we need to take control of our software and tools, and to stop being so cripplingly dependant on vendors.

When I came to work for ADFI the possibility really opened up to me that the issue relates to the wider University sector as well. Wouldn’t the future of libraries be better if the research and publication output of the University was going into open tools that the University controlled? Institutional Repositories that are open source and open journals, possibly also running open source software like OJS?

Nothing can change things overnight of course. The ’super-vendors’ still have all our legacy content, but what do we want the landscape to look like in 20 years time? If we keep publishing into ‘closed’ journals and accepting crappy service from vendors for their crappy tools, it’s going to look pretty similar I imagine, we’ll just be a whole lot poorer and frustrated.

To get there of course we have to resource it, and Joe quite rightly mentions that as one of the key challenges, but I think programs like CAIRSS are a perfect example of how University libraries are starting to come together with the TOOLS as the key point of collaboration. I would love to see that extend into open source development.

Kent’s example of Trove is clearly a good example of the tools we need, but my one criticism (and it’s a small one) of the NLA is the tools still aren’t open (unless I’m very mistaken), but given their prior involvement with VuFind I hope it’s just a case of too little time/resources to contribute.

Copyright Greg Pendlebury, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia.

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CAIRSS Weekly Update 2010-04-21

Summary

On the event front, registrations have closed and final preparations underway for the Sydney CAIRSS Copyright Workshop on 4 May.

In relation to CAIRSS technical work, Tim is still busy assisting CAIRSS institutions with their SEER IR testing required by the ARC for ERA 2010 (just nearing the end of week 6 of the 8 week testing window). He is continuing to assist some CAIRSS institutions migrate their theses content from the old VT-ETD system to their IR.

Remember you can contact CAIRSS on cairss@caul.edu.au for any CAIRSS queries/assistance required.

Events

  • Final preparations are underway for the 4 May Sydney CAIRSS Copyright Workshop.
    http://cairss.caul.edu.au/www/copyright/cairss_copyright_workshop.htm
    Registrations have closed and over 35 CAIRSS community members will be participating on the day.
    CAIRSS is planning additional Copyright Workshops for Brisbane and Perth later in the year. Dates still to be confirmed.
  • Peter Sefton attended the NLA’s innovative ideas forum in Canberra (funded by USQ) on Friday 16th April. See Peters comments on this event at http://cairss.caul.edu.au/blog/2010/04/21/innovative-ideas-for-cairss/
  • Caroline Drury attended the ANDS Roadshow in Sydney this week.
  • Caroline attended the Gumboots for the Data Deluge session in Sydney this week.

Activity

Provide a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia

  • Meeting with QUT IR staff.
  • Meeting with CQUniversity IR staff.

Provide support for ADT

  • CAIRSS continuing to assist CAUL with the ADT changes planned for 2010.
  • Manual updates of content from institutions (in current ADT system) continue to be undertaken as required.
  • Tim working with 3 CAUL sites in moving their theses content from VT-ETD to their IRs.
  • CAIRSS technical staff and NLA staff participated in a teleconference with developers from Google Scholar. Trying to determine the best path for inclusion of Australian fulltext theses content in Google Scholar (via central NLA point or by individual IRs). Discussions between NLA staff /Peter Sefton/Google Scholar on this topic continuing.

Provision of best practice and policy advice for areas such as data migration, metadata, standards compliance, import and export, harvesting, ingest of new forms of digital material.

  • Based on feedback from QUT, NLA has changed ARO display sort order on institutional browse.

Assistance with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises.

  • Continuing to work with ARC on their SEER IR testing with institutions (nearing the end of week 6 of the 8 week testing period).
  • Tim assisting numerous institutions with their test progress.
  • ARC advice provided on: 1. SEER not rendering CSS correctly (SEER is working to implement changes to combat this issue), 2. SEER HTTP/SSL/BASIC Authentication (SEER has reviewed the code and can now accept an institution’s use of BASIC authentication over HTTPS), 3. Handle URLs (SEER is examining how to alter the validation log to allow specifically
    for Handle URLs).
  • ARC advised when a Repository Manager has tested a research output within SEER Manage Repository Testing, he/she should mark whether or not that repository has passed or failed the test. This can be done in the Research Output Test Result frame in the bottom right-hand corner of the
    application. Simply expand the drop-down menu next to Result: and select the appropriate outcome for that research output’s test (failed or passed). This will place a red cross or a green tick accordingly next to that research output.
  • CAIRSS waiting for responses from ARC on a couple of areas for clarification, including: testing of SEER system using various browser software (mainly diagnosing issues associated with Internet Explorer).
  • CAIRSS continuing to submit general ERA queries to ARC on behalf of CAIRSS Community members.
  • CAIRSS technical staff will be having another teleconference with ARC SEER technical staff next Wednesday to cover areas in SEER testing outstanding.

Assistance with the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment.

Tips

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Innovative Ideas for CAIRSS

By Peter Sefton

Last Friday I attended the National Library’s Innovative Ideas Forum (my travel was funded by USQ). There’s a decent summary at Michael Carden’s blog.

With my CAIRSS hat on* I was thinking about the ideas and innovations in the context of University Libraries.

The presentation which I think addressed libraries most directly was Kent Fitch’s ominous sounding Resistance is Futile. The video is not up yet, but I’ll add a link in the comments when it is. It was a really good talk, with a very sharp edge – in a really strong programme – listing lots of challenges for librarians to think about and a reasonable dose of something very close to stand up comedy. Kent looked at many of the issues facing libraries – not the least of which is that with commercially produced electronic resources the “buy a book and lend it out model” is just not going to continue to happen. In the university libraries, more than public libraries we are already dealing with a great number of electronic resources, obtained under fixed-term subscription licenses which expire. I don’t need to explain that problem here.

Kent didn’t leave quite enough time to fully address the positive part of his talk where he looked at the opportunities for libraries, which was not entirely his fault**.

One of the questions was from a librarian from a small public library on the NSW South Coast prompting me to think about the value proposition for uni libraries; he noted that essentially the only thing unique to his library was the local history collection, and wondered about the wisdom of digitising it and putting it online. Kent encouraged him to do so, noting that history keeps happening, so the work goes on, and it is this kind of role which will be important for libraries. Others added that librarians are still there to help people find stuff even if the stuff is not on local shelves.

For university libraries there’s more than just local history that’s unique – there’s the entire research and teaching enterprise. University librarians can step forward to run the digital libraries that house scholarship and research data and possibly play an active role in the publishing process for Open Access journals and monographs and educational resources. In the CAIRSS community we’re almost all doing the former – most Australian university institutional repositories are associated with library services.

With research data it’s less clear who will be left holding the baby. There are models emerging like the one Vicki Picasso has developed at Newcastle where IT supply storage services, the research office supplies grants management data, the records office is responsible for data curation for completed research, and the library supplies the central registry system, staffed with data librarians who tie the process together; approving and/or sourcing metadata about data. (This model informs some work I have been doing with ANDS, you can read about our proposed repository system based on VITAL at my blog). I think that the model Vicki and team have developed is notable because there is strong research office involvement from the start – stronger that I think we had in most early IR developments, where it is still not common to have really tight integration between library and research office functions, but the library is still central and doing what do libraries do best.

Beyond housing and curating stuff, Kent talked about how context is important – merging sources of information together; there’s still a lot to do there with our repositories, institutional and otherwise, but it’s hard for most working IR people to get time to think about them when they are in the middle of testing the latest SEER system for the ERA (if you don’t know those acronyms then you’re lucky).

Copyright Peter Sefton, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

HTTP://DBPEDIA.ORG/SNORQL/?QUERY=SELECT+%3FRESOURCE%0D%0AWHERE+{+%0D%0A%3FRESOURCE+%3CHTTP%3A%2F%2FDBPEDIA.ORG%2FONTOLOGY%2FPERSON%2FBIRTHPLACE%3E+%3CHTTP%3A%2F%2FDBPEDIA.ORG%2FRESOURCE%2FSYDNEY%3E+%3B%0D%0A%3CHTTP%3A%2F%2FDBPEDIA.ORG%2FONTOLOGY%2FPERSON%

This post was written in OpenOffice.org, using templates and tools provided by the Integrated Content Environment project and published to WordPress using The Fascinator.

* What would a CAIRSS hat look like?

** The audience decided in an informal vote (ie people yelled out) that they’d rather watch a video of a toddler playing with an iPad which they could have looked up on YouTube later than hear Kent’s conclusion. I blame you all if the kid turns obese or goes blind from too much of that evil Screen Time.

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CAIRSS Weekly Update – 14/04/2010

Summary

On the event front, RSVPs are about to close for the Sydney CAIRSS Copyright Workshop. CAUL institutions are reminded to register. Due to requests from the community the Copyright Workshop will also be run in Brisbane and Perth later this year. Planning has also commenced for the 2010 CAIRSS Community Day.

In relation to CAIRSS technical work, Tim has been busy assisting CAIRSS institutions with their SEER IR testing required by the ARC for ERA 2010. He has also started work assisting some CAIRSS institutions migrate their theses content from the old VT-ETD system to their IR. Any CAIRSS institutions who need to move their theses content from VT-ETD to their IR can contact Tim for assistance in this process.

CAIRSS elist membership has peaked with 171 members this week. If you wanted to join see: http://groups.google.com/group/cairss.

Remember you can contact CAIRSS on cairss@caul.edu.au for any queries/assistance required.

Events

  • RSVPs close this Friday for the 4 May Sydney CAIRSS Copyright Workshop.
    http://cairss.caul.edu.au/www/copyright/cairss_copyright_workshop.htm
    There are some spare spots remaining so CAUL institutions could RSVP for more than 1 place if they wished.
    CAIRSS is planning additional Copyright Workshops for Brisbane and Perth later in the year. Dates still to be confirmed.
  • Planning is under way for the 2010 CAIRSS community day. Thanks to Craig Anderson, Marion Slawson, and Keely Chapman at RMIT the event will be held at RMIT in Melbourne. Date still to be confirmed.
  • Travel is confirmed for Peter, Tim and Caroline to attend the Open Repositories conference in Madrid in July (funded by USQ, not by CAUL or ANDS, using a variety of USQ project sources).
    Peter, Tim and Caroline will be blogging to the CAIRSS Blog on the conference and also reporting back at the 2010 CAIRSS Community Day.
    Kate will be remaining in Australia keeping CAIRSS rolling while they are away.
    If you are a CAIRSS Repository Manager or Technical Officer also attending this conference and want to stay with the CAIRSS team, please call Katy for details.
  • Peter Sefton will be attending the NLA’s innovative ideas forum in Canberra (funded by USQ). Friday 16th April and visiting ANDS @ ANU on the 15th April.

Activity

Provide a forum to represent the collective interests of repository managers around Australia

  • Planning to assist Australian DSpace users in further collaboration. Contact Kate or Sten at USYD for details.
  • Planning questions for 2010 CAIRSS contact with all CAIRSS Repository Managers (similar to activity undertaken this time in 2009). The questions are just going through required USC and USQ ethics clearance at present.
  • ANDS queries from several repository managers are being addressed. These include information about institutions’ involvement and participation in ANDS-related activities, how an institution can approach their ANDS related work, and how non-funded universities can still keep up with ANDS-related work. Any queries of this nature can be directed to Caroline Drury.

Provide support for ADT

  • Assisting CAUL with the ADT changes planned for 2010.
  • Manual updates of content from institutions being undertaken as required.
  • Working with 2 sites in moving their theses content from VT-ETD to their IRs.
  • Responding to ADT queries from end-users.


Provision of best practice and policy advice for areas such as data migration, metadata, standards compliance, import and export, harvesting, ingest of new forms of digital material.

  • Planning for CAIRSS technical staff and NLA staff phone conversation with staff from Google and Google Scholar late April.
  • Based on feedback from QUT, CAIRSS communicating with NLA on ARO display sort order.


Assistance with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ERA and the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) exercises.

  • Working with ARC on their SEER IR testing with institutions.
  • Tim assisting numerous institutions with their test progress.
  • CAIRSS waiting for responses from ARC on a couple of areas for clarification, including: rendering issue, Handle URLs issue, HTTP/SSL/BasicAuth issue some sites are experiencing.
  • Continuing to submit general ERA queries to ARC on behalf of CAIRSS Community members.

Assistance with the understanding of managing copyright issues in the repository environment.


Assistance with the integration of repositories with the requirements of the ANDS and the associated Australian Data Commons

Caroline Drury will be attending the ANDS Roadshow next week in Sydney, 19-20th April. Caroline will also attend the Gumboots for the Data Deluge session in Sydney on the 21st.

Related items

CAIRSS assistance in ERA-SEER repository testing 2010

The CAIRSS website has information for CAIRSS institutions on ERA-SEER repository testing 2010. Please see: http://cairss.caul.edu.au/www/era_seer/configuring_repositories_era.htm

The Repository Testing Strategy (open from 12 March to 7 May 2010) aims at facilitating a more comprehensive, systematic, uniform and independent approach to the depositing of and access to research outputs for the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative for 2010.

To achieve the desired outcome for this testing institutions need to:

Register all repositories that will be used for ERA 2010

Populate these repositories with at least 10 research outputs that will subsequently be submitted for ERA 2010

Test all aspects of and record results for each research output in SEER Manage Repository Testing.

Login details and URL required for testing was emailed to each institutions ERA Liaison Officer from the ARC on 12 March 2010. The subject of the email was ‘ERA SEER login details and notification’. The ERA Liaison Officer at each institution was advised they need to use this to create a Repository Manage role within SEER and assign that role to the relevant person at the institution (i.e. the repository manager).

If repository managers have not received this login they will need to chase it up at their institution with the main ERA contact officer who would be receiving these emails/details to enable them to commence testing.

Key ARC documents are linked to from CAIRSS website also including:

ERA-SEER Repository Testing Strategy for 2010.pdf

2009 ERA HCA Trial Repository Testing.pdf

Please contact Tim at CAIRSS for further information.

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