Over the last couple of years we have seen a shift in the software architecture used in Institutional Repositories. Institutional Repositories seem to have moved away from single software application models and have leaned towards using combinations of flexible and scalable web components, as well as more productive software development frameworks. So far these architectural changes have improved harvesting, indexing and general performance for the end user. But what about the researcher?

I am not exactly sure what term or phrase to reference when discussing the progressive interaction between a researcher and the software that will showcase or disseminate their research output, so allow me to refer to it using terminology that I have picked up recently such as AWE (Academic Working Environment) or eResearch Platform.

Am I correct in assuming that a researchers willingness to participate in actively making research documents and data available, as well as promoting ones personal profile might be elevated during the honeymoon phase of a research project? Based on conversations with many accomplished researchers I believe this is the case, however I have no hard evidence to back this up.

The good news is that advances in the AWE area from a software perspective are now available, creating an opportunity for change. Hopefully these advances will result in increased interaction from researchers and richer content on the web, these changes may not occur simply due to the fact that the software is available but may require innovation from within an institution or even a national mandate.

During the International Conference on Open Repositories 2010 I was made aware of systems including eSciDoc , Islandora and The Fascinator amongst others which address these issues but are unfortunately beyond the scope of this blog post. More to come.

I hope that this has created food for thought, all comments and thoughts are welcome.

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

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.

Today is the last day of the conference, I have been looking forward to attending the session on digital media as I believe that this is a topic with a big future. I have noticed allot of activity with Java programming libraries regarding media content and visualisation in the last few years. Below are some details of the work that the University of York has done recently.

“YODL2: Developing a search interface for multimedia content at the University of York” (Nigel Verghese Thomas and Julie Allinson).

Originally YODL was an implementation of Muradora as access control was an important requirement for the University of York.

The system currently holds 10 thousand objects and contains preview, thumbnail and fullscreen versions for all content.

The University of York has moved away from Muradora and created YODL2. As I understand it, this was due to the development of Muradora being halted and the start of performance issues as the system reached 10 thousand objects.

YODL2 has been written in Java. The architecture of the system is based on dependancy injection principles and uses SOLR 1.4, Spring and Fedora 3.3. The new design has an improved user interface (eg browser based zoom and handle functionality for viewing images and page turning within the browser) and performance gains.

The University of York performed a survey to assist them with interface product choice, the prototype was even written in other languages and frameworks including .NET and C#. It seems they put allot of effort into doing homework on finding the right tools to use. The candidates for enhancing the user experience were Java FX, Flex and Silverlight. Flex was chosen due to cross platform support and the fact that it is well documented. Although Silverlight would have worked on Windows and Mac there was concern that Linux users would require Moonlight (an open source implementation of Silverlight).

With YODL2, the data for display is drawn from Fedora. Sequence information is stored in RDF which when compounded provides the logic for navigating through say a book, for example there is “has next” and “has previous” value associated to pages within a book.

There were demonstrations on in-browser deep zoom, browsing image search results and paging through a book object.

This session brought us to the end of the conference which overall was a great success. The Palacio de Congresos de Madrid is a great venue, everything went as smoothly as one would expect a conference of this size would. A few minor hiccups with the wireless was definitely outweighed by the very friendly staff and the daily 3 course lunches.

Like everyone else here I have made many new friends and contacts including staff from 2 different repository support services, Welsh Repository Network and Repositories Support Project.

Please leave comments on this blog or email cairss@caul.edu.au if you have any questions regarding the conference.

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

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.

On day 2 by far the most striking paper for me was by Michael Durbin [PDF]: Terminology Services in a Digital Repository. He described a set of tools for creating controlled vocabularies and making them available to services such as metadata forms. This is an important area or repositories – if we can share terminology using a linked-data approach then we can improve discoverability. There’s a page about the service at OCLC’s site.

At the moment in the IR world we have a variety of ways to refer to the same thing so you get “Article, Journal” and “Article” and “Journal Article”, and so on, all referring to (more or less) the same thing. Using a terminology server, we could all use the term from the bibliographic ontology with the URI: http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/Article. That doesn’t mean the users have to see that URI, you can still choose what you want to show on a web page as part of a description, but when services such as Trove or ARO aggregate repository content we can be much more confident that the right kinds of resources are being grouped together.

What the users depositing content will see need not change much, they will still be presented with drop-down lists and auto-complete fields, but behind the scenes repositories will not be storing plain-old text strings as metadata, but a combination of an identifier (a URL) and (maybe) a text string.

There are a similar efforts elsewhere. Chatting to Neil Jefferies of Oxford, during the Duraspace-hosted drinks on the third day I learned that Oxford has a similar service under development. In my last post I mentioned BibApp as another important service which can do a similar thing for people’s names. And I know that ANDS have been exploring the idea of an Australian vocabulary service.

In the ADFI Software R&D team’s forthcoming work for ANDS under the metadata stores programme we will be making a service which will work for both names and terms. I hope that as this new class of software becomes more common and the various efforts mature we can start to work out some standards for interoperability.

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

Today we reached the point in the conference on Open Repositories 2010 where the general sessions ceased and the user group sessions began. The user group sessions that I attended were very practical and slightly more technical than the general sessions. One talk included an excellent live presentation using DSpace where the audience were able to log in and participate.

Statistics

I have heard some good discussions regarding the relevance and accuracy of repository statistics back home and have personally experienced persistence issues where statistics have disappeared during the administration and upgrading of software. I decided to attend the talk named named “DSpace 1.6 useage statistics, what can it do for you?” (Ben Bosman) in the hope of discovering some new facts about statistics which I could share.

It was noted during the talk that 36% of DSpace users requested features relating to statistics. The latest version of DSpace (1.6.x) now includes a sophisticated statistics package, which was a contribution by @MIRE. It is worth noting that the logging and collection of the statistics ships with DSpace for free, however the statistics visualisation package which filters and displays the statistics in a browser can be purchased from @MIRE. It is possible to create your own visualisation software by simply querying the stored statistics.

DSpace can trigger a statistics event in 4 ways. A community home page visit, a collection home page visit, an item visit or a bitstream download. When an event is triggered, the information that is stored includes (but is not limited to) the IP address of the visitor, the referring web site, the longitude and latitude of the visitor as well as the continent code (eg Asia) and country code of the visitor (eg Japan).

These events are stored in a raw format using XML. The information is then indexed using SOLR, meaning the indexing and retrieval of information is fast and efficient. This architecture allows the use of an additional/separate machine for the SOLR component, saving CPU and RAM resources in the repository and allowing load balancing for the SOLR machine if required.

When we think of statistics the first thing that comes to mind is traffic, hits and popularity, however statistics based on metadata and bitstreams allow us to measure the growth of repository over time and analyse the repository based on information about the objects and their associated bitstreams. The collection of statistics in this system is highly configurable.

Having rich data in any form is a good thing I guess and even if traffic and popularity of single objects is not your goal this type of granular statistics collection on any platform may add value one day when justifying the existence, history or importance of your repository.

Fedora

I gathered some notes on Fedora as it is widely used in Australian repositories, below is a guide/roadmap of Fedora for the near future.

Fedora 3.3 will be released on December the 18^th. New features will include the ability to ingest and provide local content using the file:// address. We were advised that the RESTful API in this version is no longer experimental and is now ready for use. Also RELS-INT relationships are supported.

Fedora 3.4 is coming soon, no date set at this point. The release candidate is out now users are able to assist in the testing of this release. This version includes size attribute improvements, scaling of logging without restarting and 25 bug fixes.

Fedora 3.5 will pave the way for 4.0 and has the following features pencilled in. A RESTful relationship API (currently versions are using SOAP to manage relationships), as well as the use of Spring and OSGi, enabling the community to contribute code more efficiently. Improvements to the Fedora command line interface was mentioned also.

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

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.

Developments in the collaboration between Fedora and DSpace are of obvious interest to the Australian repositories community, where the majority of research repositories are powered by one or other of these technologies.

The DuraSpace collaboration has gained a lot of attention since the DSpace and Fedora communities joined forces in 2008. There won’t be a code release for a while that integrates the two but it looks like a number of alliances have been formed and the community has substantially expanded. Eight of Fedora’s eleven code committers are now from the community rather than DuraSpace. The DuraSpace team members are no longer affiliated with their original universities— all now work independently for DuraSpace. And DuraSpace is a nonprofit organisation, which means they’re trying to move away from reliance on grant funding and towards a more sustainable model based on sponsorship and services.

The DuraSpace Strategy

According to Chief Technology Officer Brad McLean, DuraSpace’s mission statement is deliberately broad to allow support for community-led projects that may not directly relate to DSpace or Fedora. One of the objectives for 2010 is to “support more independent user-facing projects such as Blacklight”. This attitude explains DuraSpace’s interest in DepositMO, SWORD, Drupal/WordPress integration at Islandora and a PKP collaboration with the Big Digital Machine at Indiana University.

What about DSpace and Fedora?

DuraSpace still sees DSpace as a “turnkey reference platform for repositories” and a “user experience incubator”, while Fedora is an “easily installed, configured and maintained repository toolkit”. One possible future arrangement that DuraSpace envisages is DSpace running on Fedora running on DuraCloud. However many institutions could take a while to be ready for cloud computing. So for the moment DuraSpace is focussing on a future for DSpace with “Fedora Inside”. The goal is to retain the out-of-the-box experience of DSpace but to benefit from the strengths of the “robust” Fedora architecture.

Tim Donoghue from DSpace makes it clear that DSpace with “Fedora Inside” is still some way off—perhaps 2011 or 2012—as the software will need to go through some intermediary stages first. They’re attempting to follow more predictable release schedules; the next version of DSpace is 1.7, scheduled for December 2010.

One of the most interesting anticipated features in 1.7 (from this repository manager’s point of view) is support for different submission processes based on publication type. The example Donoghue gives here is a separate workflow for depositing theses as opposed to other publication types. This could be really useful for Australian DSpace repositories. Also, DSpace already supports import using SWORD but in 1.7 the developers are also looking at the possibility of exporting data using SWORD, which would theoretically allow DSpace to export to Fedora or to EPrints or perhaps to other repository software.

Brad McLean described how “decoupling of the user interface from workbenches” has already occurred in repositories (see for example Manakin, Blacklight and SWORD), and wonders whether the admin side of repository software will follow the same trend. I think repository managers should welcome any attempts to enhance our admin tools. We’ve focussed first on improving the usability of the end-user interfaces to our systems—this is naturally a matter of urgency—but it’s high time that repositories became easier for repository managers to use, too.

For more information on DuraSpace, see: http://www.duraspace.org/

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