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Open Repository Blog

Wednesday Jul 07, 2010

Open Repository Workshop at ALA 2010

Open Repository recently hosted a repository workshop at the American Library Association Conference 2010 in Washington D.C., titled Developing A Repository: The Library's Journey.

The workshop discussed the history of institutional repositories, developments in the open access movement and the growing need for organizations to have their own institutional repository. A case study of a library's journey in developing and implementing a repository was also included.

The slides from this presentation are now available to view online. If you would like any further information about how Open Repository can help your organization implement a repository solution, please do not hesitate to get in touch

 

 

Wednesday Mar 03, 2010

OR Interviewed at Repositories and the Cloud conference. #repcloud

At the recent 'Repositories and the Cloud' event held at The Magic Circle in London on 23rd February 2010, I was interviewed by Adrian Stevenson of UKOLN:

More interviews are at http://www.viddler.com/explore/ukoln/videos/

Slides and videos of the presentations can be seen at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/events/repcloud.

 

 

Wednesday Feb 03, 2010

Enhanced Repository Statistics

 

Usage statistics have been a major topic of discussion for institutional repositories for some time. And last year, a survey of DSpace repository administrators put enhanced statistics as their most desired feature for the next release of DSpace.

Google Analytics provides a great interface and many advanced features for seeing the overall activity for the repository, and as such, we have offered a Google Analytics account alongside the repository - enhanced to record file downloads that would otherwise be missed. However, it's not always easy to see how this relates to an individual item or file, or it's relevance in the context of a collection or community.

Now, with the release of an API for Google Analytics, we are able to  provide enhanced reporting within the repository. At every level - Items, Collections, Communities and the repository as a whole - we can show how your content is being used, the items and files that are attracting attention, and the reach the repository is having.

Read more about the enhanced statistics now available as part of the Open Repository service  

 

 

Wednesday Nov 11, 2009

Nobel Prize-winning scientists to Congress: Make available publicly funded research in an Online Repository

[Read More]

 

 

Wednesday Oct 28, 2009

Digital Asset Management for Museum Collections

Open Repository recently hosted a repository workshop at the Museums Association conferencein London entitled Digital Asset Management for Museum Collections.

The workshop focused on the increasing need for organizations to be able to digitally archive and manage their collections, including a presentation outlining how Open Repository worked with The Natural History Museum, London, to enable them to showcase and preserve their content for a future global audience.

The slides from this presentation are available to download but if you would like any further information about how Open Repository can help your organization implement a repository solution please do not hesitate to get in touch

 

 

Thursday Oct 22, 2009

The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and Open Repository is pleased to announce the first NHS Repository in the UK

The Christie NHS Foundation Trust> has a rich heritage as one of Europe’s leading centers in the field of oncology and its related sciences, publishing 350 peer-reviewed papers a year and with over 9000 papers indexed in Medline.

The launch of this repository will enable The Christie NHS Foundation Trust to capture and showcase the organizations research and provide a centrally located search-able index for this information.

Also Cancer Research UK, one of The Christie NHS Foundation Trust’s, main funding bodies is a supporter of open access publishing so the launch of the repository means many grant holders will now be able to deposit directly into the repository to meet funding requirements.

If you would like to find out more about how The Christie launched their repository take a look at their case study.

 

 

Monday Aug 10, 2009

Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) Open Repository Case Study Now Available

Open Repository is happy to announce a new case study on the OpenRepository.com website for the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE).

This as the Irish Times publishes an Article on Open Access: "The Government funded new OA archives at Irish universities while simultaneously requiring Government-funded research to end up in them. Suber would like to see more countries adopt the Irish model. “Ireland is ahead of the world,” he says. The Irish model spurs progress beyond its own borders, just as it takes in research from OA journals everywhere. For Suber that’s the point. “All of us benefit, because researchers benefit directly.”

 

 

Repository Fringe, Edinburgh Wrapup

Graham and Michael attended the 2nd Repository Fringe in Edinburgh, July 30th and 31st. It was a great opportunity to meet and discuss all things repository with fellow developers, administrators and users of repositories, with delegates coming from all over the UK and some from further afield. An excellent wrapup of the event can be browsed by going to the JISC Datashare blog. The Closing Plenary by Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is especially noteworthy, though there are many very interesting aspects of the conference documented on the site. The Twitter thread can be searched using the #rf09 hash tag.

[Read More]

 

 

Wednesday Jun 24, 2009

"Canadian Excellence" strengthened by extensive adoption of open access

  • Wilfrid Laurier University adopts Open Repository and BioMed Central Membership
  • Open access movement gains ground in North America

BioMed Central and Wilfrid Laurier University today announce the launch of Laurier IR, an institutional repository that provides a visible point of open access archiving of intellectual output for all members of the University community. Read more on the site...

 

 

OAI6 Geneva

Open Repository recently sponsored and attended OAI6 conference, CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication, organised and hosted by the University of Geneva and CERN, last week June 17th to the 19th. The city of Geneva and the Alps were certainly a magnificent backdrop for the lofty ideas that were being generated by the 236 delegates attending from all over the world.

The delegates consisted of repository managers, developers, and representatives from the Open Access community and there great networking opportunities, both informal and planned events, one notably taking place at CERN, the site of the Large Hadron Collider, and the setting for the opening sequences in the the current Dan Brown film, Angels and Demons.

Apart from the socialising, the tutorials and breakout sessions were well received and covered a wide range of topics, with something for everyone, whether a new or propective repository manager looking at various solutions, or developers working on the latest standards or ingestion methods.

Some photos of the event are posted on the CERN site.


 

 

 

Thursday Apr 30, 2009

ACRL Conference 2009

BioMed Central recently hosted a repository workshop at the ACRL conference in Seattle entitled Developing A Repository: The Library’s Journey

The workshop focused on developments in the open access movement and the consequent need for institutions to have their own institutional repository. This was followed by a case study on the journey that a library takes in developing and implementing a repository to their institution.

If you would like any further information about how Open Repository can help your organization implement a repository solution please do not hesitate to get in touch.

 

 

Thursday Mar 19, 2009

Open Repository is moving!

We're moving!

BioMed Central and Open Repository are moving to new offices on Friday 20th March.

Our new contact details will be as follows:

Open Repository, BioMed Central Ltd
236, Gray's Inn Road
London, WC1X 8HL
UK

+44 20 3192 2000 (switchboard)
+44 20 3192 2012 (fax)
Joanna Drakes can be reached at +44 20 3192 2189

Please update your records accordingly.

 

 

Friday Oct 17, 2008

New member joining the team

I am writing to introduce myself as the new Open Repository Service Manager. My name is Joanna Drakes and I am Mark Merifield’s replacement. I started on Monday 11th August 2008 and I am currently familiarising myself with the product, needs of our customers and the repository market - I look forward to assisting you wherever possible.

Like Mark, I too come from a Customer Services background, having worked in a Public Library for many years. I have assisted in organising events and I worked on a number of teaching projects, one of which involved training people how to use the electronic services offered by the library.

I have also spent a year working for a media company as a 2nd Line User Support Analyst in their ICT department. This involved managing computers and users’ accounts, dealing with hardware and software issues and handling technical enquiries.  

I will be calling all the administrators in the next few weeks, but in the meantime please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about your repository. We are currently working on new features for your repository, and I will update you on these shortly.

 

 

Wednesday Jul 30, 2008

More hertz, but less pain... and a wavering signal

Yes, I know it's been a while since I've posted any updates. We haven't really had anything major to announce for a while - lots of tweaks to existing repositories, and one or two new pilots. Although there are a couple of larger projects happening in the background, which should become visible shortly.

As I write this, I am sat on a train to Edinburgh - where for the rest of the week I shall be attending the repository world's latest conference, the Repository Fringe. Any suggestions that the timing and venue of this meetup have been chosen for the various social activities available are emphatically refuted!

I will take this opportunity to mention a significant upgrade that was made a few weeks ago - the introduction of an enhanced server infrastructure. I'll spare the gory details, but it means that we can better distribute the requests to our hosted repositories across the servers we are running. So whilst we haven't introduced any new hardware, we have effectively doubled the peak capacity that the servers can handle.

What's more, because user login information is replicated across the servers, when a server fails or the software it is running is upgraded, any users that are logged in will no longer find themselves mysteriously logged out.

All of which is good news for the managers and users of our hosted repositories, and quite noteworthy to the wider DSpace community as very few institutes run a fully clustered repository (I had to fix one or two minor issues in the main DSpace code to even make this possible - these fixes will be part of the upcoming 1.5.1 release).

 

 

Friday May 16, 2008

What You Get is more than What You See

Sorry, I've been neglecting you, haven't I? Time for another update then, and this one is more WYSI than most (err, ok, I'll stop the puns).

The first part to mention is a new cut-down 'content management system' - when I say cut-down, I'm not just being modest. It doesn't currently allow uploading of images or other objects, and doesn't post to a blog or rolling new page (although now I'm starting to get ideas!). But what it does let you do is create additional pages of html that become available under a 'pages/FILE.html' url. So you can create a page acknowledging publisher's that have let you archive full text of your material, for example.

If you want to access this, log in to your repository as an administrator, and then from the 'admin' screen, select 'Additional Pages' from the left hand navigation. It's all pretty straightforward to use, but if you would like some assistance, please get in touch.

Now, editing all this html by hand is a bit tedious, right? So, related to the above is our other feature announcement - if you are using a modern Javascript-friendly browser (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari), the 'edit html' form in the content management system above replaces the html entry box with a 'what you see is what you get' editor. If you've ever used software like Microsoft Word (and who hasn't), the operation should be fairly obvious - and much easier than tedious coding of 'pointy br slash pointy' and the like.

But why stop there? What about all that nasty html code that you see on the homepage news editor? Or the community / collection edit pages? Well we've replaced the small html entry box on the news editor with a larger WYSIWYG editor - click here for an example. For the community / collection edit screens, we've left the small box of html code there by default, but added an 'Add/remove editor' link next to it, that will convert it into a cut down version of WYSIWYG editor - this time, click here for an example.

A couple of quick tips about the WYSIWYG editor - firstly, there is a button labelled 'HTML' on the second row of buttons. If you want to see or edit the html code, clicking that button will open a pop-up that displays the html code. Secondly, by default the editor creates new paragraphs when you hit the 'enter' key - and new paragraphs always have a blank line between them. If you just want to create a new line without the additional spacing, hold down the 'Shift' key whilst you press 'Enter'.

One final note, a big congratulations this week to Medecins Sans Frontieres who have gone public with their repository. It's great to see the work that's gone into it come to fruition.

 

 

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