Open Repository Blog
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
Posted by Graham Triggs at 15:37 Comments (0)
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.”
Posted by Michael Guthrie at 16:50 Comments (0)
"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...
Posted by Michael Guthrie at 16:53 Comments (0)
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.
Posted by Joanna Drakes at 18:16 Comments (0)
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.
Posted by Bryan Vickery at 10:40 Comments (0)
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.
Posted by Joanna Drakes at 09:37 Comments (0)
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).
Posted by Graham Triggs at 12:48 Comments (0)
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.
Posted by Graham Triggs at 15:18 Comments (0)
Another day, another month, another feature
What better way to celebrate the last day of April than with another release of new features? (Yes, I can think of a few too, but you've got to be careful what you say on these blogs - you never know who might be reading).
Today brings to new enhancements to Open Repository. The first of which, you can see an example of in the screenshot below - tabbed browse panels for communities and collections.
Now, when you go to the homepage of a community or collection, the 'browse by' box will be presented with two tabs 'Community' (or 'Collection') and 'All'. The browse links when displaying the 'Community' or 'Collection' tab take you to browse list of content that is within the community or collection that you are viewing. Clicking on 'All' will update the box with links for browsing the content of the entire repository - including the 'communities and collections' link.
The really nice part about this enhancement is that these navigation options stay with you when you are browsing within a community or collection - so if you go to the 'Title' list for a specific community, the browse box will still be presented with the tabs, and you can still choose to go to the 'Author' or 'Date issued' browse for that community.
The second feature is only available to repository administrators. One of the most popular features of Open Repository has been the document conversion facility, that allows submitters to create PDFs of their Word files (amongst other options). However, this was restricted to being part of the submission process - once an item was accepted into the repository, although you could add and remove bitstreams, you no longer had access to the document conversion facilities.
Today's update changes this - as an administrator, if you edit an item, an additional button appears for the 'Document Convertor' (it's near the top of the page, just under 'Delete (expunge)' and 'Move Item'. On entering the document convertor, you will be presented with the existing bitstreams for that item, and any conversions that are available. It works in the same way as the conversion facility in the submission process, and also allows you to remove any bitstreams (just in case you create any by accident!). For editing any other metadata associated with the bitstream (name, description), or to add any files, you can use the form on the 'edit item' page as normal.
Posted by Graham Triggs at 16:02 Comments (0)
No, I know I'm clearly not referring to the number of blog posts recently (unless the answer is very few, very slowly). So, what's been happening in Open Repository land?
Well, after a very busy couple of days with the DSpace User Group sessions (the presentations from which are now online), we've been hard at work tinkering under the hood of Open Repository.
All of our repositories are now registered within Google's Webmaster tools service, which means we can keep a track on the indexing of the sites, and if any problems are being encountered. Thanks to this, I've been able to track down a couple of small bugs hiding in the RSS feed code, and the XHTML headers that caused problems when viewing a tiny minority of items. All problems that this has shown up have now been rectified.
There is also a new tool available that allows repository admins to match parts of the metadata when it is filled from a PubMed ID or DOI, and insert additional metadata into the item automatically.
But, back to the original question, which refers to some changes to the file-type analysis tool. As you know, this was enabled for all our clients just before the Open Repositories conference. However, it was a bit slow. Actually, quite a lot slow. For a repository with 2000 items in it, the initial page took over 3 minutes to display. In fact, with 2000 items, every page in the analysis tool would take at least 3 minutes, and in the worst cases would even take over 10 minutes to display.
This has now been improved slightly. For the same repository, the initial page will typically display in under 5 seconds. And every page of the analysis tool will start to display in under 5 seconds - even for the worst case scenario of listing a breakdown of 2000 items (which should complete downloading in about 20 seconds).
I say generally, because sometimes the pages do take a bit longer to load - for example, if it hasn't been used in a while, then the database may need to do a bit more work to load the necessary data. But even in those cases, it is at least usable now.
So, if you haven't looked at the file-type analysis tool - or refrained from using it due to the performance - now is the time to give it a chance.
Posted by Graham Triggs at 17:11 Comments (0)
What happens when you try to get 400 people into 2 rooms?
Having survived Microsoft's hospitality yesterday (and they were extremely hospitable, hence the reason most of those that were there are struggling), I am back at the campus of Southampton University (this time with Peter and Dominic in tow) for the formal start of Open Repositories 2008.
Today's sessions started with an very interesting keynote presentation by Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge University, exploring the issues of using repositories for scientific data (with a particular focus on chemistry). This touched on the difficulties of getting users to interact with repositories - how they only want to use the tools that they and processes that they are familiar with, and that repository ingest needs to fit in with this, either by direct integration with the tools (in the kind of way the Microsoft was demonstrating yesterday), or by having alternate ingesting procedures (discovering the content from other sources, harvesting and mining that data with little or no interaction from the user).
This presentation turned out to be as entertaining as it was informative, as the demonstrations that Peter had prepared caused havoc with the arrangements that Southampton University had made to relay the projections to a second room due to the numbers that turned up. So the answer to the question of what happens when you try to get 400 people into 2 rooms is that all your best laid plans fall through, and you end up squeezing 400 people into just one!
The following session consisted of three presentations relating to web 2.0 technologies (although as we certainly know in the DSpace community, you should never refer to something as 2.0!). The presentations focused on Connotea (and OpenID integration), scholarly practice and the impact of social networking, and a very impressive (or at least pretty) demonstration of cross repository browsing using RichTags.
It was particularly good to see what Connotea are up to, and the possibilities to build on and integrate the services of Connotea into a repository (such as the recommendation system). Usefully, this also provided me with an introduction to Ian Mulvany (Nature Publishing Group), who I've had a very productive meeting with to talk about how we can enhance the links that we provide to submit articles from Open Repository services into Connotea libraries - the good news is that they've already made some enhancements recently that allow Connotea to read the embedded meta links that we are placing in the html, in many cases signifcantly improving the quality and quantity of data that is transferred. There are still some kinks to work out, and I look forward to having further discussions with Ian once we both get back to our respective offices next week.
Posted by Graham Triggs at 14:44 Comments (0)
Open Repository @ Open Repositories 2008
Posted by Graham Triggs at 16:23 Comments (0)
With winter making one last ditch attempt to keep us all in our thermals, it's time to take a look back at what we've achieved this February. The unseasonally high temperatures have obviously helped as we seem to have made good progress in this slightly shorter of months.
We've moved to new, improved web servers, significantly improved the speed and efficiency of the browse and search features, added date restrictions to the advanced search feature, added links to various social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumble upon, Facebook, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Citeulike) and deployed the ability to download to EndNote and Reference Manager. Phew!
Our final projects for the month are currently in various stages of testing and will hopefully be deployed at the end of this week. These will be: item embargos, EThOS standardized submission forms, and a tool to define content types within the repository.
Item embargos allow a user to enter an embargo date when uploading a file during submission. The bitstream in the item view will be labelled as under embargo and inaccessible until the date set. The embargos will need to be set up by us, but it's a simple change to a config file. Embargos set up across the repository, to all collections within a specific community, or to specified collections. All admins will be able to see embargoed content, and special groups can be set up to view embargoed content. Embargo dates can be changed within the item edit page, and we're working on allowing embargos to be added to bitstreams added after submission.
Further to this we're also creating a thesis-specific submission form that can be applied to a collection or collections of your choice, that also conforms to the UK's EThOS project requirements. This will be released in hand with the item embargo tool.
The content type tool will show you how many items in your repository contain which file types, and how many do not. For example, you can look at how many items contain PDFs, and then at all those that don't. For those that don't, you'll be able to see a breakdown of which file types they do contain, and link to the specific items in each case. There will also be a list of all items that are metadata only.
We've also been working on various small customisation requests for individual repositories, and we're looking forward to seeing HeRA ready for public launch at the end of the month. Our March task list has been set, and I'll add a further update on that later this week. In the meantime we've sent Graham off to Baltimore, not to catch up on season 4 of The Wire, but to attend the OAI-ORE launch. There will certainly be MUCH more of this to come, as ORE looks to become a central tool in repository usage moving forward.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 11:21 Comments (0)
So after another terrible pun, it's time to reveal the latest features to be added to the Open Repository service.
After having worked through various user test cases, the download to EndNote and Reference Manager feature has been released to live for all production and pilot sites. This feature is available on both the individual item page, and for a page of search results.
The feature will also work for the Firefox extension, Zotero.
Additionally we have also added links to each item page for the social bookmarking sites: Digg, Del.icio.us, Connotea, Citeulike, Stumbleupon and Facebook. However, we are unable to set these up for pilot sites.
Click here for an example of both features.
Posted by Mark Merifield at 16:31 Comments (0)
It's very common for companies to gather together the positive feedback they've received and send it round internally, and I felt that it was high time we did the same for us. Although, I've removed any mention of those involved, to avoid potential embarrassment at such gushing praise, here are a few of our favourites for your public perusal:
- We think you have been absolutely fantastic and we really do appreciate all of the hard work you have put in to deal with our queries and requests.
- I'm incredibly impressed by your ability to turn round these sorts of problems within hours (even minutes) rather than days or weeks!
- Like a good Santa you gave us almost everything we wanted, but held enough back for next year and because we weren't perfect this year!
- ...much better than socks and a poorly-knitted cardigan! That's fantastic thank you
- Just let you know that the launch was very successful and people showed great interests in the repository. Many thanks for your support
- We are very satisfied with your service so far! I am happy you are developing helpful tools of great importance!
- Big thanks for all the work
- You are really rocking, today!
- Are you trying to test my coronaries, or just good at timing?
- Thanks very much for this - it has indeed gone! I think I need to lie in a darkened room now...
- I am grateful to you for going beyond normal limits to help get this off the ground
- What would I do without your willingness to shed light on these mysteries for me!
- Thanks for this. You've been remarkably quick.
- We really appreciate the attention you've given us on all these picky details.
And finally...
- Thanks for this reassurance - I actually thought I had lost the plot... No - you're completely correct, I've clearly lost the plot. Now slightly concerned that I've lost a day though! Wonder what else I've missed...
In return, we'd like to say thank you too, to everyone we work with for making our jobs not only interesting, but also highly pleasurable.
And for our own and finally, we've realised that during their involvement with Open Repository, at least two administrators have got married, and two have fallen pregnant. Now, we're not saying that... well, make of it what you will!
Tune in next week for some more news you might Digg (groan!)
Posted by Mark Merifield at 17:09 Comments (0)