After a year of developing and implementing the pilot phase of YODL, the york online multimedia repository, we feel we have useful experience to share with other people working in this area. In July Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord published an article in Ariadne, a Web magazine aimed at information professionals in archives, libraries and museums . The article outlined the progress of the project from its inception through to its actual implementation. (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue60/allinson-harbord/). To accompany this, Julie suggested Frank Feng and I write a companion article from a technical perspective. I found this a slightly daunting but very interesting challenge, and the article we jointly wrote is now online. The article can be read at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue61/stracchino-feng/

Stimulus grant to enhance arXiv e-preprints for scientists by Bill Steele, Chronicle Online, Cornell University, November 17, 2009. Excerpts:

Soon, Cornell’s e-print arXiv of scientific papers will evolve from a simple database to a place where “authors, articles, databases and readers talk to each other” to help users identify a work’s main concepts, see research reports in context and easily find related work.

…..

Other enhancements will provide interoperability with such research sites as PubMedCentral and provisions to allow scientists to contribute in newer, more flexible text formats.

Researchers might be more enthusiastic about participating in open access journals and repositories if they could see that their work was more accessible and usable, [Paul] Ginsparg suggested. “And perhaps the academic community will again play a role at the forefront as the semantic Web 3.0 rolls out,” he said. Academic publishing has lagged behind the commercial Internet in providing interactive enhancements that today’s students take for granted, he explained. “Configuring research communications infrastructure for the next generation of researchers requires getting into the heads of near-term future researchers — undergrads and grad students — coming of age in the Google/Facebook/Twitter era.”

Found via posts in [Digital & Scholarly] and [Open Access News].

Comment: The arXiv repository has been at the forefront of the Green route to OA. The proposed enhancements may once again permit it to play a leadership role. These enhancements are intended to add value of a kind that will enhance the appeal of repositories to a wider range of users.

Green OA mandates implemented by funding agencies and universities can be regarded as “sticks”, designed to push appropriate content into repositories. Enhancements of the kind being proposed for the arXiv can be regarded as “carrots”, designed to pull a variety of users toward repositories. The latter approach has, so far, received less attention from OA advocates than the former.

An audio archive of the November CNI Conversations session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher).  The discussion featured a preview of the upcoming fall CNI member meeting by Executive Director Clifford Lynch.  Cliff also reported on the recent ARL/CNI special collections forum, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and a new book on the Fourth Paradigm (a collection of essays dedicated to the memory of Jim Gray, edited by Tony Hey, et al, and published by Microsoft Research).  Participant questions included the revised Google Books settlement, Lawrence Lessig’s EDUCAUSE keynote on copyright, and an update on the Open Annotation Collaboration.

About CNI Conversations
As part of an ongoing effort to explore additional ways to connect with our members, CNI launched a new program in September 2009, CNI Conversations, in which participants from member institutions and organizations take part in discussions on current topics with CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format.

Real-time participation in upcoming CNI Conversations events requires pre-registration.  Registration is open only to those at member institutions and organizations.  Dates for upcoming events were recently sent to the CNI representatives at our member institutions; if you are interested in participating in a future session of CNI Conversations, please contact one of your organization’s CNI representatives.  We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at Joan@cni.org.

I’ve had a “Less is More” badge for a while but don’t remember where, when or why I was given it.  I’ve always liked the idea though.  At the M25 Learning Technology Group at UEL on Friday, I learned that it’s the motto of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.  This fitted in rather well with my own presentation, which was delivered as a Pecha Kucha presentation, that is ,20 slides of images timed at 20 seconds each.  A format developed by architects in Tokyo.

The theme of the meeting was collaboration; I was talking about Cloudworks and my presentation, with the original audio, is below. Preparing for it involved a lot more work that I’d imagined and delivering it was hard work but I really like the format.  As a presenter it forces you focus on what really matters &  of course it’s great for the audience as it’s only 6-minutes 40-seconds!  Definitely something I’ll be doing again and encouraging others to do.

View on Slideshare

EThOS is the British Library’s thesis digitisation service which launched in January 2009 and has so far made over 24,000 theses available for immediate download. Some of the theses from the University of Bradford are also included and more get added gradually.

As the British Library say “the service allows researchers to access theses online, most for the first time, and showcases the quality of UK postgraduate research on a global scale”. The service has been very popular with researchers and the BL have announced that the digitisation times for theses not already available electronically have been reduced. It is also worth noting that the ETHoS service is able to harvest thesis entries from the University of Bradford research archive – Bradford Scholars.

Start searching EThOS

The GetDeb web site offers the newest versions of Ubuntu software, which may not have hit the official repositories yet. They have added a new feature which allows you to add a line to your software sources, so that you can download the latest releases directly through Synaptic. They are only providing updates for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, though I believe there is a legacy site for older versions of Ubuntu.

To add the GetDeb repository, open the System menu, select Administration, then Software Sources. Select the “Other Software” tab, then click the Add button at the bottom left and enter the following line:

deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu karmic-getdeb apps

You will be prompted to reload your software sources, however if you do, you will receive a GPG error message, as you haven’t added the key yet.

Open a terminal and enter the following text:

wget -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

Once this has been accepted, you can open Synaptic and reload the repositories and you will now have access to the latest and greatest Ubuntu software. Just a note of caution – remember these aren’t official Ubuntu releases so there is always the chance that you may bork your system by downloading something incompatible. Always back up before you do anything silly!

I think this will be very useful for mainstream software like Firefox or Open Office. Firefox 3.5 was released at the end of June, but wasn’t automatically available to Jaunty users. There are a lot of packages that I would be hesitant to upgrade, but I would certainly want to try the newest versions of, for example, The Gimp or Open Office as soon as they were available, and this enables me to do that easily.

Staffing and budget cuts may force the closure of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, which is housed in Founder’s Library at Howard University.

“The loss of 60 percent of its resources and the abolishment of some critical positions due to the Voluntary Separation Incentive Retirement Program (VSIRP) resulted in many problems,” interim director Thomas C. Battle told the daily student newspaper, the Hilltop.

It is one of the world’s largest repositories of documents and other information about individuals, institutions and issues important to people of African descent throughout the world including the papers of medical pioneer Dr. Charles Drew, Congressional Black Caucus  records and copies of Afro-American  newspapers, one of the nation’s largest black newspapers.

Its collections include more than 175,000 bound volumes; thousands of journals, periodicals, and newspapers; and 100,000 prints, photographs, maps, and other graphic items.

“This should be a greater outcry. This is the premier place to research black history and culture,” Battle told the Hilltop.

Last week, IE members Alberto Abián, Elena Mena and Raquel Rebollo were attending to the Technical Course on Federation of Learning Repositories for Agriculture, Food & Environment (AgLRs) which took place at FAO Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe (SEUR) in Budapest.

The main task for the IE members in this course was to learn about spcecific architectures to interconnect Learning Repositories and to expain the technology behind the Organic.Edunet Web Portal.

Alberto, Raquel and Elena in cold Budapest - Nov.2009

See Spiral top 20 publications viewed in October 2009 to see what is being viewed in our institutional repository of research publications.

by Carol Selvey

Despite the financial crisis that has shaken consumer confidence in lending institutions and banks, we still all have bank accounts and depend on them to provide a repository for our hard-earned money. We trust them to keep our funds safe and handle our financial transactions, whether electronic or manual. Similar to these venerable financial institutions, health record banks are safe, secure repositories to store and transmit your health records.  The concept of health record banks (HRB) is the brain child of William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, and former Senior Advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services.  Yasnoff also  leads the Health Record Banking Alliance (HRBA) today. A narrated overview is available at http://www.healthbanking.org/index.html. NHIN Watch recently reported that three such banks are in operation in Oregon (see http://www.nhinwatch.com/news.cms?newsId=4933) and they merit our attention.

With the federal funding available to encourage the adoption of electronic health records and the creation of a national framework to make protected health information portable and accessible for informed medical decisions-making, health record banks offer an effective solution as a key component in health information exchange (HIE). Use of health record banks were envisioned before Google and Microsoft entered the personal health record market. The concept is elegant in its simplicity and security. A patient chooses a health record bank as the repository for his or her health records and pays a nominal annual fee for the service. The patient determines what data can be shared with whom. There are no conflicts among stakeholders and the patient is assured confidentiality and data integrity.

With health record banks in place, the burden of an HIE  is reduced for providers. While still subject to HIPAA and HITECH privacy and security rules, they would have fewer concerns about administering HIEs, since patients (not providers) would determine where their data was stored and how it was shared. New medical information about a patient would be transmitted to the patient’s account after the patient received care.  The comprehensive records of the patient would be available in one place immediately for care anywhere in the world.  The patient would control access and set his or her own privacy policy.  Each healthcare organization would need only interface to one HRB (or perhaps to a small number in their community).  Furthermore, the HRB would have a sustainable business model based on the patient paying for new value created by the HRB.

Health record banking is a concept patients need to ensure safe and secure exchange of health information.

I have been invited by the JISC-funded Edspace project, based at the University of Southampton to give a talk at an event on “Traditional educational repositories v. Web 2.0 resource sharing” to be held on Wednesday 4 November 2009. I have been asked speak on “the future for educational resources and services on the Web” – a rather grandiose topic, I think! I’ve entitled the talk “The Future for Educational Resource Repositories and Services in a Web 2.0 World” as its the Web 2.0 aspect I feel is important (and reflects my area of expertise – I don’t claim to have anything particularly significant to say on the repository side of things).

I’ll be saying that many of the technical aspects of Web 2.0 are now mainstream – and indeed the Edspace’s Edshare service provides RSS feeds, tag clouds, embed functionality and ‘cool URIs’.

But the term Web 2.0 also  covers the network as the platform and a culture of openness. The issue of openness of educational resources is being addressed in, for example, the JISC OER programme and although I personally seek to ensure that my content (such as blog posts, slides and papers) are available under a Creative Commons licence I know that there are added complexities in the area of educational resources – so I’ll not focus on the openness issue.

Instead I’ll raise the question of the network as the platform in the context of the futures for educational resource repositories.  I’ll suggest that as experts predict further cuts in the public sector, including higher education, wouldn’t it be appropriate for our repository services to be hosted in the cloud?  And the concerns which tend to be raised (sustainability, reliability, legal issues, etc.) are implementation details which do need to be addressed – but these aren’t the important policy issues.

The slides I’ll be using are available on Slideshare (in the Cloud(!) although a master copy is also held locally) and is embedded below.

Karmic Koala – Ubuntu 9.10 – was formally released on October 29, on schedule. If you have been waiting until the final release, it is here!

Be forewarned – it is still too soon after the release date for the servers to behave normally. I found, for instance, that downloading the ISO file, burning it to disk, and installing from scratch was easier than attempting to do a simple update-manager. I switched to a local mirror after receiving major “unable to reach network” messages while using the US main mirror. Even with that, the servers seem to be unreachable. Launch week is a madhouse!

One thing that I found that is new with Karmic is the command add-apt-repository. For instance, if you want to include the beautiful Bisigi artwork that I wrote about some time ago, you would just need to issue these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bisigi
sudo apt-get install zgegblog-themes

and you have wallpaper and themes galore to choose from. This works on properly formatted PPA repositories. (Unfortunately, when I tried it on the Ubuntu Tweak repository, it did not work. I hope this is something TualatriX can fix.)

The add-apt-repository command even adds the repository key so Ubuntu knows the files are authenticated. This takes away ninety percent of the pain of adding a PPA repository – you just need to know its name.

I recently came across a couple of excellent repositories of audio and video material.

The first is Europa Film Treasures, a collection of mainly pre-WW2 cinema from across Europe

The link that led me to this showed the first film ever shot from an aircraft: Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine (1909)- how this must have astonished the audiences in early cinemas and bioscope shows.

The second is the British Library’s archive of sound recordings, made available through JISC funding – over 28,000 recordings of everything from birdsong to traditional music from around the world to oral history.

Debian 5 (Lenny)
Linux kernel: 2.6.26-2-686
Gnome: 2.22.3

I’m looking for commercial dvd playback on my Debian lenny desktop. Let’s see if this works.
First thing is to add the Debian Multimedia repositories to the sources.list
Open a terminal window and type this:

$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

At the end of the sources list, add this:
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org lenny main
Mine looks like this.

Now to install the keyring. Open a terminal window and type this:
$wget http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/debian-multimedia-keyring/debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16_all.deb
The above command is one long command with no spaces. This wordpress page puts it on 2 lines…….it’s only one command.
Now type this:
$ sudo dpkg -i debian-multimedia-keyring_2008.10.16_all.deb
And now this:
$ sudo apt-get update

Now you can keep your terminal open and Type:
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-lame libdvdcss2
Once again, that is one long command. Or, if you would rather install these through synaptic, You can close the terminal and add these through the synaptic GUI program. They both will work.

gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
gstreamer0.10-lame
libdvdcss2

The install went good, no errors……until.
The Debian update manager(GUI) gave me a smart upgrade option because of some new dependencies for some new applications or newer versions of existing dependencies. I opted for the smart upgrade.
During the smart upgrade I got a notification that the mplayer.conf file would be replaced with a new conf file. I was asked if I wanted to keep the old one or write the new one. I choose to write the new one.
Try a few dvd’s
It works. Nice. Well…It didn’t work on a new release (Transformers 2), but It did work on dvd’s that were a little bit older. Probably encryption issues.

I also added:
$ sudo apt-get install w32codecs
and
$ sudo apt-get install vlc
Just for good measure.

I usually install fedora or any distro by flash drive (unfortunately my dvd rom doesnt work). When I install fedora, the first thing I need is to set the yum repo.

Problem Statement:
Yum is not working in fedora 11
Terminal Output:

Solution
$cd /etc/yum.repo.d/
$gedit fedora*.*

now in all the .repo file that get opened by the above command, remove ‘#’ or uncomment ‘base url’ and comment or add ‘#’ the ‘mirrors’ at all the places (approximately 3 per file)

now save and close, run $yum clean all
all set to go !

Open Access Week is now underway and the Welsh Repository Network has been gathering together some of the news stories they have seen. Read more on their blog at: http://welshrepositorynetwork.blogspot.com/2009/10/open-access-week-underway.html

They would like to gather together any stories from around Wales to do their own bit of OA promotion, so please do get in touch with the team via wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk if you have done anything to promote OA week.

This week is Open Access Week, aimed at broadening awareness and understanding of Open Access.

Events happening include Open Access Cambridge being held on Wednesday 21st October.

For what is going on all over Europe, see Europe: Open Access Week 2009

See the Digital Library part of the library website for links to information about open access and to find Spiral, our digital repository and information about Ethos and access to theses online.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Welsh Repository Network (WRN) website, available here http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/index_root.html.

The WRN is a collaborative venture between the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Wales to establish, develop and populate a network of interoperable institutional repositories. The vision that underpins the network is to facilitate and encourage the sharing of resources across the principality and to maximise the impact of Welsh research across the globe.

The establishment of the network was underpinned by the JISC funded WRN Start-Up Project which provided both fiscal and practical support to each WRN partner to aid in the implementation of an effective institutional repository in every Welsh HEI. The current JISC funded WRN Enhancement Project seeks to build on the previous project’s work and is investigating the potential of a collaborative, centrally managed model for accelerating the development and uptake of repository services in Welsh HEIs.

The new WRN website brings you information about the project, news on its current activities, and links to the documents and presentations produced by the project team/ project partners.

Other features of the new site include:

Project partner repository search: Allowing you to search for content across partner repositories by entering the search term in just one place.

Chat with the WRN team: Utilising the Google Chat client to offer instant support to project partner queries.

Partners Links/ WRN button: Clickable map giving the location and providing access to each of the repositories that make up the Welsh Repository Network.

**Coming soon**

Learning Objects: Online learning objects on various repository related topics to work through remotely from your desktop.

We would like to have your feedback on our website so have a look, give things a try and Get in Touch.

The current DLib article on DataStaR meshes with something we’re thinking about at my workplace. My topic is In Between Repositories (IBRs), where data bits may live, waiting, either forever or on their way to becoming something else. Granted DataStaR, and much IR work generally, emanates from scholarly need, need to share living work in stages, let work evolve groupwise; but really it’s all about beginning to use an IR as a memory stick. A little.

We’re embarking on a trial of an intentionally dark archive–a part of our institutional digital repository, up till now only for materials publicly described, that will take things fresh off the truck, electronic material (disks, CDs, DVDs, floppies…) we may not have appraised yet that needs someplace to live other than in a literal box. Accessioned, but not cataloged. Just dashed off into a form we know will be there when we, or they of the future, get to it.  We’ll park electronic files of potentially unknown content in this corner of the repository until we have time to sort them (and the rest of their associated collections) out. A dumping ground with a preservation angle. (Though I’m not entirely sure what the repository manager has agreed to. Migration?) Brings to mind the preservation track of IRs that we’ve been considering in school. It figures that shades of grey would begin to emerge in the business of digital holdings; once storage is cheap enough…no reason not to.

But a little concern about just starting technologically, which, even as I speak, we are, without really gaming this out. In a sense it’s no different than my usual practice of leaving the disks in place next to the folders in a Paige box that goes to remote storage…as long as we know where to find the preserved unwashed digital bits. But it’s kind of like the difference between the physical envelopes of mail piling up and your inbox filling with megs and megs…you might just toss everything out in either case, but in my opinion you’re more likely to empty the inbox without examination than to toss all the paper without a glance. Intentional dark e-storage isn’t quite preservation and it isn’t access. It is sure to be more expensive than storage in a very stable dry, cool box; we’ll be outsourcing conversion of things we can’t even read, no floppy drives for miles around, sometimes without knowing a thing about the contents. And we don’t yet have a plan for metadatification of the dark content.

I’m not arguing in favor of dry, cool boxes for everything…just musing before embarking. I will need to bring up some points and try to seem credible beyond my actual place in the foodchain.

See Spiral top 20 publications viewed in September 2009 to see what is being viewed in our institutional repository of research publications.

Durante la Semana del Acceso Abierto 2009 se lanzará la Confederación de Repositorios de Acceso Abierto Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). El éxito alcanzado por el proyecto DRIVER , que logró la interoperabilidad de los repositorios Europeos llevó a este proyecto a ir más allá y crear una organización que reúna a los repositorios a nivel global. La misión de COAR es:

COAR es una asociación internacional sin fines de lucro cuya misión es promover una mayor visibilidad y aplicación de los resultados de investigación a través de redes globales de repositorios digitales de Acceso Abierto.”

Respecto al surgimiento de COAR:

Uno de los objetivos de DRIVER II ha sido la creación de una organización alrededor de la infraestructura DRIVER, con capacidad de mantenerse en el tiempo. Un proceso de consulta reveló la necesidad de un modelo organizacional de socios representando a la comunidad de repositorios, compuesta de organizaciones e individuos que representan un interés estratégico común en el Acceso Abierto a la comunicación académica en lugar de una tecnología común.

Se realizó una investigación independiente, que generó conocimiento sobre el modo en que se podría dar forma a esta organización, teniendo en consideración su carácter interconectado y transfronterizo, como así también la amplia gama de comunidades de interés y sus necesidades diferenciadas. Las metas de la nueva organización, COAR,  la Confederación de Repositorios de Acceso Abierto distingue entre la necesidad de continuar la Red DRIVER como una operación, y la necesidad de trabajar globalmente en la diseminación de Repositorios de Acceso Abierto mediante el lobby, influenciando el desarrollo de políticas y proveyendo entrenamiento y guía.”

Para ser miembro de COAR habrá que pagar una cuota anual de €100. Para mayores detalles ver la sección Join COAR.

The Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories Joint Workshop will  take place 28-29 October at the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

The aim of the event is to examine the issues, challenges and priorities associated with integrating text mining technologies in applications to support scholarly communication and repository initiatives.

The audience is expected to consist of researchers, information management professionals, librarians, text miners, repository providers, publishers, policy makers and JISC service representatives.

More information at
http://www.nactem.ac.uk/tm-ukoln.php