EPrints News

EPrints 3.3 Stable

2011-09-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

Following a period of internal testing we are pleased to make the first stable EPrints 3.3 release available for download at http://files.eprints.org/691/. If you just want to test out the new version you can access our demonstration repository at http://demoprints.eprints.org/ (account creation requires email address verification).

EPrints 3.3 represents 18 months of effort since the release of 3.2. Version 3.2 brought with it new features that were aimed at making EPrints more flexible and giving more control to repository administrators. 3.3 is a natural progression of this effort that enables a new, completely flexible, data model managed through configuration files. This sets the foundation for using EPrints as a lightweight tool for research management and reporting (CRIS) through e.g. managing projects data.

New optional features and extensions are now 1-click installable through the EPrints Bazaar. The Bazaar is a centralised repository for plugins, extensions, styles and more with a complete control interface within the EPrints software. Repository administrators can browse, install and update extensions with simple 1-click controls. For developers, EPrints includes Web tools for building new extension packages.

The search engine in EPrints is now plugin-extensible. 3.3 comes with support for the Xapian probabilistic search engine (requires Xapian system libraries). Xapian supports boolean queries and relevance-based search results. For non-Xapian supported systems and advanced searching the internal search has been improved to address issues raised by the community - case sensitivity, name-matching and more. For a full(er) list of new features and bugs fixed by the 3.3 branch see http://wiki.eprints.org/w/New_Features_in_EPrints_3.3.

Registration Open for EPrints Bazaar Developer Event

2010-09-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

When: 7/8th December 2010

Where: University of Southampton

Cost: Free (You pay accommodation)

Registration has opened for the EPrints Bazaar event in Southampton which will provide the first chance for people to get hands on with the new EPrints App Store (The EPrints Bazaar), the future of extension development for EPrints.

The event will provide hands on access to the Bazaar, demonstrate the features and allow discussion on features which would be nice to have in the first release next year. By allowing people to develop their first Bazaar Application for EPrints we focus this event on developers around the repository community who wish to get their Apps (either now or in the future) out to the community with zero release delay!

For those who haven't seen the Bazaar yet, you can watch a quick demo of how easy it is to install an App here

Places are limited and if the event fills fast we will try and find a bigger room.

For more information and an up to date schedule (subject to change) see this page

Register for FREE here: http://bazaar.eventbrite.com/

There’s a repository app for that: EPrints Bazaar wows the Repository Fringe

2010-09-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

by Steve Hitchcock

"lovely, very very very nice, wow! fantastic:) impressive Woah! Really easy! working!"

A summary of some of the reaction to the first ever public appearance of the EPrints Bazaar at Repository Fringe 2010.

A new app store, EPrints Bazaar, that enables users to install repository apps and plugins with a single click, made its debut to great acclaim at the latest Repository Fringe meeting in Edinburgh.

The idea for EPrints Bazaar takes its lead from other widely successful platforms, particularly for mobile applications, making the apps, extensions and design themes simple to upload, install and use. The apps are designed for use on a single platform, in this case EPrints repository software, and the store will be open to all apps, developers and users.

A pictorial interface greets users and emphasizes the easy installation and upgrading of packages. As soon as a new add-on is uploaded to the store a repository administrator can install it without leaving their own repository. The Bazaar will also alert you to available updates for installed packages, ensuring your repository is up to date with the latest version of each package.

Already up to a dozen apps are available, including apps custom built for the Bazaar, and existing tools from earlier projects that can now find greater visibility and use. Among those apps demonstrated in Edinburgh are a tool for adding comments and annotations to eprints (SNEEP), social tools for creating user home pages (MePrints), sharing bookmarks and collections (EdShare Collections), and tools to support digital preservation.

The app that made most impact on the Edinburgh audience, drawing a Jobs-like spontaneous outbreak of applause, provides document previews (PreviewPlus). In the modern repository a document, or eprint, record can often present a range of linked resources, including the text, slides, video and data. PreviewPlus allows the user to instantly play a preview version of the item without needing to download often large data files.

EPrints Bazaar is expected to motivate a number of ways for use of the store to grow. In particular, a marketplace community could enable developers to test their apps with users, while users could place requests for required apps.

Apps such as SNEEP and MePrints have developed from JISC projects, and it is expected that EPrints Bazaar could become an important part of the dissemination strategy for such projects.

EPrints Bazaar takes advantage of the modular structure of EPrints, first introduced with version 3.0 some years ago, to separate the development of specific applications by any developer from the core code that has to be maintained by the EPrints developer team. Until now such apps have been available as code downloads from a wiki source, EPrints Files, and required more complex installation procedures familiar to coders and developers but which are less attractive to the majority who are the target users of EPrints Bazaar.

EPrints Bazaar will launch fully early in 2011 with the next iteration of EPrints, version 3.3, when this extension to files.eprints.org will come built into every install of EPrints.

Later this year a developer workshop, to be announced, will enable people to get hands on with the Bazaar and develop their first apps. This will also be an opportunity to develop the community marketplace with discussions about licensing and charging, and a chance to identify missing features before the first release.

Modular EPrints: the final piece of the jigsaw

According to the developer of the EPrints Bazaar, Dave Tarrant: “Recent releases of EPrints have been the fastest, most flexible and most reliable yet. Since the release of EPrints 3.1 we have been abstracting the core of EPrints to enable modules to be plugged in to perform many specific operations from importing/exporting data, reporting statistics, handling complex multimedia formats and storing files in the cloud.

"This modular approach offered users and developers the opportunity to put together repository modules. The EPrints Bazaar represents the final piece in this jigsaw, which allows these extensions to be installed in a single click from within the repository interface. The Bazaar also represents a huge leap forward in EPrints development where abstraction layers sit between the core repository of managed objects and the modules which bring turn-key features.

"We are very excited about the future of the Bazaar and feel it will provide a real turning point in repository customisation. There is also an incredibly simple API for developing extensions, and packaging and testing can be done within the Bazaar itself.

“This empowers the community to take control of repositories without needing a full understanding of the inner workings of the software itself.”

Transforming repository records

Apps such as PreviewPlus transform repository records. To show how other apps might look in the repository, here is a before-and-after screenshot of the abstract and record page for a single item in the repository. This record is chosen for its richness, containing a number of documents, images and videos, and shows how extensions available through the Bazaar can help transform a repository.

A rich content eprint before any Bazaar add-ons

After Bazaar add-ons (each add-on has been tagged for clarity)

First Bazaar Apps shown at Repository Fringe

To demonstrate the EPrints Bazaar at Repository Fringe seven existing add-ons were adapted by the developers to be installed via the Bazaar (in many cases this just involved designing an icon!).

The video of the Repository Fringe presentation covers these and more apps, some of which are entirely new to repository use. In one novel case we look at a plug-in which enables users to view the repository contents as a magazine in the FlipBoard app for the Apple iPad!

Many thanks goes to JISC also who funded many of the projects from which these add-ons come.

SNEEP: Social Networking Extensions for EPrints – Richard Davis @ ULCC (http://sneep.ulcc.ac.uk/)

EdShare Toolbox: EPrint actions box + Web 2.0 Integration – Marcus Ramsden @ Southampton

MePrints: A Users Home in EPrints - Marcus Ramsden @ Southampton (http://wiki.eprints.org/w/MePrints)

Digital Preservation Toolkit: Everything you need for Digital Preservation – Dave Tarrant @ Southampton (http://preservation.eprints.org)

EdShare Collections: Bookmarks and Collections creation – Seb Francois & Patrick McSweeny @ Southampton

PreviewPlus: Rich Document Preview - Patrick McSweeny @ Southampton

GreenSpring Theme: A pretty green theme for your repository - Patrick McSweeny @ Southampton

Reaction from the Repository Fringe Conference (#rfringe10)

From TwapperKeeper

Some lovely simple to browse customisation

Nicola Osborne - Edina

preview app and themes - very very very nice

John Robertson (University of Strathclyde)

EPrints Bazaar - wow!

Ian Stuart (Edina)

seeing MePrints in action - fantastic :)

Helen Muir (QMU)

Very impressive live demo of enhancing Eprints repository with plugins from Eprints Bazaar - piece of cake

Herbert Van De Sompel (Los Alamos National Library)

Woo hoo! EPrints Bazaar live demo install of Sneep SUCCESS! Really easy!

Ianthe Hind (University of Edinburgh)

live demo of eprints bazaar installation actually working!

Neil Stewart (LSE)

Digital Preservation Tutorial – iPres2010 (Austria)

2010-08-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

Do you have lots of content in a repository or content management system?

Are you worried about long term storage and access to this content?

Do you like wine?

If the answer to the first two is yes then attend the Planets and EPrints digital preservation tutorial prior to iPres2010 in Vienna, Austria. If the answer to all three is yes then why aren’t you already registered!

With both projects ending their current phase of investigation into digital preservation this tutorial offers the final and best opportunity in this phase to learn how the resulting products can help you. This is also the only digital preservation tutorial which guides you through the complete preservation process, from identification and classification, to risk analysis, planning and finally action. Along the way we will touch on the key aspects of preservation metadata, the importance of provenance, trust and authenticity. All of this in a one day tutorial where everything is presented through a series of clear user interfaces designed to help with your preservation challenges.

Information about the tutorial, including details on the world leading researchers who will be presenting, can be found on the conference website: http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010/tutorials.html#T3. From here you can also register for the event which includes the iPres2010 opening reception wine tasting event.

Workshop Details

Where: Vienna University of Technology
When: Sunday, September 19th 2010
URL: http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010/tutorials.html#T3

Topics Covered

Digital preservation overview

Bitstream preservation by data replication and distribution

File classification and risk analysis using DROID, data registries (including semantic and linked data sources) and your repository

Collection gathering for preservation planning

Preservation planning in Plato

Defining requirements

Identifying potential strategies

Experimentation

Analyzing results

Building and validating a preservation plan

Putting a plan into action

Preserving and managing your preservation plan

Provenance, Trust and Authenticity via preservation metadata.

EPrints at ECDL

2009-09-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

EPrints is at ECDL co-running a preservation workshop with the Planets project.

We've covered a lot of the theory of preservation, and have also done some practical exercises showing the forthcoming EPrints 3.2 features that assist with the preservation agenda.

Firstly we had them playing with the new storage layer. This enables repositories to control the locations in which files are stored. We covered how to set storage policies, report on how many files were in each supported storage area (local, cloud, etc), and copy items between locations.

The second set of exercises covered preservation file format risk assessment. EPrints 3.2 can keep track of and report on the preservation risk status of the content (assuming a sensibly configured repository). Migration of 'at risk' formats could be done automatically, but that's still in the future...

The slides and EPrints exercises are available here.

It's been a great day. An active bunch of attendees who had lots of questions were really enthusiastic about the subject.

EPrints at Blogtalk 09

2009-09-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

Warm and humid Jeju island, the favoured honeymoon destination of South Koreans, is hosting Blogtalk 09. Palm trees, teddy bears, life-sized plastic dinosaurs and luxury hotels all within walking distance of the beach. The view of the sea from the conference venue is somewhat distracting.

It's hard to talk about social networking without hyperbole (the talks have been full of superlatives). It's certainly important, and the possibilities for EPrints in this area have not yet been fully explored. The Sneep plugin, which enabled commenting on publication records, was very well received, but it is only scratching the surface of what's possible. I'm here to get a feel for what's going on at the moment and how this could be applied to EPrints.

A very interesting first day Keynote about the evolution of data access from Issac Mao posited that the sharing of information constituted a public 'mind'. Data creators acted as 'neurons', enabling hard problems to be solved thought distributed discourse. Blogging and micro-blogging are analogous to neurons firing - or so the speaker thought.

How can repositories leverage this? Academic publishing is social in nature, and the brain analogy works here too. If an academic paper can be said to be the equivalent of a blog post, what is the academic equivalent of a tweet? How can we support more fine-grained academic discourse? And is the repository the right place to do this?

Hmmmm....

Creative repositories for the arts

2009-06-02T01:23:00.000-07:00

A repository which will make it possible for colleges and individuals in the arts to store and present their work in a creative way will be unveiled tomorrow (Wednesday 3 June).

Kultur, a project that is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and that uses the world-leading EPrints software from the University of Southampton, has developed a joint pilot repository for the University of the Arts London, the University for the Creative Arts and Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. The project will be officially completed tomorrow and an event to mark the occasion will be held at Whitechapel Art Gallery.

'Up to now, the focus of most repositories has been science and engineering and published articles,' said Dr Leslie Carr, Technical Director of EPrints, based at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'Kultur has provided us with an opportunity to use EPrints to develop the first comprehensive institutional repository for the arts.'

The Kultur project provides a flexible, multimedia pilot repository capable of showcasing a wide range of outputs from digital versions of paintings, photography, film, graphic and textile design to records of performances, shows and installations.

The three institutions involved will now develop their own open repositories to store and showcase their creative work.

'This will make an immense difference to our institutions,' said Andrew Gray, Kultur Project Officer, University of the Arts. 'It is the first repository of its kind in the arts world; there are others but there hasn't been a visual one. The benefit of Kultur is that it will enable us to share our practice-based research across our colleges and with other institutions.'

'It will also open up the art world, which will link up the often lone artist with the wider arts community,' Dr Carr added.

The pilot repository will be showcased at Whitechapel Art Gallery between 6-8pm tomorrow. The event will include presentations from Andy McGregor, JISC, Seymour Roworth-Stokes, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research at University for the Creative Arts, Andrew Carnie, Researcher at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Pat Christie, Director of Library and Learning Resources, University of the Arts.

Kultur was collaboration between all three institutions listed in partnership with the Visual Arts Data Service and EPrints. EPrints software developed in 2000 by the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science is used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

For information about Kultur, please visit: http://kultur.eprints.org/.

EPrints working with Sun's Cloud Storage Service

2009-06-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

As part of Sun Microsystem's Preservation Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG), the EPrints team have been collaborating with Sun to enable EPrints to be used with archival storage products, such as the Honeycomb (STK-5800).

This collaboration has informed the development of the new EPrints 3.2 Storage Controller that enables the repository to distribute its objects between many storage platforms according to the rules laid down in an XML policy language. Hybrid storage provides the maximum flexibility for storage decisions based on object properties and related metadata, allowing multiple copies to be managed across local, archival and cloud storage services.

We are pleased to announce that we have been working collaboratively with Sun's Cloud Computing Unit to allow the EPrints Storage Controller to link to the forthcoming Sun Cloud Storage Service (due for release later this year). A demonstration is available at this week's Community One conference in San Francisco. EPrints is one of a few software products to have gained an entry in the early adopters catalog (available at the conference).

With an Amazon S3 plugin already available for the EPrints Storage controller, Sun's Cloud Storage Service was the logical next step in terms of cloud providers and EPrints hopes in the future to release a connector for the Microsoft Azure platform as well as the DuraSpace proposed DuraCloud service.

Watch this space for more EPrints 3.2 news!

Joint Preservation Workshop @ ECDL 2009 with EU Planets Project

2009-05-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

On 27th September 2009 the EPrints Preservation Team along with some of the Planets Team will be giving a one day Tutorial/Workshop on bitstream preservation. This tutorial will be a one day event held at the start of the European Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 (ECDL2009) in Corfu.

The day will be split into two parts with morning will be dedicated to presentations on the importance of preservation, why you should have a preservation policy and introduce technologies which could help you both design that policy as well as enact it. In the afternoon delegates will be able to get hands on experience with some of the tools discussed in the morning session including the Plato preservation planning tool from Planets and the new features in EPrints 3.2 which allow you to build preservation into your digital repository.

This workshop will be an excellent event with your chance to meet with one of the many partners which the EPrints Preservation Team has been in constant communication with over the past few years. For more information and registration see the ECDL website here.

See you in Corfu!

PhD studentship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship

2009-05-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

EPrints Services are funding a PhD studentship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship at the EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton.

The Web has had a huge impact on society and on the scientific and scholarly communications process. As more attention is paid to new e-research and e-learning methodologies it is time to stand back and investigate how rights and responsibilities are understood when "copying", "publishing" and "syndicating" are fundamental activities of the interconnected digital world.

Applicants with a technical background (a good Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Information Technology or similar) are invited for this 4-year research programme, which begins in October 2009 with a 1-year taught MSc in Web Science and is followed by a three year PhD supervised jointly by the School of Law and the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The full four-year scholarships (including stipend) is available to UK residents.

EPrints Services provide repository hosting, training and bespoke development for the research community and are funding this research opportunity to promote understanding of the context of the future scholarly environment.

Further information:

EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training: http://webscience.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dtc

EPrints Services: http://www.eprints.org/

Enquiries should be addressed to Dr Leslie Carr (lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk) in the first instance.

Free Training Course for the Tecchies

2009-03-23T04:08:00.000-07:00

A free day-long EPrints training course is being hosted by JISC's Repository Support Project in Liverpool on April 22nd, and we've decided that as the last one was targeted at Library Staff, we'd tailor this one for the systems staff and developers.

In the morning we will introduce some of the API, and show how to use the configuration files to modify the abstract page, set default values on newly created EPrints, change render methods on metadata fields, etc.

The afternoon will cover API Scripting and Plugins. We'll take a more in-depth look at the API. Exercises will cover using scripts to manage the records in your repository and the changing of the behaviour of EPrints through plugin modification and creation.

Details on how to sign up are available on the RSP events page:

http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/

We look forward to seeing you there.

EPrints gets Cloud Storage Support

2009-01-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

As some people may know as part of the move towards EPrints 3.2 we have rewritten the way file storage works within EPrints entirely (after the recode we had less lines of source code!). Basically we have implemented an abstracted storage layer called the EPrints Storage Controller that is able to utilize new "storage plug-ins" to store files in different places.

As a starting point myself and Tim Brody have just successfully tested an EPrints install which is storing it's content in Amazon S3/Cloudfront! Details on the power and capabilities of providing these 2 services are outlined briefly here.

Storage Layer features:

Write your own plug-ins to marry EPrints with any chosen storage platform.

Use multiple plug-ins simultaneously.

Impose rules such that all volatile files (thumbnails etc) are stored locally, with the main file being stored in the cloud.

Impose rules which state that any document submitted by a Physicist on a Thursday are stored both locally and by two cloud storage providers. All rules are implemented in the existing epc xml scripting language.

What does Cloud Storage mean to your repository?

Cloud Storage means less bandwidth usage for provisioning of resources to users.

Cloud Storage enables those who don't have money or space to host 100's of Terabytes, to build and control a repository of this size.

Services such as Amazons Cloudfront can handle the replication and worldwide distribution of your objects.

Your users download documents from their local continental mirror, an advanced feature enabled by the new Storage Controller.

Using Amazon services also provides a means by which the users pay for their download bandwidth.

For the Amazon S3 plug-in we used a Storage Controller ruleset which imposed rules meaning only full files were stored in Amazon S3, with all thumbnails and previews remaining local. This reduces the cost of storing and retrieving you files.

Of course the Amazon S3 plug-in is one example of a storage plug-in, you could just as easily write your own.

Free EPrints Training Course in London

2008-11-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

A free day-long EPrints training course is being hosted by JISC's Repository Support Project in London on December 11th.

This course will be our first opportunity to demonstrate EPrints' new easy-to-use web page visual editor, which makes it possible to avoid the complexity of configuration files, templates, static pages, phrases and pins and allows you to directly edit repository web pages in a standard HTML editor like Amaya or Dreamweaver.

Our aim for the day is to get all the participants to create and personalise their own repository in the first session - controlling how it looks, refining the metadata that it uses and filling it with content.

We hope that this will mark a significant milestone in our ambition to create library-centred repositories with minimal dependence on programmer- and technical support, speeding up the production cycles associated with repository development and allowing more direct control from the repository manager. We know that one of the urgent issues facing repositories in the UK and beyond is the lack of resources for sufficient IT support.

We're really excited about this, and we hope that you will be too. The day should have something new for you, even if you have been to one of our previous courses. So if you would like to find out more or register for the event, please visit the RSP EPrints Training Day page.

EPrints exhibiting at Berlin Open Access Days on 9/10 October

2008-09-27T04:08:00.000-07:00

EPrints will be represented at the forthcoming Open Access Exhibition in Berlin on October 9th & 10th. Christian Gumpenberger and Tim Miles-Board from EPrints Services will be manning an exhibiting stand to give out EPrints promotional literature, run demonstrations, answer questions and give out EPrints LiveCDs.

As well as EPrints Services, the ZORA repository from the University of Zurich will also be at the exhibition. So if you are attending, make sure you say hello to both stands!

Mechanically derived documents (versions)

2008-09-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

EPrints 3.1 has only just been released but work on 3.2 has been progressing for some months now.

One EPrints feature that we're improving in 3.2 is document thumbnails. First a bit of background: when you view the abstract (jump-off) page in EPrints each document will have either an icon or thumbnail shown. The thumbnail images are generated when a document is uploaded.

Three thumbnails are generated as standard: "small", "medium" and "preview". The "small" thumbnail is used as a substitute for the format icon. The "medium" thumbnail isn't used. The "preview" thumbnail is shown whenever the user hovers the mouse pointer over the icon/thumbnail.

Thumbnails are mechanically derived versions of the uploaded documents - they're generated by a defined process with no user interaction. There is also a text version generated from each document that contains the terms used to index that document. In future we also want to provide video previews of uploaded videos (a youtube-style interface) and lightbox versions of powerpoints etc. Another requirement is the ability to deliver cover-paged versions of documents.

To support a diverse set of derived documents we have implemented relationships between documents. In 3.2. when a thumbnail is generated it is actually a new document with "isVersionOf", "isVolatileVersionOf" and "isThumbnailVersionOf" relations to the existing document. So, if you want the "small" thumbnail of a document, you query that document for it's "hasSmallThumbnailVersion" relation. If a document is changed all of it's "hasVolatileVersion" relations are removed and regenerated. (Before the expert reader gets too far ahead ... relations aren't implemented using a triple-store, they're just the metadata fields that first appeared in 3.1)

Now for every document the user uploads a multitude of derived documents will be created. To avoid overloading the user with these new documents, "volatile" documents ("isVolatileVersionOf") are hidden.

If the user uses the "conversion" tool during the upload stage converted documents become a "isVersionOf" the existing document. This will be used to improve the jump-off page by bundling different formats of the same document together.

All of the mechanically derived documents in EPrints are generated by "Convert" plugins, enabling extensibility of the whole system.

EPrints 3.1.0 declared stable

2008-09-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

The process of working with release candidates is much a more professional
way of releasing software, but much less exciting from a developers point of view. A release candidate becomes the release when there's no bugs found in it*, which is months after the interesting work is complete.

From my perspective all the interesting work was done months ago, and we've just been shaking it down to get it ready for primetime. That said, it's quite exciting working on a project which has grown from me tinkering in a metaphorical basement, to whole team.

Traditionally someone discovers a bug within about 6 hours of a .0 realease, so don't be surprised if there's a 3.1.1 soon after, but that's us being responsive. We also have some admin features we'd have liked to make it into 3.1.0 which we may add in minor versions, as these will not impact the way data is collected and stored, or the user experience. We figure the Admin user can take a bit more change than the depositors and anonymous masses, so plan features accordingly, with any "culture shock" in the .0 release.

* on that note, I think there is still a bug in some HTML rendering in our new issues tracking interface, but as only Admins see this, and people are clamoring for the stable release, we decided to let it slide. The issues tracker is pretty cool - it uses a new type of plugin to find issues in the repository like duplicate titles, or items described as "in press" that are years old. The underlying code also has fields to describe user-raised issues, like a mini bug-tracker, but in 3.1.0 this isn't visible to the user intrerface.

One really fun (I've been working in OA/library software too long clearly, if I describe this as fun) new feature came out of a passing question from Les Carr, which we tried on our own eprints service. The new way views work allow you to create tag-cloud style links at the top of a view. The more items in the grouping, the bigger the link. This turns out to be quite cool when applied to the authors on a paper. eg.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/lac/publications/all_names

New Initiative for EPrints in Europe

2008-09-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

The EPrints team would like to welcome a new member.
Christian Gumpenberger is based in Austria and will provide consultancy for general EPrints initiatives such as marketing, new customer development and training as well as for specific EPrints projects such as the ongoing repository project at the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis.

Christian holds a master's and doctor's degree in Veterinary Medicine as well as a master's degree in Library and Information Science. He held senior information management positions in academia as well as in industry. In his last position he was managing the Novartis Knowledge Center in Vienna, where he introduced the concept of Open Access. He initiated and managed a global institutional repository project called OAK - Open Access to Knowledge @ Novartis - which is unique in industry (so far). The ongoing project is performed in collaboration with EPrints Services. Due to an unexpected company restructuring in Austria, Christian opted to set-up his own consultancy business and further support EPrints activities.

How did we decide what to put into the latest version of EPrints?

2008-04-18T01:28:00.000-07:00

The New Features in EPrints 3.1 wiki page lists a couple of dozen major and minor changes in EPrints 3.1, but they aren't everything on the list of things we *wanted* to make by any stretch of the imagination (for example, WebDAV support was a favourite of mine that we missed off). So how did we settle on this particular set of features?

First off, EPrints has a kind of unwritten mission statement that says "repositories have a job to do". It comes from the early days in 1999 when the formation of the OAI led Stevan Harnad to promise to create a piece of software that would embody OAI-PMH and allow everyone to participate in the world of shared internet resources. It was strengthened by the establishing of the Open Access movement a couple of years later. And it has been tempered by our experience of years of providing open source support for EPrints users and paid services for clients of EPrints Services. Whether the agenda is Open Access or preservation or scholarly collections, acquiring and managing digital material is a serious job that needs all the support possible for users, editors, managers and administrators. So anything that improves the lot of any of the stakeholders in a repository, anything that serves users or depositors or managers better has a high priority for EPrints development.

And it's not all lovely community-minded altruism at work here. I manage three repositories, I sit on an repository steering committee and I'm responsible for the service provision for paying clients. I want this software to make my job easier. As one of my senior colleagues says "you've got to eat your own dogfood."

The second influence is our users. Every time we run a training course and every time we have a public meeting we discuss the future direction of EPrints and the kind of facilities that it should adopt. Every time someone comes up with a question we can't answer easily on the eptech mailing list, that's a vote for a new feature - or an easier way of providing an existing feature. Every new EPrints Services client gives us input about what is important to them. And so do the users of our own repositories at Southampton - librarians and professors and research staff.

The third pointer to potential directions of development comes from The Repository Community's discussions and papers and committees and projects, especially the projects that we're involved with (like SWORD and SWAP and ORE etc).

But with all that input, the decision about what makes it in is still fairly chaotic - not random as such, but creative and agile and reacting to the current situation and pressures. Oh, perhaps a little bit random then!

Ever since we started to get feedback on version 3.0, we heard that quality assurance was becoming a big issue for people.
They liked the features we put in to help users get the metadata right in the first place, but they wanted tools to help them deal with the bulk of the material already in their repositories. Watching repository managers deal with the pressures of the RAE in the UK really underlined that message - if you're delivering an institutional service you have to get it right. 3.1 is only a step in that direction, but we're really proud to be able to make some contribution to improving the quality of repository holdings. There's still some suggestions that we haven't got round to implementing from the original EPrints 3.0 pre-rollout meeting in London in December 2006 (e.g. comparing locally-held metadata against authoritative external sources and importing the improvements) but we've made a start. And the important thing is that the vast majority of new features are just extra plugins that slot neatly into the existing infrastructure, so we're no messing around with Core EPrints and making it difficult to upgrade.

Citation tracking features were added because of the very strong steer from our research managers at Southampton, who are in turn responding to national pressures for research assessment and research management.

Some basic support for Web2 facilities were added because of the large number of projects that were trying to put Web 2.0 features (comments, tags, votes, annotations) into EPrints. A meeting of these projects made it clear that there was sufficient (funded) community work going on to experiment with different approaches, and that the role of EPrints HQ would be to support those efforts, rather than to try to take the initiative in this area.

The new database layer was written by Tim Brody just because it was a good idea that improved the software architecture. In fact I didn't know it was happening until it was finished! But directly from that sprang the metadata schema editor, using the inspired observation that the schema itself could be just another EPrints dataset.

The complex object support was added to try to better align with the semantic web - now everything (all items in all datasets) has a URI that doesn't change, and everything can have a relationship with everything else. EPrints has always had this three-tier model of eprint - document - files, so we have always been very good at modeling what others call 'complex objects'. These changes just strengthen that ability - although subsequent versions of the software will build more on this capability and bring it into the mainstream.

One particular source of input has been friend & critic Tony Hey. He used to be my boss and is now a VP at Microsoft with a portfolio that includes e-science and cyberinfrastructure. He repeatedly criticises EPrints and all repository platforms for being too darn difficult to install and use. In partial response, we recently produced a LiveCD version of EPrints to provide a 1-click installation option with no complicated configuration and dependencies. But what really stung me in Tony's criticism was the amount of system programming skill needed to configure and maintain a repository - even the requirement to log in and be comfortable with a command line seems unreasonable for anyone but a programmer, and then you have to learn how to use an editor. I may live and breathe vi, but is it fair to require librarians to adopt this skill? So I was keen to try and move as much configuration and customisation away from the programmer's interface to the manager's (web) interface. The importance of this was underlined by listening to so the stories of many repository managers who are kept at arms length from their repositories by the contract with their technical support team.

So how can you affect what is added to the next release? You can talk to us! Email the ep-tech mailing list and make a suggestion.

Welcome to EPrints News

2008-04-17T01:08:00.000-07:00

The aim of this blog is to keep you up-to-date with what's happening behind the scenes with EPrints.

There's an awful lot of EPrints activity that goes unregarded apart from the people it directly concerns, so this blog is an attempt to make the EPrints activities a bit more open. To be honest I'm not sure whether it will turn out to be a strictly factual and academic reporting of Issues and Events, or whether it will contain insider gossip - a kind of repository manager's Hello! magazine. (Get the lowdown on Chris Gutteridge's latest hair color. And who was that handsome code gorilla at OR08?)

Here are some things on my mental list to blog about in the near future.

The new EPrints 3.1 beta - what's it got in it and why?

Who's on the EPrints team

What are different sites doing with EPrints

What projects are using EPrints?