1. Discovery selection & implementation;
2. JISC Orbital project (0.3FTE) – based mainly in CERD until March 2013;
3. Possible JISC-funded Jerome follow-on work;
4. Development of the Lincoln Repository – working closely with the Library Institutional Repository Officer (BJ), the Research & Enterprise Office + the subject librarians on the following areas:
   • Metadata workflow and service development
   • Advocacy/training
   • Building a “Research Showcase”
   • CRIS-like development, bibliometrics, and supporting the REF
   • Developing staff profiles on the University’s website
   • E-theses
   • Helpdesk integration (…possibly)

The following are projects—part of the current Library I.T. strategy—that I’ll contribute to but probably won’t lead, and/or work that’s going on in the background that I need to stay abreast of:

1. Reading list development (project);
2. Authentication (project);
3. Participation in various JISC working groups as well as UKCoRR and LISN;
4. Working with the Acquisitions team on new team rôles/areas of work;
5. Monitoring and guiding e-resource management (ERM), authentication, and responding to user problems (this area of work will be looked after day-to-day by the Library (E-resources) Assistant (EV), supported by other staff, as part of the cover for my JISC project work);
6. Supporting the subject librarian for technology in a review of the Library’s presence on the University Portal;
7. Supporting the subject librarians in promoting and supporting the use of RefWorks 2.0;
8. Supporting the HELS in administering copyright/digitisation services and the use of Blackboard.
9. Initiating a new CALM user group.
10. Co-ordinating LIG (the Library Innovation Group).
11. Participating in the work of LNCD.

G’won then: what have I forgotten about?

Your publications can be found at the following short link (edit: URL updated 29 September 2011):

• http://lncn.eu/ep/XXXXXX

Where ‘XXXXXX‘ is your staff ID: the six-digit number you use to log in to the SafeCom printing system. For example, my own list is at: http://lncn.eu/ep/000947 (Any UoL students who have items on the Repository can use their normal 8-digit student account ID in the same place).

You can also get the same list of publications as an RSS feed, using the same staff ID number at:

• http://lncn.eu/eprss/XXXXXX

Again using your staff ID. For example: http://lncn.eu/eprss/000947

As well as subscribing to the list in an RSS feed reader, the RSS version of your publications list can also be embedded in a web page using Feed2JS to generate a bit of embeddable HTML code.

(Technical note: these short links are now possible because we’ve started using Lincoln staff/student IDs as unique identifiers for named authors in EPrints publication records. In future, we’ll be able to use these unique identifiers to create browsable lists of institutional authors, and to link lists of publications to staff profiles on other University systems. Thanks to EPrints Services at Southampton for putting this fix into place. The short URLs themselves were created using the [hidden] namespaces feature of lncn.eu – speak to Nick Jackson for a demo!)

Her enthusiasm and persistence has paid dividends to which I can’t do justice in this short post; instead here’s a feed of Rosaline’s own blog posts from the past year. Thank you, Rosaline.

As I’ve already mentioned, the University of Lincoln’s Repository hit 3,000 records late last month.

The tradition now appears to be that each Repo millennium is marked by cake.

Repository Rhubarb Fairy Cakes

The following recipe can be re-used, adapted and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Ingredients (metric equivalents are approximate):

• 8 oz (200g) butter
• 8 oz (200g) caster sugar
• 8 oz (200g) self-raising flour
• 1 heaped teaspoon cornflour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 large eggs
• Syrup left over from poaching rhubarb

Buttercream icing:

• Approx. 2 oz (50g) unsalted butter
• Approx. 4 oz (100g) icing sugar
• Syrup in which rhubarb has been poached
• Hundreds ‘n’ thousands

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to Gas Mark 4 (180°C; 350°F)
2. Line a fairy cake pan with paper cases
3. Cream the butter and caster sugar together in a bowl
4. In another bowl, sift the flour, cornflour, and salt together
5. Blend the flour mixture and the eggs into the butter/sugar, a bit at a time
6. Spoon the mixture into paper fairy cake cases
7. Bake for approx. 35 minutes in the middle of the oven
8. While still hot, spoon a couple of teaspoonfuls rhubarb syrup over each cake and let it soak in

Icing the cakes:

1. Beat together the unsalted butter and icing sugar until creamy and smooth
   (You might need to adjust the quantities to get the right consistency)
2. Mix in about 10 teaspoonfuls of the rhubarb syrup
3. Once the cakes are completely cool, spread a spoonful of the icing on top of each one
4. Hundreds ‘n’ thousands are compulsory.

This is being advertised on the internal staff daily alert email, with a banner image:

The next report, for Q4 2010, will be generated from the Repository on 31 March 2011.

• Staff from the faculty of Art, Architecture & Design are meeting Rosaline Smith in February to discuss the Kultivate project – I’m pleased that Kultivate is opening new lines of communication between the Repository and art/design researchers. Rosaline is also arranging some group training for the faculty of Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences.
• Bev Jones has attended an RSP EPrints training day. The event covered aspects of technical management of an EPrints repository, and focused on maintaining and customising EPrints software.
• The Repository Steering Group met on Wednesday, 2 February. University Librarian Ian Snowley is now the chair of the group. Rosaline Smith presented a status report. The Repository team have a number of new actions, including getting a move on with the Steering Group’s long-standing aim to generate dynamic lists of individual authors’ outputs for personal pages on the University’s corporate website.
• We’re also going to look at improving the procedures for dealing with users’ requests for copies of articles which are not Open Access.

• The University is now using the Repository to generate its Quarterly Research Output Reports. (These are lists of all the ‘substantive‘ research outputs published by Lincoln staff in a given quarter.) To make sure that items show up in the correct report, we’re introducing extra specificity over publication dates.
• Rosaline Smith reported on her attendance at the first Kultivate workshop, organised by the Kultur II Group, which took place on 11 January in central London. At the workshop, Rosaline gave a one-slide, two-minute presentation about improving support for art & design material in the Repository. You can read her blog post about it, here. We’d be very interested in talking to anyone from art & design at Lincoln about how we could develop the Repository to meet their needs.
• The University has renewed its contract with EPrints Services, who have provided us with excellent support, training and consultancy since the launch of our Repo in its current form. The cost of this support contract will be split three ways, between C.E.R.D., the University Research Office, and the Library.
• Bev Jones is attending a free EPrints training day on 19 January, all about maintaining, customising and branding our EPrints Repository: we’re keen to develop a bit more self-reliance when it comes to basic maintenance and simple technical jobs (saving the really hard problems for EPrints Services, above!)
• Finally, a round-up of events: I’m going to the RSP Winter School 2011 early in February; there’s a UKCoRR members’ meeting later in the same month; and we’ll be having our next [formal] University Repository Steering Group meeting on 2 February.

Repository top tips for academics

The University of Lincoln’s Repository is an online archive hosting full texts of published research carried out by academic staff at the University and teaching and learning materials.

As with all new systems, it takes some getting used to, but here is a short guide on getting the best out of the system.

1. The Repository more than doubled in size this year, placing Lincoln in the top 50 UK repositories by size (according to ROAR, the Register of Open Access Repositories).
2. In September, Lincoln became the 11th university in the UK to introduce an institution-wide ‘mandate’, making it universal practice for staff to deposit research outputs.
3. Making your work freely available through the Repository (“Open Access”) does not alter your legal rights as the author, and most publishers allow it.
4. The Library will help you to take care of your publishers’ copyright policies, and will make sure your items have been accurately recorded. More than 150 staff have attended one of the Library’s workshops.
5. From next year, the University plans to use the Repository to automatically update your staff profile page with a list of your publications on the University website.
6. Depositing your work in the Repository can help to improve citation impact in many subjects by improving the visiblity of published articles. It’s likely that citation rates will play a part in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
7. From now on, the University’s quarterly research output report for each school / department will be automatically generated by the Repository.
8. All in all, 229 members of staff now have their publications recorded in the Repository.
9. Two-thirds of all visits to the Repository come via Google!
10. You can access the Lincoln Repository on or off campus, and log in to deposit items, at: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/

For more information, contact Rosaline Smith, Research Institutional Repository Officer by emailing eprints@lincoln.ac.uk

Some quick points from the notes I took on the day:

• [I think it was] Stephanie Taylor of UKOLN [who] made a good point in her presentation about the ‘forgotten’ people in libraries, who ought naturally to be interested in the content held in repositories, but who are rarely included in discussions: inter-library loans staff being an obvious example, with the repo. as source of material to reduce the burden on document supply.
• Our own repository was mentioned in Richard Davis (ULCC)’s examples of SNEEP plugins used ‘in the wild’ – it’s good to think that some of the features of the Lincoln Repository (crafted over in the LIROLEM project that gave it its genesis) are still worthy of being held up as examples.
• Stephanie Meece’s demo of the University of the Arts’ repository was enlightening; it gave considered and coherent explanation of some of the low-level culture-clash conversations that we’ve had with our own Art & Design academic staff. It was worth it, too, to hear about the Kultur Consortium and the potential there for mutual support and development of repositories capable of meeting the needs of the Arts.
• Joss Winn was also there, bringing the University of Lincoln contingent to five! Joss gave a talk on using RSS to grease the wheels of scholarly writing and publishing, which has an accompanying blog post.
• Also exciting to see the direction Mendeley is taking [slides], with the potential (in the new year) for new features (“Library Groups”) to support library e-journals admininstration and subscription analysis.

We also took the opportunity (as four of the five committee members were in the room) to conduct an informal, stand-up UKCoRR meeting over lunch, at which we laid the groundwork for the next UKCoRR AGM, which will hopefully take place toward the end of February 2011.

Slides and handouts from the day are on the RSP’s website.