Paul Stainthorp » repository

RSP CRIS event – Tuesday 22 July

Paul Stainthorp — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:44:28 +0000

We apologise for the late arrival of this blog post.

On the 22nd of July I was at the University of Nottingham for an RSP (Repositories Support Project) event, Repositories and CRIS: working smartly together. A few of us from the UKCoRR committee were there, giving UKCoRR’s new Twitter account some hammer. My colleagues, David Young from the University Research Office and Elif Varol from the Library, also went.

Here are some very brief notes on the various presentations and activities – all of the slides are on the RSP’s website.

Simon Kerridge of ARMA (on the research administration, the CERIF standard, and the EXRI project). This has already led to some movement on the idea of a JISCMail ‘super list’ to allow information to be shared easily between members of ARMA and UKCoRR. All the talk of CERIF and REF requirements has also prompted us (Lincoln people) into action – a separate blog post about this will follow.
RePOSIT presentations and breakout discussion – this was great fun. Like being back at the RSP Winter School again. Repository work and advocacy makes far more sense and the panic easiest quelled when I talk to other repository managers around a table.
After lunch: more on euroCRIS from Mark Cox of King’s College London. Loads to look at, including the R4R (Readiness 4 REF) plugin for EPrints, and MICE (Measuring Impact under CERIF).
The University of Glasgow’s “alternative approach”, involving some hardcore use of EPrints. This is the model Lincoln is following and it’s great to see it working so successfully for Glasgow. See their Research Outcomes work and Will Nixon & colleagues’ Enlighten blog. Also related: EPrints: A Hybrid CRIS/Repository.
Finally, a whistlestop tour of EPrints version 3.3 and some of its new features, including one-click installation of plugins from the EPrints “Bazaar”. Looks very cool.

At this point: run for bus.

Orbital: managing engineering research data (JISC bid)

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Just a note to mention that I’m named (along with a few other library colleagues) on our latest project bid to JISC under the Managing Research Data Programme (02) 2011-13, for an 18 month project, called “Orbital“, on establishing a suite of systems for managing the University’s research data, and working with the School of Engineering – an extension to the Repository project and Jerome.

Here’s the bid document.

Joss Winn has blogged about it as usual. If we’re successful, Joss will act as project manager. I’ll be “lead researcher”. Bev Jones (Institutional Repository Officer), Chris Leach (Systems Librarian), and Ian Snowley (University Librarian) are also named in the bid.

“Our proposed project is called Orbital because we’re intending to build services for managing research data that ‘orbit’ around Nucleus, the data store we built during the Total Recal and Jerome projects.

“Of course, we’ve set ourselves some new challenges with this project and much work needs to be done in all phases of the project, but having the experience of building web services around large institutional data sets, gives me the confidence that we can tackle what is a really important issue for us – for any university: managing a growing body of research data.”

Subdomain dot something dot blah dot uk

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:49:00 +0000

The University of Lincoln has… rather a lot of web subdomains. Some might say too many. Our JISC funded Linking You project touched on this problem (assuming it is a problem), and then slowly—and wisely—backed away.

All of the following can by found using a Google domain search – each of these can be suffixed by “lincoln.ac.uk” to form a real domain name:

Disclaimer: I’ve no idea how many of these are current, official, or meaningful. However, here’s a humble proposal: if you want a new subdomain under *.lincoln.ac.uk, you have to have it tattooed on your arm first.

And I’ve not even got started on our own dirt – the University Library’s own little handful of subdomains.

Firstly, what the Library hasn’t got. There’s nothing to see at:

library.lincoln.ac.uk

(i.e. we’ve nothing at the ‘root’ Library subdomain. A couple of people have spotted this slight illogicality.)

Now what we have got, or have had in the recent past:

www.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…this points at our SirsiDynix HiP 3.08 library catalogue. Really, if anything, this ought to represent the overall web presence of the Library, with HiP relegated to something like catalogue.library.lincoln.ac.uk

jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…the Jerome project.

blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…which is defunct and redirects to the main blogs site.

eprints.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…a moribund, older installation of our EPrints Repository used for the 2008 RAE.

Library Impact Data Project: good news, everybody!

Paul Stainthorp — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:17:47 +0000

I think this is worth re-posting from the LIDP blog:

We are very pleased to report that we have now received all of the data from our partner organisations and have processed all but two already!

Early results are looking positive and our next step is to report back with a brief analysis to each institution. We are planning to give them our data and a general set of data so that they can compare and contrast. There have been some issues with the data, some of which has been described in previous blogs, however, we are confident we have enough to prove the hypothesis one way or another!

In our final project meeting in July we hope to make a decision on what form the data will take when released under an Open Data Commons Licence. If all the partners agree, we will release the data individually; otherwise we will release the general set for other to analyse further.

I submitted Lincoln’s data on 13 June. It consists of fully anonymised entries for 4,268 students who graduated from the University of Lincoln with a named award, at all levels of study, at the end of the academic year 2009/10 – along with a selection of their library activity over three* years (2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10).

The library activity data represents:

The number of library items (book loans etc.) issued to each student in each of the three years; taken from the circ_tran (“circulation transactions”, presumably) table within our SirsiDynix Horizon Library Management System (LMS). We also needed a copy of Horizon’s borrower table to associate each transaction with an identifiable student.
The number of times each student visited our main GCW University Library, using their student ID card to pass through the Library’s access control gates in each of the three* years; taken directly from our ‘Sentry’ access control/turnstile system. These data apply only to the main GCW University Library: there is no access control at the University of Lincoln’s other four campus libraries, so many students have ’0′ for these data. Thanks are due to my colleague Dave Masterson from the Hull Campus Library, who came in early one day, well before any students arrived, in order to break in to the Sentry system and extract this data!
The number of times each student was authenticated against an electronic resource via AthensDA; taken from our Portal server access logs. Although by no means all of our e-resources go via Athens, we’re relying on it as a sort of proxy for e-resource usage more generally. Thanks to Tim Simmonds of the Online Services Team (ICT) for recovering these logs from the UL data archive.

I had also hoped to provide numbers of PC/network logins for the same students for the same three years (as Huddersfield themselves have done), but this proved impossible. We do have network login data from 2007-, but while we can associate logins with PCs in the Library for our current PCs, we can’t say with any confidence whether a login to the network in 2007-2010 occurred within the Library or elsewhere: PCs have just been moved around too much in the last four years.

Student data itself—including the ‘primary key’ of the student account ID—was kindly supplied by our Registry department from the University’s QLS student records management system.

Once we’d gathered all these various datasets together, I prevailed upon Alex Bilbie to collate them into one huge .csv file: this he did by knocking up a quick SQL database on his laptop (he’s that kind of developer), rather than the laborious Excel-heavy approach using nested COUNTIF statements which would have been my solution. (I did have a go at this method—it clearly worked well for at least one of the other LIDP partners—but it my PC nearly melted under the strain.)

The final .csv data has gone to Huddersfield for analysis and a copy is lodged in our Repository for safe keeping. Once the agreement has been made to release the LIDP data under an open licence, I’ll make the Repository copy publicly accessible.

*N.B. In the end, there was no visitor data for the year 2007/08: the access control / visitor data for that year was missing for almost all students. This may correspond to a re-issuing of library access cards for all users around that time, or the data may be missing for some other reason.

Repository open team meeting, 17 June 2011

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:58:19 +0000

At today’s Friday-afternoon Repository open team meeting, we talked about:

The long-running saga of establishing unique staff IDs in our EPrints Repository software, and how they will help us to disambiguate and display authors’ information more clearly; also how—we think—they will allow us to move the Repository to a more ‘researcher-centric’ (rather than ‘document-centric’) model, with all sorts of benefits for research administration, reporting and REF preparation.
An RSP ‘Repositories and CRIS: working smartly together‘ event is taking place in Nottingham on 19 July. David Young and I are attending.
- “Building on the successful event ‘Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS’ which was orgainsed by teh Welsh Repository Network in 2010, this event will look at the interaction of Repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems). This event will also disseminate the findings of the RePOSIT project.”
DY also reported on the JISC-funded RePOSIT project (about which he had attended a meeting), which fits in [somewhere, somehow] to the complex web of “do it once – do it right“ requirements for collecting research administration data for all the University’s needs (only partially articulated). There are a number of EPrints initiatives at Glasgow and Southampton, all of which we need to evaluate. We decided that we probably need to raise this at the next Repository Steering Group meeting.
BJ is reviewing the 100-or-so ‘live’ items in the Repository marked ‘In Press’, with a view to moving as many of them as possible to a ‘Published’ status. This goes hand-in-hand with creating a full, complete metadata record (including all publication details), but needs careful timing so that deposited items aren’t missed off any of the Quarterly Research Output Reports.

Same time (1.00 pm) next and every Friday in the Enterprise@Lincoln café. Come one, come all.

A machine for turning metadata into cake*

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:46:15 +0000

* Or “cataloguer”, as they’re sometimes known.

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:

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

Icing the cakes:

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

Repository team meeting notes, 15 April 2011

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:16:09 +0000

Notes from the usual Friday afternoon gathering of the Repository team in Enterprise@Lincoln.

The Repository passed 3,000 records on 25 March (full blog post about this to follow), and 3,100 records on 14 April. That works out at 50 records/week, a rate of review which other universities have described as “aspirational”! The Library’s student comms & engagement officer, Steve Pannett, is creating a flyer to mark the 3,000 milestone. I’m also baking a celebratory 3,000-items cake for next week.
PS has been working on a couple of high-level advocacy and planning documents, aimed at the University Core Executive, and on a staffing document to help us to plan the level of support for the Repository after April.
RoS has been working with a number of staff to help them to deposit sizeable publication backlogs. She’s also just blogged the latest on the Kultivate project advocacy workshop which took place at the end of February, and is busy uploading all of her Repository help guides and training materials to Google Docs.
BJ and RoS attended an event on 24 March entitled ‘SHERPA/RoMEO for Repository Administrators‘, which—as well as providing an update on some new features of the RoMEO service—covered a range of copyright issues. BJ is distilling the event into a new Repository copyright flowchart/checklist for academic staff at Lincoln. You can download all the presentations from the event from the RSP’s website.
As I’ve already blogged, we produced the latest Quarterly Research Output Report (Q4 2010) using Repository data on 4 April. The next report (Q1 2011) will be generated on or after 30 June 2011.

Quarterly reporting with EPrints, RSS, and Google spreadsheets

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:35:56 +0000

Since the beginning of this year, the University of Lincoln has used its Repository as the ‘system of record’ for internal monitoring and reporting on research activity. In particular, Quarterly Research Output Reports are generated, every three months, from the Repo. These reports contain lists of ‘substantive‘ research outputs which first appeared “in published form” (or equivalent for non-textual outputs) during the relevant quarter.

We work one full quarter in hand (to give people plenty of time to deposit/record their publications on the Repository), so we’ve just produced the report for Q4 (October-December) of 2010.

At the moment, the finished reports are treated as confidential: though the information from which they’re automatically generated is freely available on the Repository.

Here’s how we do it:

Step 1. Imagine a Repository search for all items published or in press, from an individual department of the University. It’d look something like this.

Step 2. Export the search as RSS with citations.

Step 3. Next, use Google Docs’ =ImportFeed() function to import the RSS feed into a Google spreadsheet. To save having to edit the [rather long and horrible] formula for each of the University’s 21 departments, and also from having to update it for each quarter, we’ve used cell references within the formula to pick those values up from elsewhere in the spreadsheet. (Those cell references are coloured red and blue in the formula below.)

=ImportFeed(Concatenate("http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/cgi/search/advanced/export_lirolem_AllRSS.rss?screen=Public%3A%3AEPrintSearch&_action_export=1&output=AllRSS&exp=0|1|-date%2Fcreators_name%2Ftitle|archive|-|date%3Adate%3AALL%3AEQ%3A",DATERANGE!A1,"|divisions%3Adivisions%3AALL%3AEQ%3A",A1,"|ispublished%3Aispublished%3AANY%3AEQ%3Apub+inpress|-|eprint_status%3Aeprint_status%3AALL%3AEQ%3Aarchive|metadata_visibility%3Ametadata_visibility%3AALL%3AEX%3Ashow&cache=0"))

We’ve also used a couple | of custom Google scripts to make it easier to look up the reference ID for each department (in the Google spreadsheet it’s the name of each [work]sheet; one sheet per department) and use that value in the EPrints RSS query string.

Step 4. Once all the departmental sheets have been populated with RSS data, export the result to MS Excel, format nicely using Word, “sanity check” with several pairs of human eyes (to pick out the inevitable thing-or-six that the Repository has spat out that makes no sense on the page), and we’re done!

F.A.O. University of Lincoln academic staff: the next Quarterly Research Output Report, covering Q1 (January-March) 2011, will be produced from the Repository on or after the 30th of June 2011.

Repository team activity: January 2011

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:59:59 +0000

The latest quick update from the Repository team meetings, every Friday at 14.00hrs in the Enterprise@Lincoln café!

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.

Lincoln Repository: ‘ten tips’ magazine article

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:22:48 +0000

The following article (which we wrote) appears in this month’s University of Lincoln [internal] Staff Magazine.

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.

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).

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.

Making your work freely available through the Repository (“Open Access”) does not alter your legal rights as the author, and most publishers allow it.

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.

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.

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).

From now on, the University’s quarterly research output report for each school / department will be automatically generated by the Repository.

All in all, 229 members of staff now have their publications recorded in the Repository.

Two-thirds of all visits to the Repository come via Google!

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