FSOSS 2008

I attended the Free Software and Open Source Symposium October 23-24, 2008.  As always, it was a rewarding experience, and I intend to go back next year.  For the low price of only $50 (early registration), a delegate has access to two days of sessions, several workshops, and an assortment of goodies including a tee shirt, lunches and a reception. All sessions are recorded and available on-line for viewing after the conference.

I am definitely going to try out the TikiWiki CMS/Groupware application.  It has a very handy database tool that enables the user to create databases through an easy web interface.  Web forms with customized fields can be also easily created to populate your databases. I like the TikiWiki philosophy where each release comes with every available add-on which can then be enabled or disabled through site administration pages.  This ensures that all modules are updated at the time of a new release, and saves one from having to go module-hunting when new functionality is required.

I was happy to see that FSOSS featured a session on open access.  Leslie Chan discussed the convergence of open access with open source. His session reminded us of the significance of the open source contribution to the open access revolution.  John Willinsky was visionary in realizing that a major barrier to publishing journals on-line barrier-free was the cost of creating journal publishing software.  His Open Journal Systems project has enabled over 2000 journals worldwide to make journal content available on-line, most of it without barriers to access. Open source projects like his are contributing to the steady increase of peer-reviewed scholarship freely available on-line.

Marcus Bornfreund was absolutely swarmed with questions after his talk on Creative Commons and creative copyright licensing.  His session helped to bring home the message that assigning a creative commons license to a work does not limit ones ability to make a commercial profit from said work.  The cc license only sets the base standard for all who have not made alternate arrangements with the copyright holder.  It is necessary to remember that once a creative commons license is assigned to a work, any further arrangements made with respect to that work cannot be exclusive.  Marcus will be speaking at York University with Professor Pina D’Agostino on November 19th about copyright in the academy.

Follow-up post regarding DSpace 1.5 adoption

I strongly encourage readers of the CARL IR post below to view Mark Diggory’s comment.  He discusses migration from DSpace 1.4 to DSpace 1.5.  He’s made a good point: in presenting perceptions of IR meeting attendees without further elaboration I may lead readers to make conclusions that are not entirely accurate.

I agree with Mark’s comments and to add to his case would like to share our migration story.

Our migration to DSpace 1.5 was delayed because of other pressing projects and the fact that we were upgrading our server environment. The actual migration from DSpace 1.4 to 1.5 was rather quick.  It took us only a few weeks to pilot the migration on the test server,  present the test version to our user communities, integrate suggestions, and run the actual upgrade.  When we showed the upgrade to our users on our test environment, their suggestions were related to our new design, and not DSpace functionality itself.

I am a fan of DSpace 1.5’s integration of selecting a Creative Commons licence at the point of item submission. (This feature alone is worth the upgrade!) The Manakin interface has enabled us to create custom submission templates and to easily display customized searching and browsing capabilities.

Finally, my observations should be taken in balance with the reality that many IR managers are pulled in multiple other directions such as faculty liaison, policy development, advocacy for open access, and digital projects such as journal publishing initiatives.  Repository management is only one aspect of their daily work, and as a result, time is short.  Finding the time to explore new features and carefully plan migrations is increasingly short, and this is likely the overarching factor that precipitates slower adoption.

CARL IR Meeting at Access 2008

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries hosed an Institutional Repository meeting in Hamilton Ontario on Wednesday October 1st, 2008 to coincide with Access 2008, and I was happy to be in attendance.

This was an extremely worthwhile meeting where participants were able to trade stories of their successes, challenges, and plans for the future. With over 40 of us in the room, it took almost the entire duration of the meeting to do a round of introductions discussing individual repositories. I sincerely hope that this becomes an annual event!

There were three major themes that emerged from the meeting:

Theme 1 – DSpace is commonly used, most institutions running 1.4 version

Most of the repositories in attendance were hosted using DSpace software.  I was very surprised to hear that most of the DSpace hosted repositories were versions of the 1.4 release, and that only two institutions had migrated to the 1.5 release.  I was slightly relieved because we finally completed our migration to 1.5 and I thought that we were behind!

As a result, the Manakin XML interface layer for DSpace was also not being used.  We were the only ones to have a production version of Manakin running.

Reasons cited for not migrating to 1.5 included:

• customizations made to DSpace 1.4 will take a lot of programming time to move over to 1.5
• certain plug-ins and enhancements that are in heavy use in 1.4 have not yet been made available for 1.5
• administrators are evaluating other platforms and are not willing to invest the time in upgrading to 1.5 if they end up switching platforms
• programmers are hard to find, train and retain

Please visit my follow-up post to this section that elaborates on these observations.

Theme 2 – Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

ETDs were discussed at length as they are very popular and make up a sizable percentage of most Canadian repository content.  Only one institution has mandated electronic thesis deposit, but many have effective relationships with their respective Graduate Faculties where procedures have been established to enable the depositing of theses into repositories on an ongoing basis.

Copyright has been tackled in many ways: seeking legal advice from campus legal counsel, sending letters to alumni, taking out an ad in institutional alumni magazines, and re-writing agreements to be signed by current graduates.

The availability of past Proquest theses were discussed but common problems were echoed:  poor quality scans for certain year ranges, Proquest marc records not tying to digital copies of theses by filename, lack of ocr, and the need to remove signature pages have slowed down workflow to ingest these items.

Theme 3 – Scholarly Communications Programs

Many of the participating institutions are hosting outreach programs to discuss Scholarly Communications challenges with faculty.  Efforts include hosting speaker events and creating websites/supporting materials.