Gearing up for EthosNet – Electronic Thesis Online Service

It’s been a while since I looked at the EthosNet instructions on DSpace OAI Crosswalk plug-in. I’ve created a separate community within OPuS, our repository, and plan to use this for harvesting. I’ve added at least the basic metadata fields outlined so those are ready to go.
Now, I’m going out to the masses today, to the University Research Students Committee to present a paper on the topic of e-thesis, and how they’re to be collected. Initially we’ll collect them on CD/DVD but at time goes on I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have the PhD and MPhil students submited direct to OPuS. It’s a gently, gently approach for now. We’re using much the same method as Exeter, described by Ahmed Abu-Zayed at the UKCoRR meeting last November (that long ago?!).
Which reminds me – now that I’ve found the UKCoRR website, I’m keeping it here for future reference: http://www.ukcorr.org/index.php

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Directing traffic to the repository

At our meeting yesterday, Mahendra from UKOLN raised a very good point about directing traffic to our repository. Considering that conversations about page ranking and Google keep cropping up, particularly with reference to linking to the publisher version of paper, this is an important way of directing traffic and raising our profile. Obviously I need to get the repository linked from as many places as I can. The obvious place to start is the Open Access repository registers.
I’ve registered with most of the Open Access registeries of repositories I can think of – ROAR, OAI, the BASE search engine, and ScientificCommons. I’ve got my eye on the Intute Repository Search project, starting late January. Have I missed any, or is there a list of sites to register with, somewhere?
Probably – please drop me a line and let me know.

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Here to stay.

Well, some very good news – my job as Research Publications Librarian has been made a permanent position. This is pretty good news, and fairly unusual given the show of hands at the last UKCoRR meeting, where a lot of repositories are managed by people on secondments, fractional posts or even ‘leftover’ parts of a job.
I’ll be using the approval of this post in my next set of activities, which will be promotion. We’re doing an internal launch of the repository during February, where I hope to get to as many departmental meetings as I possibly can, and also get snippets about OPuS (which is what we call our repository) on the university news sites. I’ve been to a couple of events recently and touted OPuS, more as a service than as a platform. I think there’s still an awful lot of work to be done before our DSpace gets near to being ready for public consumption, but it’s early days.

I’ve got an agenda to set for next week’s meeting so better hop to it.

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Quick introduction to repositories

I’ve just drafted a couple of papers for various meetings, and I’m also working on an FAQ page for the repository. My RSS feeds have just alerted me to this new publication by Charles Bailey – at first inspection it’s a good introduction especially for repos people at the coalface but I think I’ll include a link to it from our FAQ for a general audience.
Institutional Repositories Tout de Suite is available from Charles Bailey’s very good ‘Digital Koans‘ blog at http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2008/01/06/institutional-repositories-tout-de-suite/

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