Apologies for the lengthy delay between posts. It’s very bad form on my behalf but it has been an exceptionally busy couple of months.
We have been involved in the Research Excellence Framework Bibliometrics Pilot Exercise, so it was a summer of collecting references. Now we wait whilst the company doing the data crunching, Evidence Ltd tidy up the material submitted then start investigating the metrics. Results won’t be back until next March but details on the Bibliometrics pilot are available from the HEFCE website – http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Research/ref/
Otherwise, the summer was spent working with the Eprints Services team at Southampton. We have taken the big step of changing to a hosted Eprints solution. We have Eprints 3.1, and have started populating it, pulling in our old material from existing systems and DSpace. I really think it’s a beautiful interface, especially for depositing items. The Eprints team have been really helpful, very patient and it’s great to be able to draw on their expertise. There’s still a lot of tidying of the references now in there to be done, but we’re hoping to launch late next January. Progress!
How difficult is it to pull from DSpace into Eprints? We are trying to compare both repository software to determine which would suit us best. I have been put in charge of the current DSpace instance and am not particularly fond of it
The technical work was done by either Eprints or our Web Services team. I don’t think the actual process of export was difficult, just packaging up the xml (and then finding my metadata weak spots from DSpace). The handle situation was a bit tricker but achievable.
Hi,
I was wondering why the decision was made to move to a hosted solution? Did you have just DSpace previously?
Hi John,
Yes, we just had DSpace for our pilot repository. The hosted solution seemed very economical, and although the technical support in-house here works well in java (partly behind our initial use of DSpace), we did not have strong local perl expertise to draw on. We got to a point where it was getting difficult to move our DSpace install along so we looked at our options. We did a comparison between continuing with an in-house solution versus a hosted solution, then compared hosted solutions and Eprints came out very well.