Christmas reading

A few bits and bobs to read over the holiday season:
Developing an integrated institutional repository at Imperial College London by Afshari & Jones.
HEFCE Consultation on the assessment and funding of higher education research post-2008
Finally in the library, Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.
Or I may just swing by the Bath Central Library this afternoon and go on a Harlan Coben / Sara Paretsky murder-mystery binge…

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Integrated repository

I’ve just read Richard Jones’ and Fereshteh Afshari’s research paper on their work developing an integrated repository at Imperial College in London. This is very much the direction we’re moving in, so it’s great to read about how they’ve developed their systems. They’re also DSpace users, with a personal information portal gathering research expertise and are working on tying the two together. Recommended reading, and many thanks to the authors for sharing their experiences.

ps. -5 celcius when we left the house this morning – weee!

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Repository Deposit Licence

I believe we’re on the tail end of getting our deposit licence ironed out. It’s been through numerous iterations – essentially it’s a document based on the Sherpa/AHDS recommended licence, that’s been across the desk of anyone who might possibly want to have a say in it.
I did post a message to the UKCoRR mailing list to ask whether anyone includes an indemnity in their licence – a few places replied to say they did. Our legal people were particularly keen on this idea, but the repository working party members were concerned it was possibly a deterrent to depositors. I think we’ve come up with a compromise, although that of course means it needs to see the top of someone else’s desk. When it comes back I’ll put it up for all to have a look through. We have borrowed from other licences, with permission, but the end result is very formal, quite a lot of legal jargon – ‘I, the depositor, agree to ….’. I notice a lot of publisher copyright agreement and licences have really toned down the legalese in their documents, I expect we’ll need to do the same.

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Beagles

WordPress gives you a page on blog statistics, showing things like page visits, links followed to come in and out of your blog, and search engine terms used to find your blog. This is the kind of things I believe repository statistics show that is of interest to researchers – I know I find it useful.

However, from my WordPress stats, I deduce that there is a global shortage on information about … beagles. At least once a day people stumble into my blog looking for beagle info – for which I have one post here.

Note to self – improve repository statistics by writing articles about beagles…

Beagle people – try Wikipedia, or if you’re a Darwinian, try HMS Beagle..

Gratitutious beagle shot (from Flickr, photo by cgines, licenced under CC)

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