It was great to take part in last week’s Repositories Support Project event at Sheffield Cathedral. The theme of the day, organised by Jackie Wickham and the RSP team, was “Doing It Differently” and it covered a wide range of repository-related themes. I took along an updated and expanded version of the presentation I made to SHERPA-LEAP repository managers. I covered the same topics, but in preparing the presentation, I was amazed how many more things there were to talk about a year on.
Stephanie Taylor gave an excellent overview of the repository scene, and I hope I followed it up with useful ideas about making repositories more user-friendly or just generally useful to users. Other talks went off into less well trodden areas, though no less interesting: Pat Lockley impressed again with his enthusiastic description of Xpert; Joss Winn described his further adventures in WordPress land; and Stephanie Meece described the challenges of non-textual repositories at UAL. My ears pricked up when Jason Hoyt of Mendeley mentioned that an imminent upgrade to Mendeley will be able to identify OA sources for papers, which might signal it’s time for me to finally catch up with Mendeley (dissertation starts next year!). I didn’t catch the final speakers as I had to catch my train, but I commend to you Vicki McGarvey’s post on the SHARE project blog at Nottingham Trent University.
I tried to keep things simple by steering clear of all the complicated issues in repository management – OA, OAI-PMH, copyright, advocacy, REF, RIM, etc – and just focus on simple UI enhancements that might improve a user’s experience of the repository, and effective use of features like RSS feeds and statistics, with examples from all over the world of institutional and specialist repositories. Which features a repository manager might choose, if any, is up to them and their own circumstances, but my aim was to ensure they are at least aware of what’s possible – as evidenced by what’s been done in many repositories around the country.
Beyond SNEEP: Ideas for Creative Repository Management
View more presentations from Richard Davis.
Although I focused on EPrints installations, I think nearly everything I demonstrated ought to be feasible in other platforms. Overloading an abstract page with features like “Share this on Facebook/Twitter”, QR Codes, or metadata export in RSS/JSON/CSV and more, should be a very easy way to enhance the user experience of repositories. As I suggested, adding buttons to support “the latest thing” users may be finding useful, is generally not difficult. A “Send This Paper To My Kindle” button, for example, seems so trivial I might even try it myself.
I had a long list of ideas/examples to show: for anyone who didn’t have time to copy down the small print, they were:
SNEEP
Lincoln EPrints
Language Box
MePrints
Hum Box
ULCC Publications Archive
UCL EPrints
IRStats
Repository Stats using Google Analytics (presentation by Graham Triggs at OR10)
E-Space at Manchester Metropolitan University
Framework for Linking Inline Semantic Metadata
Oxford University Research Archive
MERLIN