2020-04-08 - National UGs Coordinators Meeting

Date

08 Apr 2020 at 9:00AM EDT (1:00PM UTC)

Attendees

• Andrea Mora Campos (Costa Rica)
• Ansie Van der Westhuizen (South Africa)
• Cesar Augusto Olivares Poggi (Peru)
• David Bukenya (Uganda)
• Guillermo Murillo Goussen (Costa Rica)
• Joel Torres (Mexico)
• Marina Saponenko (Belarus)
• Maya Senko (Belarus)
• Michele Mennielli (LYRASIS) 
• Nydia Lopez (Mexico)
• Tiago Ferreira (Brazil)

Absent

• Beate Rajski (Germany)
• Daniel Deogratus (Tanzania)
• Ernesto Giovany Correa Vásquez (Nicaragua)
• Hermes Stanley Blanco Contreras (El Salvador)
• Isabel Bernal Martinez (Spain)
• Javier Enrique Martínez Martínez (Honduras)
• John Butler (US)
• Josefina Siguencia (Ecuador)
• Oksana Bruy (Ukraine)
• Owen Iyoha (Nigeria)
• Paola Alejandra Azrilevich (Argentina)
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker (Germany 
• Richard Lamptey (Ghana)
• Robinson Zapata Pino (Panama)
• Sarah Molloy (UK)

The  represents who will be taking notes for a given meeting. It rotates after each meeting to the next person in the attendee list.

Dial-in

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/j/9963190968

Agenda

Notes

Recording of the meeting is now available: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/rec/play/vsAtcuD7-m83E9fG5QSDB6B9W9W7Jqms1igX-vsLmEvjV3IGNlf3ZOcWNLTAGgLTi-8ljYiDM4IrsWaC?continueMode=true

Introduction

Mic: the scope of the meeting is for all the coordinators to know each other and share best practices and ideas cross countries. There are UGs in 21 different countries and the engagement you've been creating is invaluable. It really shows how global this community is and is such a historical time we need to rely on each other and on communities even more.

I know some of the coordinators couldn't join us today, I hope it's fine for all of you if I record the meeting (agreed).

Round table for introductions

Costa Rica UG

Andrea and Guillermo: working at CONARE and member of LA Referencia. Almost 500 cases of COVID in the country. Full lock-down, trying to flat the curve. The impact on the University of Costa Rica: working from home since march 17. Surprise for everyone. Home working wasn0t approved in every office. We had to deal with it, new schedules, communications, VPN. 100 employees could do home working, now it’s 9000 people. DSpace repository activities grow. Univ is for self deposit. The amount of deposit has decreased. We’re fixing items and metadata. Budget hasn’t changed or cut. There’re rumors that public sector might have some cuts.

South Africa UG

Ansie: University of Pretoria, IR manager. Working from home, nation wide lockdown. Started on March 27. 1700 positives. Nation wide testing. Some colleagues cannot work from home, they need to be on campus. The IR has been moved online. UNISA is very large univ, 500.000 students to support. IR 22k items, 10m users per year. Last year survey and launched the UG (27 positive and no deaths so far). Thesis and dissertation hosted in repository, trying to synch research data repo (figshare) with dspace. 

Uganda UG

David, Uganda Christian University. Small Univ just outside Kampala. Deputy Univ Librarian. Consortium of Ugandan University Library. 17 Repos in the country and growing. Working on a national repository, affected by Covid-19. 52 cases so far. Under lockdown. Univ has been closed for the last 2 weeks. Institutions closed for the past 30 days. University is “half-open” trying to do some exams. Many are submitting their thesis in the IR. Difficulties in accessing the IR for the students from home. National IR is sponsored by a Swedish program.

Mexico UG

Nydia and Joel (Mexico): eScire, small company service provider of DSpace, working since 2006. Mexico changed government 2 years ago, lots of changes happened and there’s a sort of “political war”. Universities are experiencing lots of budget cuts, also CONACYT, the national organization responsible for coordinating the repositories, is experiencing budget cuts. Universities and small companies are working from home. 3000 cases (140 deaths).

Supporting the adoption of international standards in Mexico.

Brazil UG

Tiago: 136 registered repositories in the country, 3rd biggest country for number of DSpace. Working from NEKI-IT, on DSpace since 2005 and service provider. Coordinating the UG since 2018. Big country, lots of institutions working alone, the main goal was to get people together to share what they’re doing. Good support from IBICT. Budget issues. As a coordinator I share advice with the universities with issues on DSpace. Since March 16 we have been in lockdown. We’re all working from home (40 people at NEKI-IT). Budget hasn’t been an issue yet.

Peru UG

César, CONCYTEC: we have an OA law since 2014 and since then CONCYTEC is responsible for coordinating such an effort.

180 IR in Peru, all of them on DSpace. We’re a Platinum member of DSpace and part of the Governance. One of the first UG, particularly active with webinars and in-person meetings. Slack has been working very well for us. Peruvian community is enthusiastic but not very technical. Trying to provide more technical skills to more people. I like the idea of cooperating with other UGs. We haven’t felt yet budget cuts, but the central government will get money out of CONCYTEC

Belarus UG

Marina: I'm lead librarian and administrator of DSpace. I work at the Belarusian State University.Our country hasn't gotten a quarantine. We have 1066 cases in our country. We are the budget organization. We work like before. I don't see that number of requests to our library is increasing very fast. We only start our group. So we are going to organize some webinars for administrators and editors our library. And if we'll get a good result, we'll organize a webinar for other university libraries.

How we can provide support 

Mic - before going through the 3 examples listed in the agenda, I want to share another interesting initiative that Isabel Bernal, coordinator of the Spanish UG, who works at CSIC (the National Research Council): they implemented a national aggregator of all the publications related to COVID-19 present in the institutional repositories. She wanted to share the initiative  with the other Groups and see whether there are similar initiatives in other countries (https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/204074).

Guillermo - The Costa Rican government asked to make all the publications related to COVID OA. CONARE suggested DSpace and we are interested in exploring DSpace for research data.

https://twitter.com/delfinocrc/status/1247200718794248198

https://www.presidencia.go.cr/comunicados/2020/03/costa-rica-submits-proposal-for-who-to-facilitate-access-to-technologies-to-combat-covid-19/

César - Interested in knowing more about the Costa Rican and Spanish initiatives.

Mic -  let's make this an offline topic and get others involved. Research Data and DSpace is a "hot topic" in many countries. yesterday Tiago organized a webinar related to this topic in Brazil.

Tiago - on Recurring webinars (Brazilian example) - We’ve been organizing many webinars so far. 16 recorded webinars, all of them with great participation (over 100 attendees). Due to COVID-19 everyone is struggling and not going to work. We moved from a monthly webinar to a weekly webinar. First topic was data repository, we’ll go to preservation. The idea is to have not only presentations, but also panels and interviews. Very flexible on the format of the presentation. I sent the invitation on Monday for a webinar on Tuesday, we had over 120 registrations. Very large community, discussing topics related to the repositories is getting people together. One of the goal is to create a consortium to become platinum members of LYRASIS. There will be budget issues, but we’re many. 

Joel - on trainings and translations - we want to work on translating DSpace material in Spanish. Translating official documents of LYRASIS and DSpace WIKI (tech). Organizing video training and presentations in Spanish. We also want to have a weekly open webinar (every Friday) for the Mexican community - but for Spanish speaking users in general) - to ask questions on DSpace and offer advice. There’s a lack of technical expertise and budget, so the idea is to offer support on this (2-3 hours sessions)

Mic - it seems we could organize a sub-group to work on this, based on language. Most of DSpace documentation is in English, it would be a great value to have it in other languages too. And that works for videos and training as well. 

Cesar - we were planning to organize a pre-COAR conference DSpace workshop in April in Cusco. Now it will be transformed into an online videos/webinars initiative. We were supposed to have instant translation, now with webinars it will be more difficult. And a full day webinar is hard to follow. We’re now thinking about having the speakers to record their presentations in order to be able to add subtitles for the attendees. A mix of recording and live Q&A. Distributing the webinars through different days. Good for both the Spanish and English community because the presentations will be in English with subtitles.

Tiago - we could actually add different languages as subtitles, not only Spanish, in order to make the presentations available to more groups.

How National UG could work together

Mic - I was thinking to create a WIKi page for the group, a mailing list and a slack channel. I would also like to suggest regular meetings for you to keep sharing information across the groups. (general agreement)

Action items

• Michele Mennielli- to create the collaborative spaces (WIKI, mailing list and slack)
• Michele Mennielli - to add notes of the first meeting and recording to the wiki
• Michele Mennielli - in collaboration with Joel Torres to facilitate the creation of a Spanish speaking group to work on document translations
• Michele Mennielli - to organize the second meeting (or a recurring meeting)