...

Co-Mentors: Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones, ???

Abstract:

Efficient content acquisition strategies make it easier to import scholarly information into repositories. DSpace supports batch content acquisition through the ItemImport procedure. This procedure requires digital resources to be represented in a Submission Information Package (SIP). The lead time required for preparing this format can be facilitated by encoding document metadata and digital resource location in a spreadsheet. This has been implemented at The Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of CNRS (INIST-CNRS, France), The University of Calgary Library, National Informatics Centre (India), and The Lanzhou Branch of Chinese Academy of Sciences (China). Few recent requests include The University of Waikato Library, The University of Sydney Library and the NITLE (U.S.A). Although the current implementation on Windows environment looks promising for the user community, there has been considerable request (New York University Library, Raman Research Institute Library (India)etc) to make this development compatible with the UNIX environment. It's anticipated that this add-on would facilitate content acquisition in DSpace installations.

...

• Survey Result & Analysis
  • Status : Completed
  • No of participants submitted : 43
  • Deliverables: Survey Report
    A survey was posted to the DSpace mailing list to receive users' feedback on importing documents into DSpace repositories. 43 participants responded to the online survey (managed through www.surveymonkey.com). It was found that 65% of participants have been using DSpace for less than 3 years. Interestingly, 9.3% of the participants have used DSpace for more than 5 years. The survey shows majority of participants have installations on Unix/Linux environment (74%) and only 20% are on Windows. It was found that the majority of participants' instances have collections with less than 500 documents (30%). However, 25% had their collections in the range 1,000 - – 10,000 and above 10,000 items. 55% of users prefer DSpace submission interface for importing items, where as 44% of users use the in-built batch import feature. Further, it was found that 36 % of users had one fourth of their archived items imported using batch import and 26% of users had three fourth of their collection populated using the DSpace batch import. Hence it is evident that batch import facility is having a significant impact on ingesting items into digital repositories. It also highlights that majority of users (62%) developed their own customized program for the preparation of submission information packages. Only 29% performed the preparation of submission information packages manually, while 8% of users outsourced this to a vendor. 54% of users preferred a customized program (e.g. extracting metadata into an intermediate stage and generating submission information packages automatically) while just 21% of users preferred manual methods. There were two open-ended questions in the survey. The first question was to obtain suggestions from participants on the features of program they developed. The second one was on the choice of features potential users preferred for an automatic generation of submission information package to facilitate batch ingestion. The suggestions given by participants had very useful insights. It was also evident from the survey that DSpace instances are geographically spread with 30% from North America, 27% from Asia, 25% from Europe, 7% from Africa and Australia each.
    (Note: Please email me at BL0002HN@NTU.EDU.SG for a complete survey report in PDF format)

...

References:

• Online survey using http://www.surveymonkey.com/^{Image Removed}
• Survey result export using http://www.pdfforge.org/^{Image Removed}
• JCreator - Java IDE, http://www.jcreator.com/^{Image Removed}
• Programming reference
  • Tony Sintes, http://www.javaworld.com/^{Image Removed}
  • R.J. Lorimer, http://www.Javalobby.org/^{Image Removed}
  • OpenOffice.org Forum, http://www.oooforum.org/^{Image Removed}
    • http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=2520^{Image Removed}
• NetBeans IDE 6.1, http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/netbeans.html^{Image Removed}