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DSpace User Group meeting Scandinavia - October 30th 2007

Rikshospitalet 30.10.07 - 10:00-16:00.

The meeting started with Jan Erik Kofoed from BIBSYS welcoming us all and explaining the background for the meeting and the Norwegian perspective of establishing a Scandinavian or Nordic user group for DSpace. Through the work with the NORA project the Norwegian DSpace users have realised that there are development needs of DSpace that are specific for Norway. Assuming that this was the case in the rest of Scandinavia a meeting was called, to decide whether a Scandinavian or Nordic user group for DSpace should be started.

First speaker of the day was Richard Jones from Imperial College, who talked about the DSpace software and the development of DSpace federation. He borrowed slides from Michelle Kimpton (DSpace federation) and Robert Tansley(Google) from their presentations of the recent DSpace User Group Meeting in Rome.

DSpace users in Scandinavia, developments so far and continued plans.

First out was Leif Longva from the University of Tromsø. Their Munin service was launched in 2006 with a main focus on master's theses. In Tromsø they initially made changes to the DSpace interface:

  • Exchanged the standard side menus for a horisontal menu
  • Only local authors are listed in the author index

Since the launch, the main focus has been on developing as submission portal for master's theses for the University of Tromsø, iPortal. This will be used by most of the faculties at Tromsø for deposit of master's theses. It is a separate DSpace instance, but login is done through the Munin interface. Leif also showed us some screenshots from iPortal.

He ended his talk with a "wishlist" for DSpace and Munin:

  • They want to add support for multiple languages in the registration form (due next year)
  • Administrative information are currently visible in the registration form to the students, this will be changed.
  • They wish to make the list of tasks on MyDSpace sortable
  • They wish to add file conversion support (word to pdf) as part of the deposit process
  • They wish to improve the statistics in DSpace

In general they are happy with DSpace, although they want increased flexibility and hope to achieve this by collaboration with others in the DSpace community.

Next up was Ellen Røyneberg from BIBSYS. She works on Brage, a product developed by BIBSYS for the Pepia project. BIBSYS is a service provider of repositories on the DSpace platform for various institutions in Norway, mainly University Colleges and during the Pepia project a variety of changes has been made to DSpace:

  • Changed the build routine
  • Adapted DSpace to Feide authentication
  • Support of embargoed items
  • Import support from Brage to BIBSYS ILS
  • Simpler user administration
  • Additional metadata fields

Further developments are planned:

  • Remove beta marking. This is however depending on other developments:
  • A mature ID service from the Norwegian National Library
  • Federated OAI
  • Integration with BIBSYS ForskDok
  • Metadata and document type review
  • Peer review branding of publications

There is a working group with representatives from the institutions using Brage, this group is responsible for deciding the future direction of the BIBSYS development of DSpace.

Kari Fjose from BORA, Norwegian School of Economics and Buisness Administration was next. The BORA, NHH service was started in early 2006, and currently contains around 1600 publications, consisting of reports, master's theses and PhD theses. They don't do any development themselves, but see several areas in DSpace that needs improvement:

  • There is currently no support for Name authority control
  • Master's theses that are confidential (embargoed) has no support
  • Moving items between collections are currently difficult
  • Norwegian letters in file names are not supported
  • In Norway new metadata standards have recently been developed, and updating old records is a challenge
  • NORA harvesting

Future plans - wishes

  • New DSpace interface
  • Start working on self-archiving of articles
  • Easier correction facilites for items
  • Better statistics

Next it was Aksel Mjeldheims turn from BORA, Chr. Michelsens Institute (CMI). CMI is a research institute focusing on development issues in various parts of the world. They have been part of the BORA collaboration since September 2007 and currently their main deposited content consist of reports and working papers.

Aksel identified a number of challenges that needs to be adressed:

  • The research institute employs a number of researchers with academical ambitions who are used to publishing their research in traditional channels
  • There are currently little awareness of open access issues
  • The self-archiving process needs to be formalised in the institution, at the same time the copyright clearance and deposit process must become easier

He ended his talk looking forward, CMI are very new at institutional repositories and need more experience with running DSpace and the deposit of content. Longer term they are planning to work on developing repository services for institutions in Africa.

After Aksel´s talks it was time for some lunch and networking.

After lunch Ole G. Evensen talked about BORA, University of Bergen. This first instance of the BORA group of IRs was opened November 15th 2004 after a year of preparations. Right from the start the name was chosen to enable other institutions in the Bergen area to join in a collaborative service reaching across academic and research institutions in Bergen.

In February 2005 the BORA name was extended was extended when Bergen University College decided to buy services from the University. NHH and CMI were added and a common service was launched in 2007.

In January 2006 UiB set up another repository, this time for the archiving of exam works, with a starting focus on master's theses. Deposit to this repository is done through the University's student portal in which also the grading is done; an archive version is then stored in the exam archive before the thesis is transferred and made openly available in BORA.

For BORA there are a number of tasks ahead:

  • Content transfer from the exam archive to BORA still needs to be implemented
  • A similar transfer solution from the CRIS Frida to BORA needs to be implemented
  • Facilitate data transfer from BORA to BIBSYS
  • Improvement of interface for content viewing
  • Better statistics

Also, BORA needs improved support for digital contracts and for embargoed content.

Arild Skalmeraas, Telemark University College ended the introduction of Norwegian IRs by talking about Telemark Open Research Archive (TEORA), a collaborative DSpace project from various institutions in Telemark. They have chosen to run a local out of the box instance of DSpace with some local adaptations. Among other things, they have made configuration changes to the interface design and the language files have been changed.

In future they hope that the following issues will be handled in the Norwegian DSpace community:

  • Integration with ForskDok
  • Deposit to the National Library
  • Electronic deposit of master's theses
  • Also finally, there was a question from the audience about integration to EndNote, Reference manager and similar tools.

Jonas Gilbert from Gøteborg University then talked about experiences and development plans from the Swedish DSpace users. In Sweden there are two important national projects on institutional repositories:
SVEP - Samordning av den Svenska högskolans Elektroniska Publicering" and
Openaccess.se.

Currently there are five institutions in Sweden using DSpace :

  • Högskolan i Borås, Borås akademiska digitala arkiv started in 2006 and contains around 1300 publications. Has developed a solution for including the item handle in the printed version of a thesis.
  • Högskolan i Halmstad, Halmstad University Scholarly Archive started in 2006 and contains around 900 publications.
  • Malmö högskola, who started using DSpace in 2005 and has about 3100 publications in MUEP. They have set up integrated support for the printing of theses and developed export formats of publication lists in rtf and xls format.
  • Göteborgs universitet. Göteborgs universitets publikationer - epublicering och e-arkiv (GUPEA) was also started in 2006 and contains content migrated from eprints. The University has decided to make e-publishing of PhD theses mandatory. Currently the archive contains 5300 items, 2700 of these are student theses.
  • Lärarhögskolan i Stockholm

The DSpace community in Sweden are already established and generally meet to share experiences once every six months. For example they did a workshop with Richard Jones in 2006, they also have a mail list and they collaborated on the translation of messages.properties for DSpace.

From July 2007 they have used Google Analytics in order to gather comparable statistics, and Jonas continued to show these and talk about the very useful information these had produced

Finland also got a couple of minutes to talk about institutional repositories in Finland.

Scandinavian user group?

When all the presentations were finished it was time to open the general debate of do we need a Scandinavian (Nordic) user group for DSpace, and if we do what should be it's main goals?

All participants agreed on the need for a user group, one question raised however, was whether it should cover Scandinavia or the Nordic countries. The main topic of discussion differed had to do with the language challenges a Nordic group would have to face. The participants decided that this could be dealt with some flexibility regarding language, and both Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and English was decided upon being "official" languages in the group.

It was agreed to establish DSpace User Group Nordic Archive Dugnad (DUGNAD) with an initial committee consisting of Ole G. Evensen (University of Bergen Library, chair), Kuno Öhrman (Datacentralen, HANKEN - Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration), Jonas Gilbert (Goteborg University Library) and Jan Erik Garshol (BIBSYS). BIBSYS has also taken the responsibility of facilitating communication by setting up an email list, maintain the wiki etc.

The purposes of DUGNAD' are:

  • To promote the use of the Open Source system DSpace
  • Promote collaboration between DSpace users
  • Be a forum facilitating discussion and further development of DSpace
  • Be a forum for sharing DSpace related code
  • Stay in touch with the international DSpace community

After another tea and coffee break it was time to discuss important tasks for the future.

Important development tasks were discussed and responsibilities for development were assigned for some of the tasks:

  • Statistics
  • Frida Integration - responsible: UiT, Munin with assistance from UiB, BORA
  • Integration with the National Library's upgraded URN-service - responsible: BIBSYS
  • Import to BIBSYS ILS - responsible: BIBSYS
  • Integration with Forskdok - responsible: BIBSYS, this service is already in development. It is assumed that a large part of the deposit to Brage will happen through Forskdok.
  • Integration with LMS
  • Print on demand solutions - Malmø Høgskola will look into this
  • Authority control solutions
  • Embargo support
  • Problems with special characters - consider system generated file names
  • Moving of objects - this is part of DSpace 1.5
  • Improved administration interface
  • Legal deposit to the National Library - is planned to be done through NORA.
  • Integration with reference management tools

As the last official part of the program Richard Jones talked about how to contribute with code to the DSpace development. He pointed out the main project tools:

  • Patch tracker - contains code to be considered for the codebase
  • Bug tracker - list of things that don't work
  • Mailing lists, General, Tech and Devel.
  • IRC channel - irc.freenode.net / #dspace
  • DSpace Wiki

He also recommended that everyone takes part in the testathons, that is a community test event of new versions of DSpace. The testathon for 1.5 should be imminent.

The meeting ended with Jan Erik Kofoed from BIBSYS summarising the meeting and concluding that everyone were in agreement on moving forwards with the DSpace User Group Nordic Archive Dugnad (DUGNAD).

Next meeting will (probably) be in April as part of Open Repositories 2008.

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