ORO’s growing lists of PhD, EdD and MPhil theses are now also available via the DART-Europe E-theses Portal, a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses.
One of the many advantages of ORO is the role it can play in raising the profile of OU research. By this, I don’t only mean at the University scale, but also at Faculty, Department, Centre, Research Group, and individual researcher level too.
As such, we have had many people come to us and ask if we can create a publications feed for their website. The answer is yes, it can be done in a variety of ways, but up until now we’ve tended to work with people making these requests on a case-by-case basis, which of course can be very time-consuming.
However, now (as of today), it is a lot easier for you (or your website editor) to embed a publications feed, driven by ORO, without much (if any) involvement by us! From any set of search results, or indeed from any browse page within ORO, you will now see “Embed as feed” towards the top of the page with a “+” sign next to it. Clicking on the “+” will reveal a string of code which, when copied into the code for your site, will create a publications feed based on that page.
The standard feed this code creates is the ten most recent publications, in descending order by year of publication. I would suggest this, together with a link through to ORO to view all publications matching the criteria, would be a very nice feature on any OU-research-based website. And remember to make use of ORO’s Short URL service when linking through to a set of publications, particularly if it has been generated from a search.
Clearly, some people may want feeds ordered or styled in different ways, and in these cases you may still need to come back to us for help. However, we are addressing that too! Pretty soon we will also be rolling out a feed API for ORO, allowing developers to play around with the raw data, perhaps changing the citation style, the order of results, the number of results displayed, and so on. Also on the cards is some new functionality to allow individual articles to be tagged with Research Group information, thus enabling feeds for Research Groups to be created off the back of that information. Keep any eye on the blog for further announcements!
Finally, to help people understand how to use this new functionality, we’ve produced a short screencast demo which can be found in a new “Video Tutorials” section of the ORO help pages. More screencasts demonstrating other features of ORO will be added over the coming weeks and months!
Last Thursday I attended a ’Repository Softwares Day’, organised by the Repositories Support Project (RSP). Held at the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester, the event comprised a good mix of presentations and exhibits from key software developers such as EPrints, DSpace, Fedora, and so on.
Microsoft were there, talking about their complete cycle of solutions for the scholarly community. So, from tools to assist academics in researching and writing their paper, through to publishing platforms for hosting e-journals, and then finally their open-source repository software.
In terms of the repository end, I was left wondering whether there is room for more software – certainly in the UK, where EPrints and DSpace are very well established. Of more interest, in my opinion, was hearing about their article authoring add-in for Word 2007. Installing this enables the user to create very well structured technical documents (e.g. journal papers) in a way that captures additional metadata and semantic information at the authoring stage. The add-in also makes use of SWORD (Simple Web Service Offering for Repository Deposit), meaning an author could potentially deposit their article in whatever repository they choose from within Microsoft Word at the click of a button, assuming the repository is SWORD-compliant. This carries benefits for both the author (through ease of deposit) and Repository Managers/Administrators (possibly more full text). We will certainly be looking at making ORO SWORD-compliant in the coming months so as to take advantage of these features.
Another tool that I came away from the day feeling quite excited about is SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for EPrints). I’d read bits and pieces about this plugin for EPrints (the software underpinning ORO) prior to attending this day, but I was really grateful of the opportunity to see an actual presentation on it. Basically, installing the plugin would give us three new features for ORO: the ability to comment, to bookmark, and tag individual eprints. The various permutations of who can and can’t add / see comments and tags are explained in the SNEEP Wiki pages; again, I expect us to look into the possibility of installing SNEEP for ORO in the coming months.
The final major point of interest from the day for me was hearing and learning more about the various CRIS (Current Research Information System) solutions on offer. I’m going to mention Symplectic here, not because I’m endorsing the product, but simply because I attended their presentation, so it’s the one I feel most informed about currently. I was particularly impressed by Symplectic’s Publications Management System, which automatically gathers publications information from key databases such as Web of Science and ‘asks’ academics by email whether the publications it has found belong to them. If the academic clicks ‘yes’ then the article can automatically pass through to their repository, giving them the option to attach full text beforehand. More needs to be known, but one can see how a system like this could take away a lot of the data entry needed to populate a repository – an element typically cited by academics as the biggest barrier to depositing their work. However, the depositor is still making a conscious decision to put their work in their repository, but at the click of a button rather than by filling in lots of data fields manually.
All told, this was an extremely informative and thoroughly enjoyable day!
Today I attended an interesting event on repository services, organised by the RSP (Repositories Support Project) and hosted by the University of Bath. The services featured were not only of interest to repository administrators and managers, but also of relevance to researchers. Specifically, I’m talking about content searching services; so, the ability to cross-search the content of multiple open access repositories.
We were given demonstrations of these services by the speakers; specifically, OpenDOAR, ROAR, BASE, DRIVER, and Intute. All of these are very good tools for researchers, enabling you to search across multiple platforms for open access content. I couldn’t help but wonder though, while I and many other repository staff in the audience are aware of these services and have played around with them to see what they can do, how many academics actually think of using repository search engines like these? If you’re a researcher and you can’t find what you’re looking for within the bounds of your university’s subscriptions and other information resources, or, dare I say it, Google, would you think of visiting a service that searches across open access repositories? Did you even know that such services exist?