Launch of Theses Collection Wales

On Friday 18th February 2011 the Welsh Repository Network held a launch event for ' Theses Collection Wales'. The collection allows users to view both electronic and paper copies of theses and dissertations from every Higher Education Institution (HEI) in Wales through a dedicated catalogue.

Screen shot of 'Theses Collection Wales'

Held in Y Drwm at the National Library of Wales the launch event was attended by approximately 35 people from around Wales.


The Theses Collection Wales includes approximately 50,000 theses and dissertations which have been presented for postgraduate degrees in Welsh HEIs. The collection comprises theses and dissertations arising from PhD and research Masters degrees, as well as taught Masters dissertations which have a Welsh interest or have gained a distinction.

Participants at the launch

The vast majority of the current collection is in paper format, but electronic deposit is becoming increasingly common. Through the WRN every HEI in Wales has developed an institutional repository to store and provide online access to their research output, including electronic theses and dissertations - more commonly referred to as 'e-theses'. In 2009 the NLW and the WRN began work on the ‘e-theses harvesting service.’ This service enabled the NLW to collect, through harvesting, copies of the full-text e-theses and to provide continued access to them through preservation management.

The project team

Anyone may search Theses Collection Wales but to access the resources within the collection it is necessary to register as a NLW reader. This will enable you to request to view a print copy of a thesis in the Library Reading Rooms or alternatively to view and download an e-thesis within the catalogue.

All of the electronic PhD theses that have been collected by the NLW from participating institutions will be further harvested by the British Library’s EThOS service. EThOS aims to provide access to all theses produced by UK higher education. For more information regarding EThOS visit http://ethos.bl.uk/

The presentations delivered during the event are now available online by following the relevant links below:

A Long and Winding Road: the creation of Theses Collection Wales
Jackie Knowles, Project Manager, Welsh Repository Network


Demonstration of Theses Collection Wales
Siân Thomas, National Library of Wales

The future of repositories
Balviar Notay, Information Environment Programme Manager, JISC


EThOS Update
Vicky Roy & Andy Appleyard, British Library

Repositories and CRIS article

An article has been published in the latest issue of Ariadne about the Repositories and CRIS event we ran in Leeds in May this year. ‘Learning how to play nicely: Repositories and CRIS’ is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/wrn-repos-2010-05-rpt/.

The full contents of the journal issue, which may also be of interest, including articles on e-books, Library 2.0 and data management is available from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue64/#main-articles.

Reflections from OR2010: Part 1

Last week Antony and I attended the 5th International Conference on Open Repositories in Madrid. The conference boasted a fully packed, 4 day programme including ‘General’ presentation sessions, User group sessions, working groups and forums. Nearly 500 delegates were in attendance, representing countries from all across the globe.

One of the reasons Antony and I were in attendance was to present a Poster, authored in conjunction with Glen Robson and Ioan Isaac-Richards from the NLW, about the work of the Welsh e-theses harvesting service. A copy of the poster is available from the Aberystwyth University repository CADAIR.

With parallel streams running for the majority of the programme there were too many sessions for one person to attend- let alone comment on- so below I’ve discussed the sessions I found of most interest and relevance to the work of the WRN.

The first couple of interesting sessions related to nationwide open access/ repository support networks: the first located in Germany; the second located in Australia. The OAN (Open Access Network) initiated by the DINI (German Initiative for Network Information) and funded for a two-year term by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has created an over-arching infrastructure between quality certified German IRs to act as a single interface for research promotion and to support other DINI Open- Access projects. DINI certification, a certificate of IR quality, denotes that an IR utilises international standards, such as DRIVER for metadata, has determined and makes its policies regarding use clear and available, and is well-positioned within both its own institution and the greater open access arena.

The OAN harvests data from the DINI certified repositories within Germany, aggregates the data and puts it through a number of value added modules such as data clean-up, FT link finding, OCR, and citation tracking. The aggregated data is then presented within a single search interface, and acts as a single point for data export and further harvesting. It also acts as a single point for the other OA projects, some of which were presented at OR2010, such as OAS (Open-Access Statistik) and OAFR (OA Subject Based Repositories).

The OAN is also responsible for increasing the number of certified repositories and offers support to repository managers in order for their repository to achieve certification. The alignment of WRN repositories, specifically in the area of policies, is an area of focus for the WRN team this autumn so the process of DINI certification will work well as a basis for this process.

Caroline Drury, University of Southern Queensland presented on the ANDS (Australian National Data Service), a service looking to inform and influence national policy on the curation of data. ANDS has created Research Data Australia, a central collection of curated data sets produced by Australian academics. ANDS also offers the following services: Publish my data; Register my data; Identify my data; which are related to this central collection. Also based at Queensland is Tim McCallum, the technical support half of the CAIRSS repository support team (the team resembles that of the WRN team with one technical and one organisational support officer). Piggy-backed on to a CAIRSS repository survey, ANDS has been investigating the data management practices at Australian Universities. This survey found that there was a low-level of repository manager involvement within the University in regards to data management, a trend that ANDS are looking to change with Senior Management intervention, in conjunction with CAIRSS. Data management is a new area of interest for the WRN so we will be watching the progress of ANDS with interest.

The other session of direct relevance and interest in regards to the work of the WRN, and more specifically the poster presented e-theses harvesting service, was from Nikos Houssous, National Documentation Centre (EKT), Greece. Nikos was describing the National Archive of PhD Theses developed at EKT, a single search interface presented within DSpace. Like the NLW in Wales, the EKT have a historic role in the collection of Greek PhD theses, a role they were looking to extend to the digital realm. The EKT are undertaking a digitisation project of the PhDs currently held in print form, as well as encouraging institutions to submit theses electronically. Records are held in a bespoke theses admin system and then pushed to both the DSpace system (via SOAP in ETD-MS (a metadata standard for e-theses devised by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)) and to the EKT Library Catalogue (via Z39.50 in UNIMARC). The DSpace collection also forms a central harvesting point for DART Europe, a service aggregating PhD theses records for the whole of Europe. I was unaware of NDLTD and ETD-MS before Nikos’ presentation and their relation to DART is of interest to the next stage of the Welsh e-theses harvesting service.

Through other sessions and networking I became aware of two other national aggregation services: NARCIS in the Netherlands and RCAAP in Portugal. Whereas RCAAP is an aggregation of IR content, NARCIS is an aggregation of IR and National information, such as DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services). There are also plans to incorporate the data from METIS the Dutch national CRIS, which will provide much richer information about researchers and their projects. Anecdotally, the NARCIS presenter reported that theses and dissertations were the most frequently retrieved items through the system, perhaps as NARCIS provided the only central point of discovery for these types of items.

It’s certainly nice to know that the work of the WRN parallels that carried out within other countries and that we have an extended network to call upon when in need of best practice advice.

CRIS Event Cafe Society Write Up - Group 4: Data Quality

At the JISC/ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning How to Play Nicely' held at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Met University on Friday 7th May the afternoon was dedicated to a cafe society discussion session. Four topics were explored by delegates and over the course of four blog posts we are disseminating the facilitator reports from each session.

Please use the comment option below to contribute or comment on these discussion topics.

Group 4 - Data Quality
Facilitator: Simon Kerridge, ARMA

The issue to be discussed was Data Quality and it was framed as “How do we ensure data quality in our systems? What are the best methods for getting data out of legacy systems?” however a number of related issues also cropped up in the discussions

The time was split into four 30 minute slots with delegates attending as many times as they liked. Some issued were identified on many occasions and others less often, most are presented.

Unique Identifiers - (for many, perhaps all data items) was considered to be a big issue. Examples included:
• PersonId: usually not a single one is used in an institution; the various systems (eg HR, CRIS, IT, PGR and others) generally used different ids. Moreover the HR system, which might seem like the obvious primary source, might have multiple entries for the same person (if they had more than one contract), but worse, only usually had entries for paid staff – there are many examples of unpaid people involved in research.
• FunderId: many expressed problems with de-duplicating similar looking funders. It was thought that the funders themselves could/should provide a unique reference

Authority Lists
• Even if an institution could de-duplicate all their own data and use a single id internally, it was likely that other institutions would not use the same system and so exchange of data would be problematic. This could be resolved by an agreed independent authority (for example staff HESAid). But one does not exist for (for example) Funders. This was thought to be something that would be extremely useful.
• A national policy on national data (eg FunderId) was seen as desirable
• Scopus / WoS / Pubmed were seen as possible partial authority lists for publications (and authors) but they contain differing information and do not cover the whole spectrum – and indeed not worth using in some subject areas

Data Quality
• Many places have a feedback loop (eg monthly show academic staff what has been added to their profile).
• Use carrots and sticks, eg only allow publications from the IR/CRIS to be used on internal promotions or for the annual report
• One stick method that was generally liked was the Norwegian system where in order to receive public funding for a research project a prerequisite was that all of the authors publications (where possible) had to be submitted to an open access repository
• Good enough is good enough
• Data should be re-used where possible, but only where it is appropriate; sometimes systems can be developed organically to meet too many requirements and end up not doing any of them well
• Try to think about potential future use of data and collect what you might need – but don’t go overboard. For example one institution has additional classification for all publications using the library of congress system, but so far has not used that meta data
• Have processes in place to check data quality on input and as a secondary check to ‘approve’ the data – one institution has a ‘checked by Carol’ flag!
• In general self-archive was not approved of due to the lack of quality and copyright checking
• There is some good software available for data quality checking against publications (using Scopus / WoS / PubMed data) and for data aggregation
• One institution uses Lieberstein string comparison to help identify possible duplicate entries
• The RAE / REF was seen as a good driver for increasing data and data quality
• Periodic data maintenance and cleansing is essential, but often not undertaken – data quality is unsexy!

Data Sharing
• Authority lists would make this much easier – surely some work can be done in this area?
• Two institutions recounted the issues of doing a joint submission to the RAE and the data fusion issues. It simplified a later choice of IR, the second institution simply plumped for the same as the first

Parallel Systems
• Many reported using parallel systems within their institutions as the data in the (normally) central system was simply not trusted by all the users.

Priority
• It was universally agreed that problems tended to occur where an issue was not given a high enough priority by the institution. For example, if a DVC took an interest in the quality of data in the IR then resources were made available to improve the processes and data quality.

Legacy Systems
• Often resources were made available for moving data from a legacy system to a new one
• However this was often seen as solving data quality issues, whereas in reality it is an ongoing issue, but often not resourced as such

Primary Data Source
• It was agreed that there is not one system for all an institutions data needs. Indeed that might not be desirable as individual systems tend to meet different requirements.
• However it should be known where the primary data resides, understanding that for a single record (eg information about staff) this might not all be in one system

Summary (the facilitators view of the discussions)
Overall the discussions were very open and positive. Many participants took away some ideas for use in their own institutions. Most were also sure that they would not find it easy to get the resource required to do a proper job in improving their data quality. Some systems were reportedly working very well, other systems were not. In general the former were the result of new developments whereas the latter tended to be systems that have been in use for a while. Hopefully this is the result of better new technology being used to support processes; however it seems likely that the reason is more to do with system being neglected once they are seen as being embedded and working.

CRIS Event Cafe Society Write Up - Group 3: Stakeholder Engagement

At the JISC/ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning How to Play Nicely' held at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Met University on Friday 7th May the afternoon was dedicated to a cafe society discussion session. Four topics were explored by delegates and over the course of four blog posts we are disseminating the facilitator reports from each session.

Please use the comment option below to contribute or comment on these discussion topics.

Group 3 - Stakeholder Engagement
Facilitator: William J Nixon, Glasgow University

Overview
The afternoon session of the “Repositories and CRIS” was an opportunity to bring Research Office and repository staff together across a range of topics and to draw lessons from other institutions, raise issues and share experiences. The focus of the discussion was “Stakeholder Engagement with the questions: “Who are the main stakeholders and how do we engage them? What do academics think?”. Over the sessions the focus was with researchers, research office and repository staff – but we acknowledged that there were many other stakeholders for our systems. These include funding bodies, University management, JISC, HEFC and RMAS amongst others.

The café approach to these sessions enabled attendees to stay for as long as they wanted, to move on to other sessions, and in some cases to return. Many of the initial attendees stayed across the first two sessions. The sessions had a good mix of research office and repository staff, both attending and contributing.

Key themes
• Key stakeholders – who are they?
• Workflows- what comes first the CRIS or IR?
• Carrots and sticks

Key stakeholders
In each session, there was an opportunity for staff to identify themselves as either research office or repository staff which was a useful starting point.

The initial discussions in each of the sessions, some of which overlapped considered who are the key stakeholders, with a particular focus on academic staff. It became clear very quickly that it was insufficient to talk just about researchers as a homogenous group and there was some discussion around unpacking them, guided not by discipline or research itself but by the nature of their funding and the length of their post, so we identified
• Researchers
• Contract staff
• PhD staff

These roles have created a shifting landscape not only for researchers themselves and their work/funding but for the CRIS/IR staff who support them.
The discussions here were then around how much do these staff know about, or are aware of the CRIS or the repository, in order to set a baseline for engagement. It was felt, certainly for IRs that there was still insufficient awareness of these -“invisible services”.

One approach which some institutions have begun to do is to provide build in sessions on the IR and CRIS as part of new research staff’s training. This opportunity to embed this information into existing courses was felt to be very valuable

At other institutions IR staff have been invited to be involved in Research Staff meetings and conferences.

Other Library and research office staff were recognised as stakeholders and as these CRIS and IR services have matured beyond a “project set-up” it is also necessary to inform and to engage them.

Some institutions have worked to inform and update their subject Librarian staff to act as advocates for the IR and for open access; others though preferred to manage this through the smaller repository team who they felt were better able to answer the range of queries which academic colleagues would ask. These include copyright, versioning issues and funder compliance.

Workflows and scope- what comes first the CRIS or IR?
There was some discussion, particularly around researchers and their publications about what should come first, a record in the CRIS and then as appropriate fed through to an IR, or should a publication just be deposited or entered into the IR. A third option was an additional publications database which was not part of the CRIS or the IR.

In some institutions the CRIS is or will be used to store the publication data while the repository is only used to hold the full text. A key challenge for one institution was the move to a CRIS for managing its publication with the expectation that research staff would manage their own publications. This was in contrast to the mediated service which the Library had provided [but was felt to be unsustainable in the longer term]

Questions here ranged around: who would manage the import of this data, its management (“clean-up”) and its acceptance/review. We also considered acceptable turnaround times for managing any review of the data before it became live – and how that could that be used to support engagement with staff.

Different workflows and staff resources were also covered. These ranged from self-deposit/submission to a wholly mediated service just done by the Library for the IR. This seemed to be less of an issue for data for the CRIS.

The need to engage with departmental administrative staff as a stakeholder group was identified here as one solution for this issue. These staff have the local knowledge and many are in departments dealing with publications, the CRIS and web pages.

Working with them for the IR (and CRIS) is a good way forward. Some institutions have taken this forward and provide training and support for these staff for the IR in a similar fashion to that provided for the CRIS.

Repository staff in particular also had concerns about the focus on bibliographic data for their CRIS or their IR if was a mix of full text and bibliographic data, if the importance of the need for full text was lost.

The comment was also made that the “repository is a set of services” not just an entity in itself – and one which can take on a range of roles including digital preservation, research assessment and open access.

Different institutions approached this differently and it was felt that there was no right answer or one size fits all, different institutions and the needs of different stakeholders will dictate the workflows but the need to engage staff at all levels is crucial. It was felt that this was most effective when the CRIS and IR could demonstrate valued added services [“carrots”].

Carrots and sticks
There was a considerable amount of discussions around the “carrots and sticks” for depositing material into the repository, or dealing with it in a CRIS. Did these help or hinder the engagement with stakeholders? Some of this flowed from the concerns over the sustainability of the mediated approach to deposit, the range of content which may be accepted to the IR and its public availability [a need for a dark archive?].

Carrots (and value adds):
• Increased visibility in Google
• Re-use of content in the IR (or CRIS) in personal websites etc
• The inclusion of citation data from Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Knowledge
• Business intelligence opportunities
• Inherent value of discovery/availability
• Adding value to the research agenda

Sticks:
• Publications polices
• Funder mandates
• Professional development and review documentation

Final comments
This was a dynamic and rolling discussion throughout the afternoon with good mix of repository and research staff across a wide range of stakeholder and engagement issues. This short report provides a flavour of the key themes which emerged and were explored across the 4 30 minute sessions. In addition to those already detailed other issues raised included questions about research data be held, when and by who.

It was clear the research office and repository staff are engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in a variety of different ways, with varying degrees of success. Increased co-operation, co-ordination and a shared understanding of the work each group is doing.

CRIS Event Cafe Society Write Up - Group 2: DIY v. Commercial Solutions

At the JISC/ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning How to Play Nicely' held at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Met University on Friday 7th May the afternoon was dedicated to a cafe society discussion session. Four topics were explored by delegates and over the course of four blog posts we are disseminating the facilitator reports from each session.

Please use the comment option below to contribute or comment on these discussion topics.

Group 2 - DIY v. Commercial Solutions
Facilitator: Anna Clements, EuroCRIS

Format of discussion
Introduction from each member explaining what systems/s had at moment – IR, CRIS or both ; whether DIY or commercial and whether considering going commercial if not already. Most had an IR but very view had a CRIS. Then discussed criteria to consider and other issues to think about when choosing DIY v Commercial – not in priority order:

Institutional requirements - Differ depending on size and particularly how research active the institution is [or would like to be] i.e. DIY may be fine for smaller, less research intensive institutions but larger, more research intensive institutions may find it easier to justify investment in commercial solution

Cost - Need to include total cost i.e. cost for in-house development and maintenance over lifetime of systems needs to be included. Senior managers often think a DIY system is ‘free’ as don’t see cost of internal resource.
Need to consider total cost across sector if we are all reinventing the wheel – one commercial product estimates they have spent at least 12 man years developing their product; also consider benefits in collaborative approach to development where several Institutions working with a commercial supplier to build/improve product collectively and therefore share costs and benefit from better overall product

Control/Scope Creep - Two views on this :
1. DIY allows full control and so get exactly what you want – whereas commercial may deliver 75%
2. DIY ends in continual scope creep as difficult to say no internally – whereas with commercial products boundaries are clearer

Link to internal systems - Is DIY better here ? … but issue more is that there should be a buffer between each system and the CRIS e.g. at St Andrews have a data warehouse which acts as a data broker between the source systems [e.g.. Human Resources, Registry, Finance] and the CRIS. If change made in source system then can reconfigure the views in the data warehouse to match the new source system but leave them unchanged as far as CRIS concerned. If this doesn’t exist then have problem of reconfiguring links whether DIY or commercial -> for latter, therefore, important that architecture of any commercial solution can cope with sync changes without major rewrites -> include this in your tender requirements.

Understand your data - Related to point above. DIY or commercial you need to understand what data you have in which systems at the Institutional level; which is the golden source where there are multiple and what keys/ids you can use to related data together when pull it all into the CRIS – this could mean considerable investigation, data tidying and work to review/improve data flows and related procedures to ensure good quality data going forward. At St Andrews we have found that such work leading on from the CRIS is beginning to feed through in an overall improvement in information management at the University. CRIS is ideal for this because so many stakeholders within University are involved [Researchers, Schools, Library, HR, Registry, Finance, Research Policy/Management, Senior Management] and NEED to be involved whether as users of the CRIS or as data providers for the CRIS. One benefit of commercial system could be that it insists on better quality data via business rules, such as always having a primary key (!) than a DIY solution.

Product coverage - Be clear what each commercial product offers compared to what your requirements are. An example being whether you are looking just for a publications management system or a full-blown CRIS with links to students, staff, projects, events and activities

Switching from DIY to commercial - At least two institutions are trying a simple DIY solution first to find out what exactly is needed … with a view to switching to commercial product later. Disadvantage of this approach is that may then be difficult to persuade senior management to, as they see it, throw away the internal investment, at a later date.

Open source CRIS? - Question was asked that perhaps there is a third way ;) - not commercial ; not DIY alone ; but DIY together i.e. an open source solution. Why hasn’t that been done? Possible reasons that no academic interest in pursuing this [unlike for open access]; CRIS seen as a management information tool , as Finance or HR, rather than a tool for individual academics.

CRIS Event Cafe Society Write Up - Group 1: Drivers

At the JISC/ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning How to Play Nicely' held at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Met University on Friday 7th May the afternoon was dedicated to a cafe society discussion session. Four topics were explored by delegates and over the course of four blog posts we are disseminating the facilitator reports from each session.

Please use the comment option below to contribute or comment on these discussion topics.

Group 1 - Drivers
Facilitator: Andy Mc Gregor, JISC

Aim
This session was designed to explore the issues that are driving the development of research management systems, processes and policies in universities.
This document reports on the issues raised during that session by the many people who joined in over the 2 hour course of the discussion.
During the session we looked at the drivers, then considered the ways that institutions were choosing to address those issues and finally used these approaches to develop a rough and ready action plan for institutions wishing to look at research management.

Drivers
REF – the Research Excellence Framework was a clear priority for many of those present.

Efficiencies – many people felt that a joined up and embedded research management system would stop effort being duplicated and make some tasks much easier than they are at present freeing staff time to be spent on other tasks.

Funding – a good research management system could help institutions understand, monitor and manage research funding more effectively and enable it to target bids for funding in a more managed way.

Funder mandates – many funders are mandating the storage of research outputs and research data, a research management system could help institutions comply with such mandates.

Legal compliance – a research management system could help institutions manage compliance with data protection and freedom of information requirements in a more efficient and joined up way, greatly reducing staff time that needs to be spent on these tasks.

Business information – the information held by a research management system could provide valuable information about the operation of the institution such as identifying successful research clusters, or areas for potential collaboration. This would enable the institution to provide more focused support to researchers.

Business processes – the research management system could help institutions refine some of the processes and workflows for research and administrative tasks. This would make it easier for researchers to manage the administrative part of their research. It could also make it easier for researchers to fulfil obligations to funders and could support a more effective link between institutional and funder information and systems.

Benefiting research – a research management system could use the information about the institutions research to provide useful services to researchers. This could be something like a directory of expertise or a service to explore research happening in other institutions.

Open access – open access to research outputs can provide greater access to the literature for a researcher as well as enabling a greater number of people to access their research outputs. While this is an important driver, to some extent it is a result of some of the other drivers.

Collaboration (communities of practice) – a well managed research management system could help support researchers in finding suitable people to collaborate with and support the identification of communities of practice. This is an area where research management systems could link effectively with virtual research environments.

Knowledge exchange – having details of an institutions research on an easy to use website could help with knowledge exchange with business and with other nations.

In thinking about ways to address these drivers it is important to focus on the key reasons that an institution needs to implement a research management system. There is a danger that focusing too closely on one specific driver could produce a system that is only good for that particular purpose and does not meet the wider needs of the institution. This is especially serious when thinking about the REF as specifying a solution too closely aligned to the ref may produce a system that is not suitable for future research assessment purposes.

While it was clear from the discussion that the impetus for the development or revamp of research management in institutions was coming from senior managers, it was also clear that it was members of the research office, library, and IT departments of institutions that were steering the specific nature of the implementation in each institution.

Responding to Drivers
Once the drivers were identified, the group moved on to discussing how the drivers could be addressed and what tasks were important in setting up a research management system. To help structure this session and to ensure that the tasks were grounded in the reality of the institutional setting we categorised each task into three cost categories: tasks that would not require extra funding and could be accomplished with existing resources, tasks that would cost a moderate amount of money (e.g. £10,000-£50,000) or tasks that would cost in excess of £100,000.

No cost tasks

Building relationships – it was clear from the whole day that building effective relationships was a key success criteria in developing a research management system in an institution. Effective relationships between senior managers, researchers, research managers, librarians, IT, and other relevant systems are an essential early task that can be achieved without any extra resources. However, maintaining those relationships may take a lot of time and effort and therefore may need some extra resources.

Embedding the system in the institutional processes – to ensure successful uptake of any system, a number of people suggested that the system needed to be embedded in the institutional processes that affect researchers such as assessment and promotion. The group disagreed on whether this was a no cost or moderate cost task with some people feeling that the relationship building and advocacy/training that would be required would push this into the moderate cost bracket. However it was also noted that once the initial hump of getting the system embedded into institutional practice was surmounted then it could make complying with institutional requirements easier and quicker for researchers and therefore lower institutional costs.

Moderate cost tasks

Planning – obviously there is a fairly large planning overhead for implementing a research management system in an institution. This often involves a range of staff and is quite time consuming and so comes at a cost to an institution.
Publicity and advocacy – it is highly likely that any new research management system would require researchers to change their working practices, therefore significant advocacy and publicity would be required to make sure researchers were aware of the system and how it would affect and help them. This is a resource intensive process in terms of staff effort and some materials costs therefore it would require a moderate amount of resources dedicated to it.

Training – a related task to publicity and advocacy is training of researchers and administrators in the use of the system.

Understanding institutional requirements and systems – before an effective research management system can be designed a good understanding of institutional requirements, systems, existing processes and people involved must be developed. This will involve a range of departments and roles and could be quite time consuming but it is an essential step in designing a system that will fulfil institutional requirements.

User consultation – just as it’s important to understand institutional requirements and systems it is also vital to understand the needs and current practices of the people who will end up using this system. This is important in making sure the system meets their needs but it is also important in getting early buy in from users and in managing their expectations. This is a very important part of the planning and implementation process and the group concurred that this was worth dedicating a decent amount of resources to.

Developer time – this is essential if institutions choose to build a home grown system However it is also important if institutions choose to buy a system in as developer time will be needed to ensure the system links well with other institutional systems. This doesn’t come cheap and can be a significant commitment. One group member reported that they had been told that their research management system would require 400 hours of developer time, which would probably push it into the high cost bracket.

Data entry and quality checking – It is important not to underestimate the cost of data entry into the new system, both in terms of set up and in terms of ongoing cost. Even if data is bought in or cheap data entry effort is procured then there will still be an associated cost in quality checking that needs to be supported.

High cost tasks

This category was slightly more speculative than the others as many people in the group did not expect to receive high levels of funding.

Build systems – A number of people believed that this amount of money would enable their institution to build a system that could give their institution competitive advantage over rival institutions. However a note of caution was sounded here in that there may not be a competitive advantage in building your own system and building your own system may unnecessarily duplicate effort occurring in other institutions and in fact there may be advantages to collaborating with other institutions to build an open source system. Competitive advantage is more likely to be realised through the effective embedding of the system and the way it is used rather than building a unique system.

Best of breed products – given this amount of money a number of people suggested the best way it could be used was to buy best of breed products.

Staff – getting the staffing resource correct for any research management system was identified as a key success criteria and a concern for many of the group members. They were concerned with ensuring that the right staff were employed to implement a system and that those staff were then sustained by the institution where required.

An institutional scale data review - this was a scaled up version of the institutional requirements task mentioned under the moderate costs heading. Many group members felt that a really thorough review of an institutional requirement, the data that would be managed by any system and the requirements for managing that data was a step they would ideally like to take before designing a system. Many felt that CERIF could help here.

Action plan
The final part of the session was spent discussing a possible action plan. The following headings were as far as we got. They are listed in chronological order:
1. Relationships – build relationships with all relevant stakeholders.

2. Feasibility – understand the system’s users, the high level requirements for the system and identify a rough cost. (

3. Define institutional need and sustainability and get buy in from senior managers.

4. Produce a plan

5. Consult with users to gather requirements (this would need to start with a stakeholder analysis)

6. Analyse requirements gathered and report back to users with outline specification (it is probably desirable to make this process iterative and to continue the iterations throughout the building process).

7. Produce specification

8. Decide how to proceed and then move to tender or building process

9. Build it

10. Embed it (this process really started with the user consultation and needs to continue throughout the project). This will include training where appropriate.
11. Communication - this is likely to run throughout the project and have two processes:
a. Communicating over the tasks in the project with the relevant stakeholders
b. Wider dissemination and communication related to embedding the system through advocacy, traning etc.

12. Sustainability handover – this needs to include:
a. Built in review process for the software (perhaps every 4 years)
b. Ongoing support including technical and managerial.

CRIS event blog write-ups

Richard Jones, Head of Repository Systems at Symplectic Ltd. and a member of the JISC Sonex working group has created two blog posts about our JISC/ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning How to Play Nicely' held at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Met University last Friday 7th May. Richard attended the event as an exhibitor of Symplectic.

Learning How to Play Nicely- Presentations online

Many thanks to our delegates, speakers and exhibitors for making last Friday's (7th May) JISC/ ARMA Repositories and CRIS event 'Learning how to play nicely' such a success.

For those unable to attend the event at the Rose Bowl, Leeds Metropolitan University, or for those who would like to recap, the presentations from the day along with some recorded sessions are now available from our website at http://www.wrn.aber.ac.uk/events/cris/presentations.html.

Further outputs from the day will be made available shortly- Watch this space!

Gregynog Repositories Stream - Programme now available

We have now announced the detailed programme for the forthcoming repositories stream at the 2010 Gregynog Colloquium. As you will see we have a detailed programme in place with plenty of variety on offer.

Tuesday 8th June 2010

15.30-17.00 WRN Business Meeting

Wednesday 9th June 2010

9.15 - 10.00 The power of mandates, Sue Hodges, University of Salford

10.00 - 10.30 Publications Management System at Swansea University - Alex Roberts, Swansea University

10.30 - 11.00 Research Management System at the University of Glamorgan - Leanne Beevers & Neil Williams, Glamorgan University

11.00 - 11.30 Tea

11.30 - 12.00 Developing a repository, caring, sharing and living the dream – Misha Jepson, Glyndwr University

12.00 - 12.30 Encouraging Author self – deposit at Cardiff - Tracey Andrews & Scott Hill, Cardiff University

12.30 - 13.00 Using statistics as an advocacy tool Nicky Cashman, Aberystwyth University

13.00 - 14.00 Lunch

2.00 - 2.30 Repository Advocacy: The theory - WRN staff

2.30 - 3.30 Advocacy Café Society session

3 tables will be laid out each with a facilitator and a topic to discuss, participants are moved on to a new topic every 15 minutes with a 15 minute slot at the end to feedback and present findings. Suggested topics:
A)What are the main obstacles to gathering content in your repository?
B)What are the main misconceptions your stakeholders have when it comes to your repository?
C)Put yourself in the shoes of an objector and outline the main arguments against having a repository?

3.30 - 4.00 Tea

4.00 - 5.00 Advocacy in Action: Workshop/exercise. Participants are asked to work in groups to produce some broad brush repository promotional materials.

As in previous years the WRN will be sponsoring places at the colloquium for up to 2 participants per partner institution. Further details have been sent out via the usual mailing list.

We looking forward to seeing you there!

Preservation for Repository Practitioners

Aston Business School Birmingham, Thursday 27th May 2010.

In conjunction with the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland project (ERIS), we here at WRN are organising a free, one- day workshop at the Aston Business School Conference Centre Birmingham on Thursday 27th May, looking at preservation issues and repositories.

We have created a hands-on, practical programme with preservation tool presentations from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the PLANETS project as well as facilitated discussion sessions looking in to preservation issues and your repository, and how to construct an action plan and preservation policy to use in your institution.

For a draft programme and booking please see the RSP event page.

UKCoRR Meeting- 19th February 2010

Venue: University of Leicester

On Friday 19th I attended the UKCoRR Meeting hosted by the University of Leicester at their VERY impressive David Wilson Library (a clear picture of what can be done if you have £32 million available!). I had been invited by the UKCoRR Committee to speak about the work of the WRN and more specifically about the tools we have created (learning objects) and the services we are looking to offer (NLW e-theses harvesting; events). A copy of the presentation is available from CADAIR.

The meeting itself boasted a full day of presentations from members and also offered a great opportunity for networking with others in the repository community- especially those with hands-on, practical experience of repository issues.

The day opened with a Welcome address from Louise Jones, Director of Library Services who provided highlights of the achievements and future plans for the repository at Leicester:

• mandates for both e-theses and all academic research outputs;
• Research Information Management System bid in conjunction with the University’s Research Office;
• hiring of a Bibliometrician to aid with REF/ research reporting;
• plans for an Open Educational Resources repository- named OTA I think (?).

This was followed by presentations from Jenny Delasalle, UKCoRR Chair and Dr. Nicky Cashman, UKCoRR Secretary (and AU Repository Advisor). Nicky talked about her experiences as a Repository Advisor so far and highlighted the current ‘Opt-in’ repository deposit aspect of AU’s e-theses submission mandate and how this may conflict with EThOS digitisation requests in the future. This prompted a small discussion about how e-theses mandates had been handled in other institutions. At Leicester, permission has to be sought from past students before a thesis is made available to EThOS for digitisation. This is similar to the situation in Southampton where students have had to be contacted through the Alumni Office before their already digitised theses can be made available via the repository. Another institution uses the Freedom of Information Act to fall back on if a previously embargoed thesis is subsequently requested by EThOS for digitisation.

The next presentation came from Nick Sheppard and Wendy Luker at Leeds Met University about their recently completed Bibliosight project. The project was looking at streamlining the method for populating repositories using metadata from WoK’s WSLite API. The code developed by the project is available as a JAR file. A query to WoK will return an xml page of results which can then by converted to xslt where extra fields can then be added. These results can then be deposited into a repository via SWORD. There are highlighted problems with the API however:

• only certain fields within the records are returned, abstracts are not included as WoK are not able to grant a license for their transfer;
• it is not possible to distinguish between the publication type of the items returned;
• a limit of 100 records return per query. If more records are found a second query specifically requesting records 101-x/200 has to be made.

The attempt at a live demonstration on the day also highlighted that IP authentication may prove a problem when using the API. It was unclear whether this was from WoK’s end or something within the developed code. The mechanisms of how to populate a repository with WoK records has been the focus of the Bibliosight project rather than the management issues surrounding it so the copyright implications related to data re-use have yet to be considered. Please see Nick’s blog post about the meeting and to view his presentation.

Gareth Johnson, our host at the University of Leicester, gave a very entertaining presentation about his experiences as University of Leicester Repository Manager; a copy of his presentation is available from SlideShare. An interesting anecdote he raised in his presentation related to commercial bodies’ use of an institution’s repository and its content for vetting researchers. If a commercial body is looking to approach an academic to collaborate with them in a research project the availability of that academic’s full-text gives them an insight into the quality of research being produced by that individual. A useful element to include in any repository advocacy! Gareth has also created a useful commentary of the meeting as it happened available from the UoL Library Blog.

Another useful presentation came from Jane Smith and Peter Millington from Nottingham looking at the additions that have been made to SHERPA RoMEO and its cross-over with SHERPA JULIET. Jane highlighted that although one of the new additions to RoMEO was an ‘Updated on’ field to records they still did not have the capability to display all past versions of a publisher’s open access policy. They do however, store paper copies of each incarnation of a policy they are aware of and copies can be made available on request to romeo@sherpa.ac.uk.

Hopefully all the presentations from the day will be available via the UKCoRR website.

Please see the UKCoRR membership pages for info on how to join.

Digital Preservation Roadshow, Aberystwyth

Last Friday Jackie and I presented at the CyMAL / Society of Archivists Digital Preservation Roadshow held at the National Library of Wales (NLW) . The event was aimed at all practitioners who were involved with the management of digital records, with delegates coming from different organisations within the public sector including Welsh regional archive services, Universities and the NLW.

Our presentation looked jointly at the approaches taken to digital preservation within the repository community and how preservation is being put into action within our e-theses harvesting workpackage, being conducted with the NLW. The presentation that followed ours was delivered by our NLW partner, Glen Robson, who discussed what was going to happen to the harvested e-theses records once they had reached the NLW repository or DAMS (digital asset management system) as they call it.

Other interesting presentations during the day included:

• A forecast of the necessary skills needed by future practitioners to manage and preserve digital records, given by Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher, Records Management Lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University.

• An entertaining and engaging presentation on METS and other standards including PREMIS by Lyn Lewis Dafis, Head of Metadata and Digitisation Unit, NLW. Actually making these complicated metadata standards understandable for the non-techies like me!

• An overview of the digital preservation policy planning at Cardiff University by Sarah Phillips, Records Manager.

• Short description of a useful tool to assess file format suitability in terms of preservation developed by the National Library of the Netherlands and utilised by the NLW from Ioan Isaac-Richards.

The Society of Archivists hopes to have the presentations for the day available via the Digital Preservation Roadshows 2009- 10 webpage soon.

Now planning - Repositories and CRIS event

The WRN team are currently in the process of planning a repositories and CRIS event. This one day event will be one of the programme meetings for the JISC Inf11 programme and will explore the close relationship between CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) and institutional repositories. We hope to be able to co-host this meeting with representatives from ARMA the professional association for research managers and administrators in the UK.

The programme and details are at an early stage and we are inviting feedback from our community to help us shape the event. We currently have an online discussion page available at http://infteamjisc.slinkset.com/items/Repositories_and_CRIS_event

Please join in and let us know what you think!

Preservation event planning

In conjunction with our sister projects RSP and ERIS, the WRN are planning some one-day events looking at digital preservation and repositories. The programme will specifically target repository practitioners and will be aimed at beginners. In order to ensure as many people as possible are able to attend we are tentatively planning to repeat the event in various locations around the UK. Provisional dates are under discussion for Cardiff, Birmingham and Edinburgh in May 2010.

We are very keen that these events are of real practical use to the repository community, so in order to help us plan theses events, we would appreciate it if you could take the time to complete this quick question.

If you would like to register your interest for one of these events, please visit http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/92F89A8D8D2C15BE.

Many thanks in advance for your help!

Research Management News

The second consultation document for the Research Excellence Framework has now been published. This document sets out the new arrangements for the assessment and funding of research in UK higher education institutions that will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), including information about the proposals to assess the impact of research. Responses to the consultation should be made by midday on 16th December 2009.



Secondly, a euroCRIS membership meeting will take place in St. Andrews on the 11-13 November 2009. euroCRIS is the professional association of CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) experts and custodian of the CERIF standard, and is dedicated to improvement of research information availability.

The membership meeting programme will comprise: a euroCRIS overview session, including business meeting; a CERIF tutorial; progress of the new website; Scottish session and Jostein Hauge session. A one-day workshop on the last day will deal with CERIF-CRIS implementations, their benefits and problems.

Are any partners already members of euroCRIS? Or is anyone interested in joining? The membership fees are reasonable and given that a few of our partners are considering implementing CRIS systems we feel this is an area worth finding out more about. Please contact us via wrnstaff@aber.ac.uk if you are interested in going to this meeting or already planning to attend.