Friday 30 May 2014

LIR Seminar - Headlines (March 2014) - PART 1

My previous post about the LIR Seminar was focused on my presentation 'Open Source for Libraries: feel the fear and do it anyway", but here are the headlines from the other presentations.



LIR HEAnet User Group for Libraries

2014 Annual Seminar

Pride and Prejudice: the Challenges with Open Access and Open Source
Friday, March 21st
Trinity College Dublin School of Nursing and Midwifery
D'Olier Street Dublin 2.

PROGRAMME - WITH LINKS TO PRESENTATIONS AND VIDEO

Morning Session Keynote: Niamh Brennan, TCD
Jim Foran, Institute Librarian IT Sligo and Meave Mc Cauley, Acting Institute Librarian LYIT.

Glenn Wearen, HEAnet
Helen Fallon, NUI Maynooth and Anne O’Brien, Kairos Communications
Yvonne Desmond, Dublin Institute of Technology


Scott Wilson, OSSWatch, Oxford University.
Niamh Walker Headon, ITT Dublin : Institute of Technology Tallaght
David Kane, Waterford Institute of Technology

Hugh Murphy and Padraic Stack, NUI Maynooth
Jennifer Collery, University College Dublin
Lightning talks
Deirdre Judge  (slides) IADT / David Kane (slides) WIT  / Michael Ladisch, UCD (Slides)

Headlines and Highlights

Niamh Brennan

A comprehensive overview of the Irish landscape re Institutional repositories was given, starting from the first sites in 1993 to the latest projects. 

Key players and stakeholders were mentioned (ie SPARC, SPARC Europe,etc.) 

The arguments around open access were touched upon. (ie publishers campaign against the green model, freemuim etc. )

Irish policy is more in line with Berlin (EU) than Boston (USA) ( Oct. 2012 all Irish research funders support the publishing of findings in open access publications / locations. 

Focus is on getting academic on board and actively publishing using this model. This requires a change in culture for both the researcher and the libraries who support them. For example the charging of fees to publish OA has implications for some library budgets. 

COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) membership is fee based and required the head of the institution sign off on membership. 

Open AIRE and Open AIRE+ allows data to be harvested which is good for visibility (CERN & Max Planx Inst.) 

Horizon 2020 is a model grant agreement

DRIVER - all university repositories
RIAN (Ireland) - OAI-PMH works with core set of data and normalization at the end of the process. 

NUIM had the 1st repository  2002.
DIT have had a policy of OA since 2003

It is of note that there is an extraordinary effort and output for such a small country. 

QUB have embedded their research information system into their institutional repository. 

The National Citation Report at the National Research Data Project 2010-3, were outlined. 

The repository network Ireland is an informal alliance formed in 2013. 

Even with all the progress made in this are it is important to remember that not all Irish research is published in an OA forum. eDeposit Ireland is voluntary deposit. Only a small number of peer reviewed articles are deposited. OA is constantly changing, creating the need for more staff and resources.
Additional types of publication are now making their way into repositories (Data sets, recordings etc.)

DART Europe is the free e-theses portal.

Issues

Confusion
Lack of awareness
Very low staffing for the repository (usually less than 1 fte)
Marketing 


Jim Foran & Meave Mc Cauley

CUAL = Connaught Ulster Alliance of Sligo IT, LKIT & GMIT. 
Created from a memorandum of understanding, co-operative projects were encouraged.
Insitutional Reposirty was selected by the libraries to put forward. Upon success BioMed Central won the tender for provision, using a Dublin Core Schema, based on DSpace and CC license. 

The challenge is to get academics and researchers to self archive. 
The next step is to get the data into RIAN.


Glenn Wearen


Outlined network tools used at HEANet and that some are for niche purposes, therefore when the best fit is Open Source Software (OSS) then that is what is used as they have an expensive physical network to maintain. 
Services offered by HEAnet include hosting in a LAMP environment, SSL certs (djangora), Vidoe Conferencing (GNU - Gate Keeper), EDURoam (free RADIUS),EDUgate (JAGGER) 
HEAnet HAVE 1.5 DEVELOPERS AND CODE IS POSTED TO GITHUB. 

Their ftp server hosts 1,000's of projects

Some selection criteria 

  • Do the staff have the skills required
  • Will those staff be retained long term
  • Is there 3rd party expertise available (trusted)
  • Total cost of ownership (license & staff V Staff & Staff skills etc) 
  • Do you need technical staff to run it 
  • Is the code well maintained, is there a development road map 
  • Is it well supported (community support is acceptable)
  • Do you need physical hardware (or can you use visualization)
  • Are open standards used > inter-operability (OS/Commercial/Cloud)
  • Which is the best solution?
  • If closed then make sure it uses an open standard.
  • Does it meet procurement rules
  • Is the required infrastructure viable.


Helen Fallon & Dr. Anne O'Brien

Spoke about the archive and recordings around Ken Saro Wiwa and Sr. Majella McCarron. 
Zoom recorder and audacity were recommended for anyone looking to create / capture audio. 
Before you begin such a project read around it to discover best practice, and tie into students who may already have the skills required. Record everything, and edit afterwards. 

Soundcloud was selected as a hosting solution as the final files were very large. (1st 2 hours are free, c.$100 annually for unlimited space). It provides statistics, comments, posting, sharing, tagging and images as album cover.The British Library are using  it for sound recordings. It can be embedded in blogger. 
Sound Cloud is a temporary solution until the archive is relocated to the Digital Repository of Ireland. 


Yvonne Desmond

Repositories give academics freedom, this is why the have held their ground. 
Institutional support in the from of Institute level mandates and funder mandates are elements needed for success. 
There are many platforms, some are easier. DIT use Digital Commons, as it has a holistic approach, and aggregates around subjects. Therefore there are no dead ends and no barriers. 

Provide access to the OA content of 321 Universities, fulfilling the promise of OA and ensuring serendipity. 
This increases the exposure of the organizations research content as it bridges from local to global content by leveraging browsable taxonomies. 

Users can follow popular articles, institutions, authors etc. 
It can be used to identify peers. 

It is totally full text, with mostly journal articles and aiming for +1 million articles by the end of 2014. 


SEE MORE IN PART 2


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