Demonstration of Symplectic Elements and DSpace, 17th December 2010

After the meeting last week with Queen Mary Creative Services, I arranged to provide a demonstration of QMRO repository and PubLists, the local installations of the DSpace and Symplectic Elements systems, to the designers who will be working on our advocacy materials. It was hoped that this would give QMCS a better idea of how the systems worked, how they are connected, and why this is important.

I provided a comparison demonstration, showing how content would normally be entered into DSpace; how each field has to be populated manually, the file upload and permission granting process. I then showed them how items are deposited using the RePosit model. By doing this, it was easy to demonstrate how much quicker and simpler deposit is when the metadata is provided through a linked system, requiring only the file upload and permissions to be granted for deposit to be completed.

The demonstration helped to put the project and the systems into context for the designer, Dan Boom, and hopefully gave him some ideas of how to illustrate this in our materials.

Dan was also able to give me a short update on the progress made so far, that they have begun work to produce some project branding for us, and that they hope to have some early examples of these and other materials ready for our meeting in January 2011.

Sarah Molloy

Queen Mary, University of London