Update from Exeter

Work on integration is continuing at Exeter. We’ve made significant progress, for example Repository Tools 1.3 has now been installed but we’ve also hit a number of unexpected technical hitches that have held things up a little.

Testing has been going on for a few weeks, initially with the Engineering department, which has produced some very useful feedback. Crosswalks and collection mapping have also been tested extensively and we’re now working our way through the list of identified issues. We’re still not sure when we’ll be in a position to go live but we’re moving nearer to that point!

We’re looking at ways of getting publications into ERIC quickly as soon as Repository Tools goes live. For example, some funds have been put aside for a postgraduate to deposit the top four ‘favourites’ for all researchers participating in the REF in ERIC via Symplectic. We’re also aware of a number of publications collections around the University that are, with a little copyright checking, ready to be uploaded.

Advocacy planning is ongoing but we’ve had to scale back some of the activities planned for Open Access Week as it’s unlikely Repository Tools will be working by then. We’ll still be doing general awareness-raising, however, and will follow up with our own OA week when the integration’s been completed.

Some good news – we were successful in our recent bid to the JISC for funds to continue our pilot research data management project. The new project, called Open Up! for the moment, will start in October and will, amongst other activities, look at embedding use of repositories in the research lifecycle. We will have a full time advocacy officer for 12 months, picking up from and building on RePosit advocacy work. We’re aiming for much closer integration of our repositories and deposit procedures, particularly the linking of research publications with the underlying primary research data. So Symplectic will continue to be a focus of advocacy work but through Open Up! rather than RePosit, which will soon come to an end.

If you’d like further information about our integration work or Open Up! email me: jill.evans@exeter.ac.uk

Jill Evans

University of Exeter

Update from Plymouth University

The sharp eyed will notice the change in the University's name to Plymouth University.

The summer saw significant progress in the work on the integration between Symplectic Elements and Pearl, following a visit from Symplectic and ongoing work here. After testing, we are currently in the final stages of working through the last issues with the crosswalks and the file handling scenarios.

I also ran the RePosit survey using the Test systems and chose a select group of the 60 most frequent users of Symplectic Elements Publications to pilot the Repository Tools and test out the process. This proved an insightful exercise, the feedback showed that there was confusion around versions and copyright information. I now know how to amend the user documentation in response to this feedback. As Plymouth are using a self deposit model, I am also now going to roll out RT, by starting with one Faculty, in order to able to provide support to users and not be overwhelmed.

Open Access Week (beg 24th Oct) is a key target and I will be running advocacy events around OA so ePHDs and masters as well as Pearl. Due to some staff illness here, our plans for getting the integration live have had to be reevaluated and I can not set a date for the integration to go live. However I will be running advocacy activities in OA week and will adapt what I do when I know if the integration will be Live/Test.

Nicola Cockarill

Plymouth University

Advocacy materials

These are the advocacy materials developed for Keele University and are currently being distributed around the campus to raise awareness

Poster:

Leaflet (2 sided)

An editable version of these will be made available for other Universities to use, as part of the outputs from the REPOSIT project

Ellie James
Keele University

How do you know when you have achieved increased engagement?

Way back at the start of the project, one of the aims we set ourselves as project partners was to be able to demonstrate increased engagement with repositories as a result of our simplified deposit model. In order to show increased engagement, we needed to be able to calculate numbers of unique depositors (so who is doing the uploading), but this wasn't the simplest data to be able to extract.

DSpace doesn't have a report with which to provide this data, and it isn't possible to extract it from the Elements database. However, we knew that when an item was uploaded, along with the metadata for the item and the file, data about who had made the submission was entered into the dc.description.provenance field. How to get at this and turn it into useful numerical data took a little time to work out.

Our IT Services systems administrator performed a search within DSpace looking for matching text strings within the dc.description.provenance field. Once he had this, he provided me with a (very much tidied up) text file which I was able to import into spreadsheet software to begin turning into numerical values. Since the data we wanted was cumulative, it didn't take long to make the appropriate calculations (especially since the number of depositors is relatively small at the moment).

This was a messy process, with some risk of inaccuracies because of the manual extraction process, fine as an interim whilst something better is investigated perhaps (hello DSpace developers?), and I do have to wonder if there is an easier way to get at the data. It also occurs to me that this time consuming process might work for one-off data extractions, but would be unsustainable over longer periods for regular collection of data. However, we do now have statistics on how many people are actually engaging with our repository (not to pre-empt the final report of the project but: July 2010 = 24, April 2011 = 61), and this gives us some evidence of how well we're doing; not only in terms of new users, but also with sustained engagement.

With many thanks to my IT colleague, David Goddard, for handling the extraction and cleaning up of the data.

Sarah Molloy (Queen Mary)

A Queen Mary update

In recent weeks, the repository here at Queen Mary has been having a bit of work done 'under the bonnet'. In preparation for a proposed official launch during this month of 'May-ing', we have upgraded DSpace from version 1.5.2 to version 1.6.2, and upgraded Repository Tools into the bargain. Top marks to the IT guru for having achieved this without a hitch (he was somewhat smug).

Elsewhere in Research Publications world at QM, we have recently launched a public 'shop window' of our research output. Research Publications will eventually link to Queen Mary Research Online, is already automatically updated every day (overnight) and is proving somewhat popular with our academics and administrators alike who want to link to it from department websites. We'll be monitoring the traffic to/through this site over the coming weeks and months to see what impact it has on exposing research outputs more widely, and whether it too could drive engagement with Open Access.

In a related matter, we are now working with departments to provide data from PubLists (our local name for the Symplectic Elements system) to departments to populate their own academic web pages. This is a very big deal here, with lots of academic staff keen to have this set up quickly (no pressure then). Again, this will provide a direct link to full content in QMRO, so this could be an additional driver for engagement but it's early days at the moment.

The major focus for me over May and June is to begin seriously promoting and advocating: Open Access, self deposit, repositories and in particular QMRO, using the model that we've adopted here to demonstrate the ease with which this can be achieved.

Sarah Molloy (Queen Mary, University of London)

Progress report from University of Plymouth

An update on Pearl, UoP’s repository, we are currently working hard to solve some technical issues, with the Symplectic collection mapper. Sessions are booked in May ready for advocacy and I am working on guides and the supporting documentation. As Pearl has a self submission workflow, I am writing a Romeo guide for academics, including advice on the publisher policies and how to action the various conditions and points within the policies. The early sessions will provide good feedback from the academics both on the integration and the documentation. May is really the last window of opportunity to do advocacy and get staff to use the system so May is a key focus.

However to be able to run a full advocacy programme and get academics submitting into Pearl via Symplectic, the integration between Symplectic and DSpace needs to be working. There are a number of key dependencies eg that UoP's technical issues are fixed and knowing that with Plymouth's/Exeter's shared Symplectic service, that both repositories can run together.

It is a case of continuing to book the sessions and being flexible to either demo or use screenshots to start to raise awareness about Pearl and continue to work with UoP/UoE/Symplectic colleagues to get the integration working as soon as possible.

Nicola Cockarill
University of Plymouth

RePosit Questionnaire

At the end of March I joined the RePosit team to assist with writing the on-line questionnaire and with the Advocacy here at Exeter. I worked closely with Jodie Double and Nicola Cockerill on the questionnaire; a number of drafts were available to view and it was from these that I was able to get an idea of the information that was required from this exercise.

I considered it important for the questionnaire to be short, easy to answer and easily understood. Surveys of this type rely on the good will of those replying and anything that causes irritation can lead to the reply being abandoned.

The complication with this particular questionnaire is that most of the questions are dependent on the answers given to previous questions. I hoped to overcome this by organising the questions into groups so, for example, Question 2 asks if a deposit has been made, if the answer is no, the user is asked to continue at question 3, otherwise questions are asked regarding the ease of depositing etc.

The institution specific questions were left alone, apart from the use of a grid which from the BOS website seemed a neat way of asking a lot of similar questions.

The major headache was to keep the questionnaire focussed and easily understood, whilst trying to keep the language adequately generic to apply to all the institutions involved. By the end of the week I had decided that it was a much better idea to give each institution the skeleton of the survey, for each to enter their own repository names. The main thrust of the project is to publicise the institutional repository so to send a communication to all academics without mentioning the local repository name would be a huge lost opportunity. It is important that the only changes each institution makes are the repository names, as otherwise the resulting data will be difficult to compile and analyse.

Jodie, Nicola and I currently believe that the most efficient way forward is for each institution to build their own survey, having taken the skeleton provided and furnished it with local names, and to extract the data to give to Leeds for analysis.

We've circulated the final questionnaire within the project team although this does not imply that no more changes can be made, it was 'final' only to me at the time I uploaded it! We ask for feedback and comments by Wednesday 27th so we can get moving on this. It is, however, most important to get the survey right, so even after this deadline we are very keen for any input.

Gill Still

Developing training materials

At the start of the RePosit project (and probably even before then), one of the planned outputs was a set of generic training materials (user based) to help other repository managers should they head down the route of linking their CRIS to their repository.


There is a huge assumption implicit in this however, and one which we as a project group have found difficult to resolve and reconcile. In essence, regardless of the software you are using for either CRIS or repository, there is an assumption that the underlying process is at least similar if not the same. This is perhaps a little naive and has certainly been a bit of a stumbling block.


On a very basic level, when you present this model to your users, what you want to get across is:
Login
Upload
All done through the same interface, no need to toggle between CRIS and repository, all done at the same time in one simple set of steps


In technical terms, this is broadly the case (login, find publication, browse to find file, upload file). However, when attempting to apply this to a simple (generic) how-to guide, it turns out it's not so simple afterall. Really obvious, really basic actions become really important: logging in, for example. How do you describe what actions constitute the logging in process? If everyone used the same CRIS software, this wouldn't be an issue (other than for the Competition Commission), log in would just be 'log in', simply because there would only be one way to do it. Similarly, getting to the point of browsing for the file to upload would be just 'find publication', all actions could be illustrated with a few snappy screenshots and you'd be done. When you're not using the same software though, it's hard to provide a simple set of instructions that doesn't become obsolete by its very vagueness.


There's also the problem of what the 'link' between your systems is called (if it has a name other than 'link thingy') and the fact that we're all using different repository software too.


In reality, whilst it would be nice to say we could produce glossy guides and materials that will just provide you with a complete package for your CRIS-Repository set up project, the honest truth is, some things you'll just have to do yourself or need to be software and local implementation specific and best dealt with by you or your vendors.


We love collaboration, but now and again, it can make something simple really, really complicated!


Sarah Molloy, Research Support Librarian (Repository and Publications System Manager) Queen Mary, University of London

New Year, fresh project meetings

Happy New Year to everyone following the RePosit project!

We are currently preparing for the next wave of activity in RePosit, and at the moment our focus is the project team meeting taking place at project partner Leeds University next Thursday and Friday (13th/14th January). The Leeds meeting will be particularly important for two reasons: (i) there are a number of invited guests coming for part of the meeting, and (ii) it is about at the halfway point in the project's lifetime, and therefore is a milestone in terms of starting to move from planning into doing activities. The invitees, a group from a mixture of academic faculties, research office and library, have kindly agreed to listen to and give feedback on two trial-run advocacy presentations using the materials we've been creating - one aimed at senior managers and one aimed at researchers - and will be our first real audience. We should also have the first designs from the QMUL Creative Services team ready for viewing at the meeting, and we are planning a Skype hook-up with one of the designers to discuss our reactions to and hopefully approval of the work.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

First advocacy plans made public

One of the key milestones along the path of the RePosit project for the individual partner HEIs is the creation of an advocacy plan for each institution (or review and updating of an existing plan within the RePosit framework). These plans describe the overall strategy for communications around awareness of, engagement with and deposit into the institutional open-access repositories (including specifically via the link from the CRIS/RMS), and these are the plans that will be followed for the second half of the project's life to hopefully produce the results we are anticipating - increased deposits and increased users. In some cases, the plans include the detailed timetable of activities that will be undertaken, in other cases these timetables are stored in a separate document - mainly because such detailed activities lists are by their nature more fluid and need to be revisited and updated regularly, in comparison with the overall advocacy strategy documents.

At the moment, those advocacy plans available to view are for the University of Plymouth, Keele University and the University of Leeds. Of course, these plans will potentially be revised as the project progresses and the experience at each institution grows.

All the plans have been drawn up individually but with the sharing of ideas and help across the whole project team. The plans also use the lessons learned from our literature review of previous JISC projects in and around this area.


posted by: Lizzie Dipple

Meeting with QM Creative Services, 13th December 2010

So, after all our hard work coming up with contextual and content ideas for our advocacy materials, these were dutifully sent off to Queen Mary Creative Services (thanks Lizzie). In a follow up to this, QMCS asked to meet with us to get a clearer idea of what we wanted.

Lizzie and I have therefore spent a very fruitful meeting with members of the design team this afternoon, from which the following has been agreed:

1. The first priority is to design a brand and theme that will be carried across all materials.
2. QMCS will then work on the slide library template ready for the next project meeting on 13th/14th January 2011 (when the first trial-run presentations are to take place).
3. QMCS will also begin developing some of the early design ideas for other materials once the theme and brand have been agreed.

I am providing a demo to Creative Services on Thursday morning (16th December) to give them a better idea about the repository and research publications management systems and how they work, what they are for, etc. This should hopefully help to clarify what we as a project partnership are doing and also tie in with the outlines that we have sent them.

They've also given us things to think about in terms of running our advocacy/communication campaigns. For example, our web presence, which could be providing somewhere quick and easily accessible to get up to date information, not just about the JISC project but about the messages that we are trying to communicate in our advocacy plans. They've also suggested some other mechanisms by which we can give our project a higher profile (for example, year planners on walls are a cheap way to put up information - and have it there all year!) in order to drive users to the project and get the message out more widely.

Whilst we will not be able to do all these things due to time and money constraints, they are useful things to think about for the future, perhaps once we have gone our separate ways. So lots to mull over, and definitely lots of things for me to add to my own shopping list (if I can but find the money). The Head of Creative Services did ask me if I was planning to move in...

Sarah Molloy (QMUL)

User Stories

In a previous post we discussed the fact that there are many reasons why someone might care about a link existing between their CRIS and their Digital Repository. We identified upwards of 20 such reasons, and alluded to the fact that each of these reasons resonates more with some people than it does with others, and emphasises more the CRIS or the Repository.

In this post we're going to have a look at some concrete examples of the user stories that we have developed from the "Whys", to give you a flavour of what the project outputs will contain.

A story for academic authors: how can this help me raise my research profile?

CRIS and Digital Repository integration is all about raising your research profile. This happens by enhancing your research's visibility through your digital repository and increasing your potential for being cited. This is not only in the public interest - the people who ultimately funded your work - but it also increases how easy it is to find and read your work, and therefore also increases its re-usability. By ensuring that your research information and full-text content is available, it will be easier for your institution to assemble high-quality REF returns, while also making it easy for you to meet your funder mandates on open access deposit. As an additional advantage, your research will be cared for and preserved for future readers. As a result your research presence is significant, and remains so for longer.


A story for librarians: using research information management to drive institutional strategy

Shrinking library budgets mean that it is important to find cost-effective solutions to support your institution's strategy, and to participate in the global research economy. By providing public access to publicly funded research through your Digital Repository, you are provisioning for long-term storage and preservation across time and software advances of institutional assets, which are valuable in this economy. This benefits the institution's standing by increasing the amount of research content which can be made available through the repository, the CRIS and any other systems which build institutional web-presence from the information held there.


A story for senior staff: increasing citations in support of the REF

Increasing the visibility of your research is going to be extremely important in the next round of metrics-based research evaluation. You can increase the visibility of your research by improving its online discoverability. This is not just in the public interest (although it is), but will provide you with the opportunity to raise your institution's profile in areas such as HE rankings, and Student Surveys. Ultimately, this increased discoverability and visibility increases the opportunity for citations to your researcher's work, which will support a high quality REF return.


There are a number of other stories that we are working on, and as you can see from the above we are still in the early period of refining them into something which can be clearly presented. In time we will develop and make available advocacy material wireframes and slide-decks in support of these stories, and we will shortly be publishing blog posts on those topics.

- Richard Jones, Symplectic Ltd.

The Why of the "Whys"

At the heart of the RePosit re-usable advocacy materials is a core list of reasons why connecting your Research Management System to your Digital Repository is a Good Thing. Why you should care. Why it is good for you. Why it is good for your institution. This list of "Whys" contains the following arguments, in no particular order:

1. Library budgets are shrinking
2. It will raise your research profile
3. It gives you the potential for increased citations
4. It increases the discoverability/visibility of your research
5. It's quick and easy to use
6. It will allow you to improve the business decisions of your institution through business intelligence
7. It's a single point of entry to all research management needs
8. It can provide research statistics and analysis
9. It improves the reusability of your content
10. It's in the public interest
11. It supports research into teaching
12. It enhances your ability to return to the REF
13. It improves the student experience of the institution
14. It provides full-text content storage
15. It can help inform institutional strategy
16. It can help inform competitive parity analysis
17. It can enhance your institution's overall profile
18. It can help manage institutional assets
19. It can help you meet funder deposit mandates
20. It improves the discoverability of your research via search engine
21. It increases your ability to comply with copyright requirements

It is worth noting that the emphasis of RePosit is not on the repository or the RMS but on the link between them. Some of these "Whys" are more weighted towards one side or the other, as you would expect. We have attempted, when developing arguments behind each of these points, to balance the emphasis between these two systems appropriately, in order to try to draw out what is relevant to the integration itself.

Each of the different "Whys" on this list is relevant more to one group of people than another. For example, that it provides an opportunity to generate a more complete picture of an institution's research output is far more relevant to senior staff than it is to academic researchers, while the fact that it is integrated with SHERPA RoMEO is something which appeals mostly to librarians. We therefore identified three groups of people to whom we would be pitching the idea:

• Academic authors
• Librarians
• Senior management

Then we took each of the "Whys", and we constructed more substantive arguments underneath the short descriptions above, and we looked at which reasons were closely related together (e.g. business intelligence and institutional strategy). It is from this matrix, then, that we will construct the advocacy materials which will be one of the re-usable outputs of the RePosit project.

In future posts we will discuss the User Stories that emerge from the above matrix, as well as the advocacy material wireframes which tell those user stories, and the slide-deck that can be used to present those stories to our target groups.


- Richard Jones, Symplectic Ltd

Progress Report - Queen Mary

The battle to launch QMRO goes on here. Frustration is beginning to kick in due not to lack of interest by academics, but actually in our seeming incapacity to reach the end stage. Whilst we have academics really interested in helping to get things moving, not least the Principal himself, we have gotten a little stuck with the final technical issues. Working closely with our IT Services team, we are getting ever closer to launching the repository, something I have been looking forward to for some few years now. Whilst a lot of work has gone into making this happen, we seem to have fallen foul of the summer holiday black hole, when other projects got prioritised, and which (over-running as they always do) meant that we also fell into the start of term black hole immediately afterwards.

However, it's not all bleakness. We're currently working on using the data from PubLists to provide a Publications web site and this is nearing completion at last. With links to the repository and published versions on publisher web sites, this should be a really good way to promote the repository and open access, and therefore drive engagement. Having worked out a few kinks, we're at the stage where we'll be able to launch the site soon and this is really exciting!

I'm currently drafting a communications strategy for QMRO, which will help us to plan our advocacy and training strategy over the coming months and will help to formalise ways of highlighting the work we are doing.

I've also recently attended a meeting with some of the Sherpa-LEAP partners and this has got me thinking about how we can tap into/share knowledge and expertise. So lots to do!

Sarah Molloy (QMUL)

Project update from University of Plymouth

Now that the bulk of information literacy teaching is past, I have been working on the 2nd meeting action points. I have drawn up the draft communication strategy for PEARL (Plymouth Electronic Archive and Research Library) and have circulated it to the Project Team for their comment. It was a case of having done lots of reading of case studies, looking back at the case studies and the WRRO example, we reviewed at the 2nd Team meeting and looking at RSP materials and other repository sites, I set aside a day and made completing the draft, my sole task for that day.

I am looking forward to the Project teams's comment and seeing the other advocacy plans as our team has lots of experience and knowledge however we are geographically spread across the country. The Skype meeting on Thursday will be invaluable to catch up on progress and share advice and support.

As PEARL is being launched, the strategy has highlighted that there are many stakeholder groups and activities that need to be covered. Future work will involve planning the workshops to be held at UoP in Spring 2011 and collaborating with Symplectic around the training materials that will be needed.
Nicola Cockarill
Senior Subject Librarian, University of Plymouth

Update from Exeter

We have had a very constructive set of discussions within the local project team in Exeter and have made substantial progress towards our advocacy plan. Two documents form the foundation for this work:

• the communications and key messages plan that was used during the initial rollout of Symplectic in 2009
• a newer breakdown of key stakeholders, message types and appropriate delivery vehicles, that reflects the changed organisational structure introduced this year

Going forward, we will be merging elements of these two documents, as well as identifying key individuals and dates. In addition we are reviewing the recently revised governance structure of the University, to identify appropriate communication routes.

Other work has concentrated on identifying the best time for the rollout of Repository Tools, and the best months within which to run the workshops. This has involved clarifying the dates of other internal processes (such as the internal research monitoring exercise) and ensuring that the various activities do not clash.

Two further local meetings are scheduled, within which we intend to finalise our advocacy plan in time for the deadline at the end of November.

Potential Deposits

A great success this week is that we have developed a report that runs against the publications management system which can give the project partners an idea of the potential limit of allowed deposits through the deposit interface. It works by using stored information about the SHERPA RoMEO colours for the ISSNs of each publication in the system to build a profile of which publications have which colours associated with them. Then we can see of the total number of publications in the system which have GREEN and BLUE colours. We have tried this out on the Keele University instance, and found an incidence of around 25% legitimately archivable articles. Now we're in the process of gathering this information across all the systems, and we'll aim to publish our first baseline survey shortly.

posted by: Richard Jones