The fourth and last OA-Forum workshop was introduced by Rachel Heery, who gave a brief introduction to the background of the OAF and the remit of this workshop.
The first talk, which presented the initial results from the 4th OAF Technical Validation Report, was given by Birgit Matthaei, from Humbolt University. The results gave an overview on European OAI activities and their worldwide context. It was extremely encouraging to see that use of OAI-compliant software is increasing. The results from the technical validation questionnaire will be available from the OA-Forum website under the Information Resource Database [http://www.oaforum.org/]
The second talk by Leona Carpenter, formerly of UKOLN, presented the new OA-Forum OAI Tutorial [http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/oa-forum/tutorial/]. The tutorial is meant to give an overview of the history behind the OAI-PMH and its key features; achieve a deeper technical insight into how the protocol works; learn something about some of the main implementation issues; find some useful starting points and hints that will help you as an implementer. The tutorial is not on general release yet as it is awaiting feedback from the OA-F community. All comments to Leona.Carpenter@btinternet.com by 12-9-03……
Delegates at the workshop were invited to participate in one of three breakout sessions, as follows; 1) E-theses, facilitated by Jessica Lindholm; 2) Quality Issues, facilitated by Rachel Heery and 3) Sustainability Issues, facilitated by the DARE project. The Theses Alive! team attended the E-theses session.
This breakout session was well attended by a diverse group of interested participants, including representatives from across Europe and North America. The groups collective background included software developers, project workers, librarians and even senior university management (see Table 1).
|
Name |
Position |
Organisation |
Area of interest |
|
Ron Aardening |
Project Manager |
University of Maastricht |
IPR for etds |
|
Lenin Ageer |
Systems & Applications developer |
UK Data Archive |
Preservation |
|
Theo Andrew |
Project Officer |
University of Edinburgh |
Policy |
|
Jean-Marie Bouquegneau |
Dean of the Faculty of Sciences |
University of Liege |
All aspects |
|
Susan Copeland |
Senior Librarian |
RGU |
All aspects |
|
Anne Diamond |
|
ILRT, University of Bristol |
Cultural change |
|
Ninfa Greco |
Library Director |
University of Liege |
All aspects |
|
Ivo Houbrechts |
Software Engineer |
Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen (Belgium) |
Software development |
|
Carell Jackimiek |
Project Manager |
University of Manitoba |
IPR /copyright |
|
Richard Jones |
Systems Developer |
University of Edinburgh |
Metadata |
|
Jessica Lindholm |
Project Manager |
University of Lund |
Facilitator |
|
Carole Moreland |
Asst. Director, Learning Resources |
University of Northumbria |
Undergraduate dissertations |
|
Uwe Muller |
Humbolt University |
Long term preservation |
|
|
Andrew Penman |
Research Project Officer |
RGU |
All aspects |
|
Michele Rubini |
Politecnico di Milano |
Copyright |
Table 1 List of E-theses breakout group participants
The breakout session was initiated by Jessica Lindholm who introduced the two ETD initiatives being carried out at Lund University, one a local project running since 1996, which has already 2800 dissertation abstracts online and 70 full text dissertations. [http://www.lub.lu.se/dissdb/]. The second project is a national service currently run by the 5 main Swedish Universities, called Arkiv Ex- Sverige (otherwise known as the X-Files!). Following the brief presentation the breakout session took the form of a free flowing discussion between the attendees, which centred upon these main points:
1) Documents, creating, obtaining and structuring documents for metadata extraction, experiences and challenges.
-e.g. Humbolt University use a strict submission format, which facilitates automatic metadata extraction.
-the Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen (Flemish Institute) is in the process of creating their own bespoke software after evaluating DSpace and finding it lacking the functionality that they require.
- University of Northumbria is interested in looking at electronic submissions of undergraduate dissertations.
2) Metadata interoperability, thesis metadata and the need for national/international interoperability.
-OAI-PMH v.2.0
3) Metadata for everything, assuring useful local metadata for searching/browsing
4) Copyright
-Particularly relevant for some continental theses which have a composite format of published research papers, e.g. Lund University (Not really relevant for us but may be a minor problem).
- who will check copyright material within theses? Most ETD projects rely on the author. This differs from the corporate structure, e.g. Pro Quest, which has a team of copyright checkers.
5) Preservation, what responsibilities are needed.
-file formats, PDF, XML?
6) Convincing decision makers, i.e. faculties, authors and libraries.
- unfortunately no real consensus was reached on this matter.
After lunch, an unfortunate Tim Cole, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamaign, bravely struggled through his half hour presentation after losing his voice on the transatlantic flight over. His talk gave a North American perspective on ongoing OAI-compliant project work funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) Programme.
Muriel Foulonneau (from Relais Culture Europe) followed on with a talk on OAI-PMH practices for cultural heritage
An expectant Lizzy Gadd (from Loughborough University) gave a re-run of the RoMEO results. An update from previous talks was the development of the use of the creative commons licenses.
The final talk of the day was given by Carl Lagoze (from Cornell University) who gave an excellent overview of OAI- where it is now and where it could/should be going. Presently, the OAI-PMH is the defacto standard for information exchange, deployed extensively and internationally. The protocol has been stable since release and there are no plans for a v3.0 release, perhaps only a minor 2.x version with additional implemental guidelines. Carl also expressed some controversial opinions, which provoked some strong reactions from the audience. In particular it was suggested that metadata is not the be all and end all, and perhaps it is not the best way to search for some resources due to rapid advances in automated methods, e.g. Google.
The last day of the OA-Forum was chaired by Chris Awre. This third session focussed on examples of exemplar OAI-compliant projects from the UK and Europe. The first speakers of the day were Theo Andrew & Richard Jones, who introduced the Edinburgh University Theses Alive! project.
The second presentation by Rasik Pandey highlighted two OAI-compliant projects from France; Aquitane Patrimoines- a cultural heritage portal, and Cyberdocs- a new open source publishing platform for e-theses.
The last talk of the session was given by Henk Ellermann, of the DARE project which is looking, amongst other things, to implement institutional repositories at all Dutch universities.
After the coffee break, the workshop focussed on ongoing projects in the museum sector before reflecting on wider issues affecting the OA community.
The first talk of the session was given by Anna Borda, Alpay Beler & Nick Wyatt from the Science Museum, London. This talk concentrated on metadata issues that arise not only when cataloguing a wide and varied collection, but it also highlighted the kind of problems that could arise when projects work with a number of institutions.
Shaun Osbourne presented the JISC-FAIR project Harvesting the Fitzwilliam based at the University of Cambridge. Topics covered by the talk included the project aims, objectives, scope and the interplay occurring with other ongoing projects within the institution.
Paul Child presented the main results from the OA-Forum report on Organisational issues, which stressed the importance of the use of business models. The report should be available from the OA-F website in due course.
The final talk of the workshop was delivered by David Prosser, who gave a general talk on the development of Institutional Repositories and Open Access journals.
Theo Andrew & Richard Jones Theses Alive! Project
10 September 2003