[Dspace-general] [Fwd: Open Repositories Conference, Jan 23-26, 2007, San Antonio]

[MacKenzie Smith]

Note that the early registration deadline for Open Repositories 2007
and the DSpace User Group meeting is coming up soon!

MacKenzie


-------- Original Message --------
*November 30, 2006*
*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
*Preview of the Open Repositories Conference 2007, January 23-26, 
2007/San Antonio, Texas*
<_http://openrepositories.org/_>

Last January the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories 
gathered visionaries for the first time in Sydney <_ 
http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/_>  to share information 
about how Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints repositories were changing the 
nature of scholarly and commercial information communities of practice. 
The upcoming Open Repositories Conference will bring user communities 
and others a step closer to understanding the pivotal role that 
repositories play in the emerging information landscape.   Institutions 
such as universities, research laboratories, publishers, libraries, and 
commercial organizations are creating innovative repository-based 
systems that address the entire lifecycle of information-from supporting 
the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, 
and interconnection of information, to ultimately ensuring long-term 
preservation and archiving. Open Repositories 2007 (OR07) will bring 
global stakeholders together again to discuss the challenges inherent in 
the conference tagline, "Achieving Interoperability in an Open World."  
What are the policy issues that are implied in an open world?  What are 
the technical challenges in achieving interoperability across 
heterogenesous repositories and related services?  How can advanced 
repository-based systems enable the collaborative processes around 
"e-science" and scholarly communication?   What are the challenges in 
enabling users to discover and access information across distributed 
repositories?  What does open access to content mean across cultures? 
These are just some of the questions that attendees will ponder during 
the three-day conference scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San 
Antonio, Texas.

Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints User Group meetings will be held on Jan. 23 
and 24, followed by combined conference plenary sessions on Jan. 25 and 
26. The conference reception and poster session will take place on Jan. 24.

James Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the 
University of Virginia, and Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for 
Technical Computing, Microsoft, will discuss the opportunities and 
challenges in making human knowledge accessible and interoperable in an 
open world in keynote addresses on January 24 and January 26.

The Conference plenary program focuses on presentations in six 
categories that offer new ideas and solutions for online collaborative 
science and scholarship, along with insights into how to manage policy 
and decisions for the creation and preservation of distributed 
institutional knowledge 
<_http://openrepositories.org/program/presentations_>.

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AND POLICY

*The ARROW Project at 3 years: Looking Backwards, Aiming Forwards.*
<_ http://arrow.edu.au/_>
Since 2003 Arrow has been funded by the Australian Commonwealth 
Department of Education, Science and Training to identify and test 
solutions for best institutional repository practices. Andrew Treloar, 
Monash University, will offer an analysis of how their objectives have 
evolved, views on repository technology then and now, software 
development issues, and implementation decisions culled from three years 
of practice using Fedora.

*How the Principles and Activities of Digital Curation Guide Repository 
Management and Operations
*<_ http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/_>
Leslie Johnson, University of Virginia Library, will share four 
overarching principles of digital curation that have been successful in 
making it easier to build trusted discovery and delivery services and 
tools for the use of digital objects. Principles for Selection, 
Principles for the Use of Standards, Principles for Trustworthiness, and 
Principles for Preservation and Sustainability are local principles that 
have provided a model for the creation of collection development 
policies, the identification of service goals for a repository and 
related policies and activities.

*CURATOR: Its Developmental Strategy
*<_ http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/curator/index_e.html_>
How do you enable indexing of Japanese character strings for searching? 
This presentation describes practical and strategic approaches adopted 
by Japan's first institutional repository launched by a university 
library-Chiba University's Repository for Access to Outcome from 
Research (CURATOR).

PRESERVATION

*Policy Frameworks for Institutional Repositories
*As repositories begin to federate and interoperate at a large scale, 
the inability to express local policies as part of the context of the 
digital collections becomes more problematic. MacKenzie Smith, MIT and 
Reagan Moore, SDSC, will report on work by the MIT Libraries and the 
University of California, San Diego Supercomputer Center on the PLEDGE 
project (PoLicy Enforcement in Data Grid Environments). The project is 
funded by the US National Archives and Records Administration.

*Using OAI- PMH Resource Harvesting and MPEG- 21 DIDL for Digital 
Preservation
*<_ http://www.modoai.org_>
To successfully preserve a web site, its resources must be crawled and 
the structure and relationships among the resources must be maintained. 
Joan Smith and Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University, propose 
involving the web server in the preservation process through "mod_oai", 
an Apache module to harvest a web site packaged with its associated 
metadata thereby contributing to its long-term preservation.

*CRiB: Preservation Services for Digital Repositories
*<_ http://crib.dsi.uminho.pt/_>
The active lifespan of digital materials is much longer than the 
lifetime of individual storage media, hardware and software components, 
as well as the formats in which the information is encoded. As hardware 
and software become obsolete, digital materials become prisoners of 
their own encodings. Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice Baptista, and Jose 
Carlos Ramalho from the University of Minho, Portugal will present the 
CRiB recommendation service that is designed to help institutions 
determine optimal migration strategies within a range of choices to 
preserve authentic materials.

USER SERVICES AND WORKFLOW
*Making Fedora Easier to Implement with Fez-A Free Open Source Content 
Model and Workflow Management Front-end to Fedora
*<_http://sourceforge.net/projects/fez/_>
The University of Queensland, Australia has developed Fez, a 
world-leading user-interface and management system for Fedora-based 
institutional repositories, which bridges the gap between  a repository 
and users. Christiaan Kortekaas, Andrew Bennett and Keith Webster will 
review this open source software that gives institutions the power to 
create a comprehensive repository solution without the hassle.
*Real-time Duplicate and Plagiarism Detection*
<_http://arxiv.org/_ >
While electronic access to documents provides unprecedented opportunity 
for plagiarism, it also provides an unprecedented opportunity to 
automate the detection of plagiarism. Simeon Warner, Cornell University, 
will describe the implementation and the underlying algorithm of a 
service to compare the full-text of each new submission against all 
existing submissions in real-time used in managing the arXiv.org 
repository. ArXiv contains over 390,000 articles, and will grow by more 
than 10% in the next year.
*An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Repository Librarians: Their 
Experiences of Usability
*<_http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/cgi-bin/library_>
The usability of current repository software and its tools is largely 
unknown when it comes to understanding whether they are adequate and 
appropriate for the tasks performed by repository managers.  Sally Jo 
Cunningham, Dave Nichols, Dana McKay and David Bainbridge from the 
University of Waikato, New Zealand, will share their observations based 
on their ethnographic study of local librarians who support the 
inclusion of new material in institutional repositories.

SEMANTIC WEB AND WEB 2.0
*Realizing the Role of Digital Repositories in Educational Applications: 
Supporting Content and Context
*<_http://teachingboxes.org/_>
DLESE Teaching Boxes are customizable, digital replicas of the 
traditional collections that most educators create, store (in boxes), 
re-use and improve on during their years of teaching. Huda Khan and 
Keith Maull from DLESE: Digital Library for Earth System Education, will 
review development of the Teaching Box Builder application and discuss 
questions raised with respect to repository integration with real-time 
Web 2.0 technologies as well as how this application design provides 
support for educators' creation and adaptation of pedagogical content 
and context.
* *
*Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project
*<_http://simile.mit.edu/_>
Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is 
found in and among new repositories--is each repository an island or a 
separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of 
Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an 
extensive 'tool chain' for gathering and manipulating data assets. 
Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools 
developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for 
the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.
*The BibApp-Enabling Rapid Repository Population
*<_http://oscp.library.wisc.edu/response.html#libraries_>
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries recently launched the 
Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing (OSCP) and uses BibApp 
to consolidate campus directory information with citation data gathered 
by librarians, departments and research centers into a single online 
interface. Eric Larson will describe how BibApp alerts OSCP to content 
that may be suitable for fast "mashup" repository ingest. OSCP has 
prepared 1,200+ papers for ingest using BibApp.

INTEROPERABILITY
*The OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE) Initiative
*<_http://www.openarchives.org/ore/_>
There are numerous examples of the need to re-use objects across 
repositories in scholarly communication. Carl Lagoze, Cornell University 
and Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, will discuss 
the ORE (Object Re-Use and Exchange) Initiative that seeks to implement 
an interoperable fabric consisting of service interfaces shared across 
repositories, and some shared infrastructure. Repository federation 
efforts such as aDORe, CORDRA, the Chinese DSpace Federation, DARE, and 
Pathways (NSF IIS-0430906) suggest that such object re-use is achievable 
and will create the building blocks of a global scholarly communication 
federation in which each individual digital object will fuel a variety 
of applications.
*Repository Deposit Service Description
*<_http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_rep_pres.aspx_>
Rachel Heery, Julie Allinson, Jim Downing, Christopher Gutteridge and 
Martin Morrey, UKOLN, University of Bath, will update attendees on a 
three-year UK program that is developing repository infrastructure aimed 
at increasing open access to scholarly material, while improving 
management of assets in higher education institutions. This effort is 
designed to ensure that the emerging network of JISC (Joint Information 
Services Committee) Digital Repositories is well populated with content. 
They will present their work towards defining a lightweight Common 
Repository Deposit Service Description.

*An Analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows
*This presentation will set out the preliminary results of a study for a 
cross-section of the diverse repository developments ongoing in the 
United Kingdom. To date, over 80 scenarios and 20 use cases have been 
collected covering contexts such as: delineating the community 
dimensions of learning object repositories, depositing geospatial data, 
storing versions of content in a repository, developing metadata 
workflow in a laboratory repository holding research data, and adding 
digital rights information. Mahendra Mahey, Rachel Heery, Julie Allinson 
and Robert John Robertson UKOLN, University of Bath, will present the 
methodology developed to collect, compare and analyze scenarios, use 
cases and workflows for the identification of common functional internal 
components and interactions with external services in the information 
landscape.

e-SCIENCE AND e-SCHOLARSHIP

*The Eprints Application Profile: A FRBR Approach to Modeling Repository 
Metadata
*Julie Allinson, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of 
Bath, present recent work on developing a Dublin Core Application 
Profile (DCAP) for describing 'scholarly publications' (eprints). They 
will explain why the Dublin Core Abstract Model is well suited to 
creating descriptions based on entity-relational models such as the 
FRBR-based (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) Eprints 
data model. The ePrints DCAP highlights the relational nature of the 
model underpinning Dublin Core and illustrates that the Dublin Core 
Abstract Model can support the representation of complex data describing 
multiple entities and their relationships.

*EsciDoc-a Scholarly Information and Communication Platform for the Max 
Planck Society
*<_ http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html_>
Digital libraries have become tools for everyday work. But are they 
ready for e-Scholarship? Scholarship produces additional types of 
information that are not curated by traditional libraries such as 
primary data, simulations, informal results, and annotations. Matthias 
Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe, will discuss eSciDoc, a joint project of the Max 
Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe that will create a next-generation 
platform for communication and publication in research organizations.

*ChemXSeer: A Chemistry Web Portal for Scientific Literature and Datasets
*ChemXSeer portal is designed to be a hub for research in chemistry by 
facilitating search and access to both scientific literature and 
experimental datasets, while bridging these information sources in a 
unified framework. Levent Bolelli, Xiaonan Lu, Ying Liu, Anuj Jaiswal, 
Kun Bai, Isaac Councill, Prasenjit Mitra, James Z. Wang, Karl Mueller, 
James Kubicki, Barbara Garrison, Joel Bandstra and C. Lee Giles, 
Pennsylvania State University, will present an overview of ChemXSeer,  a 
portal for academic researchers in environmental chemistry that 
integrates scientific literature with experimental, analytical and 
simulation result datasets. The hybrid repository of ChemXSeer will be 
comprised of information crawled from the web, manual submissions of 
scientific documents, and user submitted datasets as well as scientific 
documents and metadata provided by major publishers.
*Advance registration for the conference is open until December 22, 
2006. More information including an at-a-glance conference schedule and 
plenary, keynote and user group session descriptions is available at 
<_http://openrepositories.org/_>.*

-- 
MacKenzie Smith
MIT Libraries