Are you wondering how to "light the fire" of open access to scholarly research with your graduate students? UMass Amherst graduate student Chris Boulton was taken aback when he discovered that he was unable to use some images as core materials in his Master's thesis. He was determined to make a difference. When he and some other authors had their articles accepted for a special issue of "Communication Review" a prestigious journal in the Communic... [read more]

Rob Sieczkiewicz: Marilyn, I enjoyed hearing about Chris and watching his video. However, I think I copied the URL of his Selected Works site incorrectly. I have http://works.bepress.com/chris.boulton but that gives me a "Page not Found" error. What is the correct lin... [read more]

Rob Sieczkiewicz: Found it! http://works.bepress.com/chris_boulton/

May I please bother one of you twittering folk to give me a hand with MediaWiki? Anyone know it well enough to operate? --Jen

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sparc08

if posting to twitter or flickr we should probably use #sparc08 but I am up for other suggestions.

The BibApp development and planning team is proud to unveil bibapp.org! BibApp is a research gateway, expert finder, citation gatherer, rights checker, and repository ingester all rolled into one. We are looking to release the first stable version of BibApp early in 2009. Early adopters and additional programmers very welcome! BibApp developer Tim Donohue and planners Sarah Shreeves and I will all be at SPARC-DR. Please stop us in the hall for a ... [read more]

Citeline (citeline.mit.edu) is an online service created to facilitate the web publishing of author bibliographies and citation collections as interactive exhibits and facilitate the sharing of this type of information with interested researchers. The service makes it simple for authors, librarians, research assistants and others to create an attractive online bibliography simply by uploading a batch of citations in BibTeX, a standard packaging f... [read more]

The Akubra Project is a new effort to provide a pluggable file storage interface for digital repositories that can be adapted to almost any storage subsystem. We think that many repository systems (such as Fedora and DSpace) would benefit from a simple, pluggable interface to storage. The first release of Akubra will conclude at the end of the year. For more information on the project, see http://fedora-commons.org/go/akubra

The California Digital Library is developing a new interface for eScholarship, an open access publishing platform with over 25,000 scholarly works. One of the most exciting features in development is Keyword in Context Pictures (a.k.a. KWIC Pics). How does it work? When a user hovers the cursor over a highlighted term in search results, KWIC Pics instantly displays a snapshot of the actual PDF page where that term appears. See KWIC Pics in action... [read more]

Joshua M.: Martin: This is a great feature, and something that I have wished to see for a while now. Do you know if any of the open source projects like DSpace or EPrints have implemented anything like this? Joshua

Martin Haye: Hi Joshua, I don't know if DSpace or EPrints has done this, but if not hopefully we can start a trend... --Martin

“SCPJ” (Society Copyright Policies in Japan) project is aimed to develop legal protocols for managing copyright issues in an open access environment. Most of scholarly journals in Japan are published by not commercial publishers but domestic scholarly societies. Therefore, in 2006, we sent out questionnaires to them, and based on the results, built and opened a database of their open access policies ?SCPJ database. We have determined a color codi... [read more]

What are some of the innovative ways you use to build trust, partnerships, and collaboration with scientists and faculty?

I've tried to learn from the experiences of others and with regard to content recruitment, we've instituted a new approach. The slide is just an outline of what I (in 2 minutes, I understand) will say.

Is anyone teaching Digital Repositories in Information Science or Computer Science undergraduate or postgraduate courses? Can you point me at any curriculum descriptions?

Dorothea Salo: I teach it as part of a unit in my intro to technology in libraries course, but I really don't have more than a few slides to give you, I'm afraid!

In 2005, the Oregon State University Libraries (OSUL) launched its institutional repository, ScholarsArchive@OSU. Realizing a critical mass of content was essential for success OSUL initiated a digitization program focused on content already held by the library – gray literature produced by various academic units on campus – as well as non-library collections related to Oregon State University (OSU) research. ScholarsArchive’s digitized collectio... [read more]

Sarah L. Shreeves: We have also done this at Illinois as well - it does help create good relations with many units to see past research available.

How do we get researchers to deposit into institutional and domain repositories? By changing the conversation. Rather than asking researchers to upload objects into a repository, My Research presents a familiar desktop folder metaphor and provides a means to simply drag/drop any item (a research paper, a presentation, a lecture video, a data set, etc.) onto a desktop folder in order to 'publish' that item. One step. Done. This simple event can in... [read more]

Together with Robin Rice

Presenting together with Guy McGarva. Make the most of your geospatial coverage metadata. Treat your users to a map interface to draw a bounding box to describe or search for a geographic area, or simply ensure consistency of input through a lookup with GeoNames for entering placenames.

For faculty, we designed a custom interface to our Workflow Management System. In addition, faculty can access their collections from their own web sites with our "partner portal" utility. To reduce redundancy, we are establishing an association between a work that is deposited into the IR and its citation in the Faculty Survey, an online form that documents faculty accomplishments and is used for personnel actions.

Presenting with John Harrington. We thought that having an IR was a Win Win but 4 years on we realised that few people knew about it and contributions weren’t flooding in. A user requirement study indicated that · awareness of both our IR and other repositories was very low in the academic community and · that the benefits of contributing and how to contribute their work were unclear Mandates weren’t an option so we developed an advocacy campaign... [read more]

In June 2008, the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) and the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library launched PolicyArchive (www.policyarchive.org), the nation’s first, free, comprehensive, online archive of public policy research. In this partnership, each organization brings unique strengths and perspectives but with a common goal of making it simple and easy for content submitters and the end users. Earl... [read more]

All, http://maps.repository66.org/ is a mashup of data from OpenDOAR and ROAR and displays repositories around the world on a Google map. It's very cool; take a look. (Thanks Stuart Lewis!) And, please make sure your repository is up there. If it's not, update your information on ROAR or Open DOAR. We'll be highlighting r66 at this meeting. Make sure you're included! JM

Hi all. We're working with CARL on a new campaign to talk with faculty about digital repositories and why they should use them. In two, three, or four words, we want to describe the key benefit of repositories -- being exposure for research. (Take a look at our student brochure cover to see what we'll do with it - http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/rr2008_pages.pdf). So it would be something like: **More reach for your research:** Expand your reader... [read more]

Les Carr: ** More Prestige for your Profile: expand your social network through your institutional repository ** More Esteem for your Establishment: expand your research group's visibility through your institutional repository ** More Reputation for your Resul... [read more]