JISC

The primary aim of the Lirolem project was initially to build a repository capable of handling the material that was generated by the students of the Lincoln School of Architecture, with a view to using it as teaching material in future years. A second aim was to provide an Institutional Repository that was capable of handling research materials in a variety of formats.

Executive Summary

Our initial approach was to conduct a survey of staff in the school of architecture with a view to finding out what they would need from such a tool but there was relatively little interest expressed from members of staff, other than those directly involved in the project. We therefore expanded the scope of the vision for the repository so that it became a more conventional Institutional Repository. An alternative method, closer to the original vision of the School of Architecture’s Virtual Studio Project was devised using a combination of Blackboard and the Learning Objects LX wiki plug in. This allowed students to post examples of work in progress to the wiki, with a view to creating finished products suitable for ultimate deposit in the Repository. While this remained some way from the original vision we were concerned to ensure that the Repository continued as far as possible to meet the requirements of the School of Architecture, and so the early part of the project was concerned with evaluating different Repository software packages.

As a result of our evaluation we chose to use E-prints for the Repository, partly because they had a reliable, well tested product which already had some multimedia capacity but also because we were able to enter into a contract with E-Prints Services to develop the Repository in the ways that we wanted, namely to develop its multimedia handling capacity and ensure that it remained fully OAI-PMH compliant, so that it would work with other services that are being developed by the Repository Community.

At the same time, the project officer drew the attention of the Project Team to the growing Open Access movement, and we saw the advantages that this would have as a model for the intellectual property rights management of materials deposited in the Repository. The project officer wrote and disseminated a business case for an Open Access mandate. This brought the Repository to the attention of the University’s senior management and more pertinently to the attention of the Research

Policy Committee who immediately saw the advantages that an Open Access Institutional Repository would have in promoting the University’s research profile.

The principal output of the project has been the establishment of the Lincoln Institutional Repository (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk) in which all members of the University are able to deposit material. A review process is in place, whereby members of the project team can assess the quality of submissions and either make them live in the Repository, or return them to the original author with suggestions for improvement. The Repository facilitates the deposit of full text material, or metadata only records. The public release of full text material can be embargoed for public release for a period of time to comply with publishers’ requirements, or if preferred this material can be made available to registered users of the Repository

Other outputs have been the production of Service Usage Model Document, which describes the services that the Repository uses, the production of user guides and the production of a conference paper, which was delivered at the MACE conference in Venice, 20-21 September 2008, briefing papers for management on Open Access, interim and completion reports to JISC and a project wiki that contains all these documents which is available at http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Institutional_Repository

Currently there are 1039 records in the repository, although 900 of these are still embargoed as they formed part of the University’s last RAE submission and permission has not yet been granted by the authors to release them. Researchers are depositing material at the rate of one or two items a week, despite the delays we have experienced with the advocacy programme. In addition we have yet to install a fully functional analytical package to measure usage. Finally work is ongoing to develop the Repository further, particularly in the areas of simplifying the procedure for the deposit of material, creating a more visually appealing interface to match the original requirements in the school of architecture. Our development work was very much focussed on ensuring the repository was fully standards compliant and thus able to take full advantage of the outputs of other projects, in particular the MACE and SWORD projects.

Report available electronically only. See full report below.