JISC

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This project examined an individuals’ interaction with a repository and investigated how social networking tools might facilitate connection between the institutional functions of the repository and the individual’s own use and exploitation of it.

Executive Summary

This project (PERSoNA) is a component of our developing repository infrastructure at Leeds Metropolitan University which comprises three discrete but related JISC funded repository projects:

• Implementing an Institutional Repository for Leeds Metropolitan University, match-funded under the Repositories and Preservation Programme - Repositories Start-up and Enhancement Strand
• Streamline, and PERSoNA, which are both funded under the Users and Innovation Programme

PERSoNA builds on issues initially identified by the Streamline project; that the relatively low take up of the use of repositories is a result of attitudinal issues as well as technical ones. Building a community of trust around repository use by integrating social networking technologies to facilitate collaboration, community building and the sharing and signposting of digital content - could alleviate some of the issues and facilitate intuitive, communal interaction with the repository both for placing material into and for retrieving material from the repository from a variety of appropriate locations on the web.

The project plan proposed a methodology based on an iterative cycle of testing the use of social networking tools at points throughout the workflow and making changes and adjustments on the basis of feedback from users and the original intention was to utilise a range of social networking tools already in use by the stakeholder groups including social book-marking, informal tagging, synchronous and asynchronous communication and text clipping. However, issues around the choice of an appropriate repository software platform meant that the project team have needed to be flexible and modify the methodology on an ad hoc basis and preliminary discussions with the developers (Intrallect) indicated that embedding tools within the repository itself in line with the original proposal was not practical. An alternative approach was to develop a suite of tools and web services that would comprise an adaptable infrastructure around the repository enabling individual users to use the entire suite or to adopt and adapt specific tools and not others.

In the project plan there was an explicit assumption that stakeholder groups were already using social networking tools; however, it is possible that this did not fully take account of the modern web as a complex and rapidly evolving infrastructure, by definition totally decentralised, that enables individual users to draw upon innumerable environments and combinations of tools to navigate their own path through vast amounts of information that is continuously being added to; we report a number of difficulties in devising a robust methodology within the project timescale to gather data on how social networking tools are already used by stakeholders.

A blog was set up to serve as a portal for services developed by PERSoNA and the project team intended to install/link to widgets and web-services already developed by third parties and also, where possible, to develop further widget based technology in house. It emerged, however, that a hosted blog was not an ideal platform for this purpose and should be seen as a ‘beta’ implementation to serve as proof of concept rather than a finished, user-friendly portal.

We conclude that the project has contributed to a potential repository infrastructure that is modular and adaptable in nature. However, there is a great deal of work yet to be done, both technical and promotional, to ensure the tangible project outcomes become fully integrated into the information environment at Leeds Met. Key to this is user engagement and technical aspects may really be secondary to general education around the issues surrounding repository use and effective advocacy and promotion of the tools.

Report available electronically only