JISC

Introduction

The Resource Discovery Network’s ePrints UK is funded under the JISC IE Development Programme. The proposal was successful under the JISC Circular 1/02 call, ‘Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme (FAIR) as one of the eprints cluster projects. 

The project will build upon RDN's experience in implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to share metadata between the RDN partners to create the aggregated search facility, ResourceFinder. ePrints UK will benefit from the RDN partners' expertise in developing services tailored for particular subject audiences, the considerable existing user base visiting existing RDN services and the ongoing work of the JISC funded Subject Portals Project.

The ePrints UK project will work closely with other projects in this area, including HaIRST, which will provide ePrints UK with a single point of access to metadata repositories of 13 Scottish institutions, CURL's SHERPA project, which aims to support the development of a number of institutional e-print archives in the UK, and RoMEO, which is exploring intellectual property issues surrounding institutional eprints archives.  It was proposed at the first project meeting of ePrints UK that we should look to collaborate with the various FAIR eprints projects in the dissemination of our outcomes in workshops and conferences, and in November 2002, the first FAIR eprints/etheses cluster group meeting was held, where the projects agreed formally to collaborate in the dissemination events. 

This proposal also acknowledges the significant contribution that the University of Southampton's eprints.org software has to play in the development of institutional eprint archives in the UK. We anticipate that this software will form the technical basis for the majority of repositories from which ePrints UK will be harvesting metadata. 

Aims and Objectives

The project plans to develop a national service through which the UK higher and further education community can access the collective output of eprint papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories provided by UK universities and colleges.  It was also proposed at the first project meeting held on 30^th September 2002 that we will look at the feasibility of harvesting records from established international eprints archives such as arXiv.  ePrints UK will harvest metadata from available OAI-compliant eprint repositories into a single central metadata database hosted by the RDN server based at UKOLN at the University of Bath. The metadata records will be passed to external web services that will enhance the records, adding (or validating) authoritative forms of author names, automatically assigning a subject-classification to the data, and parsing semi-structured citation information in the document text to form structured, machine-readable citations in the form of OpenURLs. 

The enhanced records will be returned to the central repository, and various user-interfaces will be developed to allow them to be harvested by the RDN hubs to integrate with their existing services, UK academic institutions, and other organisations. 

Other objectives agreed at the Project Meeting on 30^th September include:

• To carry out an evaluation exercise on the usefulness of the Dewey Decimal Classification web service.
• To carry out 18 workshops disseminating the project outcomes, 2 each by the 9 RDN hubs involved in the project, and possibly in collaboration with one or more of the parallel eprints projects listed above.
• To produce four supporting studies: an impact assessment report; collection development issues report; business and IPR issues report; and a research assessment report.
• To carry out general dissemination activities, for instance articles and conference papers.
• To publish the project documentation, including technical reports and diagrams, on the project website.

Overall Approach

All documentation arising from this project will be made publicly available via the project web site, www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/   A private version of this site will be used for communication among the project partners, as will a project mailing list.  We also plan to hold three project meetings per year, and make use of the RDN Service Provider’s Forum meeting to discuss project issues with representatives of the RDN subject hubs. The project’s technical developers will plan separate meetings to discuss specific issues. 

Discussion on interoperability issues with the other FAIR projects will make use of the “eFAIR” mailing list (efair@jiscmail.ac.uk) set up following the eprints/etheses cluster group meeting in November 2002, and the general FAIR Projects mailing list. Wider discussions on issues relating to Open Archives will make use of the Open Archives Forum mailing list.  

The project will address the following user communities: HE/FE academics, researchers, and teachers; librarians and other intermediaries; HE/FE undergraduate and postgraduate students. Their needs will be assessed in the 18 focus groups, involving subject consultants, which will be run in the two remaining years of the project by the RDN hubs; and the project outcomes will be promoted in 18 workshops, the scope of which is yet to be decided. Other general marketing and dissemination activities will take place throughout the project. 

All software and programs developed by the project will be tested for accessibility following the JISC guidelines and using the evaluation software developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative. 

In line with other RDN services, the quality of resources offered through ePrints UKwill be of critical success to the service. The project will investigate appropriate mechanisms for selectively harvesting sub-sets of metadata records from institutional and other eprint archives. We will evaluate the quality of the automated enhancement services and, in particular, the value of this procedure in partitioning the ePrintsUKdatabase into our subject focused end-user services.  Following the end of project funding, the RDN plan to offer the ePrintsUKservice as part of overall RDN service framework, at minimal ongoing costs.  

Project Consortium

RDN Centre, King’s College London - the RDNC co-ordinates RDN activity and is responsible for the overall development of the service.

UKOLN, University of Bath - responsible for project management and co-ordination of activities, supporting studies, plus development of the central database and various interfaces between the database and the web services, and the database and the RDN hubs, as well as general technical co-ordination for the project consortium. 

OCLC, Dublin, Ohio - responsible for the development of the name authority and subject classification web services.

University of Southampton - responsible for the development of the citation analysis web service. 

A draft consortium agreement has been written to cover work practices and IPR issues concerning the project partners. This agreement is currently pending formal ratification, but its terms have been agreed provisionally by all the project partners.