FAIR Synthesis: HaIRST : JISC

FAIR Synthesis: HaIRST

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HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed

The HaIRST project involved a consortium of both Higher and Further Education institutions, and is investigating the ways in which different types of materials can be disclosed and shared. For HE institutions the primary material is e-prints, whereas for FE institutions learning materials are the main body of content. The project has investigated a model of how different levels of metadata can be incorporated in an overall search for materials across the range when they are disclosed using the Open Archives Initiative protocol. The technical approach taken by the project has adapted to take on board new OAI developments.

Further information is available via the JISC project page and the project website. The final report from the project is also available.

Outputs from this project include the implementation of a range of OAI-related repositories and tools, including the use of OAI Static Repositories for the disclosure of content, a report on setting up a repository, a metadata advocacy event, an OAI information service, plus a range of publications and presentations. The work of HaIRST has fed into a number of other CDLR and related initiatives and projects.

Contact

Gordon Dunsire
Deputy Director
Centre for Digital Library Research
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde
Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street
Glasgow G1 1XH

Email: g.dunsire@strath.ac.uk
Tel: 0141 548 4680

Software

The following software has been implemented as part of the HaIRST project:

GNU EPrints software version 2.0, to create and develop an eprint archive for the University of Strathclyde (Strathprints). The open source nature of EPrints has allowed the HaIRST team to make a number of adaptations to the software to suit local requirements, with these adaptations being fed back to the EPrints developers at the University of Southampton.
GNU EPrints software version 2.0, to create and develop an e-print archive for the University of St Andrew.
OAI Static Repositories (using version 2.0 of the Static Repositories specification) for Napier University and Glasgow Colleges Group/John Wheatley College, to enable and facilitate the disclosure of metadata records. These static repositories are XML files that can be disclosed for harvesting by an OAI service provider. A static repository gateway has also been developed to allow collections disclosed using the specification to be disclosed for harvesting.
ARC harvester software, to create and develop an experimental discovery service across all the repositories developed.

To facilitate the development of services such as Strathprints, a Perl Lightweight Application Framework (PLAF) has been developed. Documentation on this is available through JISC.

Content

The St Andrew’s repository has built up a collection of over 290 e-prints as of December 2005. The Strathclyde repository has been set up primarily as a testbed environment to support technical development within the project, and collection of content is not a priority within the this project. The repositories at Napier, John Wheatley College and the Glasgow Colleges Group have been set up using the OAI Static Repositories specification, and hold test content at this stage. OAI Static Repositories is being used as a possible solution to allow the disclosure of XML-based content via OAI at institutions that are unable to maintain a full local repository. It has been found that OAI, whilst effective at what it does, will require finer tuning in its functionality for it to be most effective across these collections.

The ability to harvest data aggregated by the ARC harvester from across the different repositories within HaIRST has also been successfully investigated. The target URL to enable this is http://speirserver.cdlr.strath.ac.uk:8088/arc/index.html, to which one of the six OAI verbs needs to be appended (e.g., http://speirserver.cdlr.strath.ac.uk:8088/arc/servlet/OAI-DP?verb=ListSets provides an XML list of the available sets for harvesting).

Report

HaIRST project report, Chris Korycinski, 2004. [Report from St Andrews University].

Event

Metadata Issues: goals, principles, standards, and strategy, Orientation Event held at the University of Strathclyde, 12th May 2003. Details are available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/MetadataIssues.zip (PDF) and http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents/MetadataIssuesPPT.zip (PPT)

Guidance

The OAISIS (OAI Scotland Information Service) website is available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/oaisis/index.htm. This has been linked into the broader Open Access Team for Scotland (OATS) Initiative (see http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/).

Links with related initiatives and projects

In addition to the link to OATS described above, the work of HaIRST has been fed into work that the CDLR is carrying out with the following organisations:

Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland
Scottish Library and Information Council
Confederation of Scottish Mini Cooperatives

HaIRST has and is also feeding into the following projects:

Cooperative Information Retrieval Network for Scotland.
COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation project, 2002-2004 [JISC project].
The Mandate project, Managing Digital Assets in Tertiary Education, part of the Support for Institutional Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme, 2004-2005 [JISC project, led by John Wheatley College]. An OAI-compliant repository was used within this project for both learning materials and Freedom of Information content, in the latter case using the repository as a means of disseminating this and complying with the terms of the FOI Act.
Metadata Workflow Study 2004-5 [JISC project]
Scottish Collections Network.
Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research project, 2003-2004 [SLIC project].
SLAINTE catalogue for Library & Information Science CPD.
Springburn Virtual Museum, a NOF project which has used a static repository to expose digitised materials. See the XML content exposed in this way.

Publications

Simeoni, F., Servicing the federation: the case for metadata harvesting, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004 Volume 3232: 389

Simeoni, F., The case for metadata harvesting, Library Review, 2004 53(5): 255-258, preprint available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm

Dunsire, G., Collection landscaping in the common information environment: a case study using the Scottish Collections Network (SCONE), CC-interop report, 2004, available at http://ccinterop.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/documents.htm
Dunsire, G., HaIRST: Harvesting for Scotland. Short report included in: Open Access in Scotland: Punching Above Our Weight? WIDWISAWN, 2004 2(4), available at http://widwisawn.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/issues/vol2/issue2_4_2.html#hairs
Dunsire, G. and Macgregor, G., Clumps and collection description in the information environment in the UK with particular reference to Scotland, Program, 2003 37(4): 218-225

Presentations

HaIRST: an embryonic harvested union catalogue for Scotland, Gordon Dunsire, State of the Union: union catalogues and the Scottish information environment seminar, 17th May 2005, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm

The Centre for Digital Library Research and the Common Information Environment, Gordon Dunsire, 8th Croatian Archives, Libraries, Museums seminar, 2004
Making sense of hybrid union catalogues: collection landscaping in complex information environments, Gordon Dunsire, Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues...: CC-interop dissemination seminar, 11th November 2004, available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/british-library/programme.html

Servicing the Federation: the case for metadata harvesting, Fabio Simeoni, 8th ECDL, Bath, 12-17th September 2004, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm (this presentation has also been published in the proceedings of the conference)
HaIRST: investigating the technology and culture of resource sharing in JISC Information Environment – a poster, Fabio Simeoni, JISC Joint Programmes Meeting, Brighton, 6-7th July 2004, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm
Sharing models in the Information Environment, Fabio Simeoni and Jane Barton, CETIS Metadata SIG Meeting, 8th March 2004, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm and http://metadata.cetis.ac.uk/sig_meetings/glasgow-mar-2004_html
Institutional repositories, metadata harvesting & global discovery services, Fabio Simeoni, I-Lab Group Series, December 2003, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm
Cataloguing electronic materials, Gordon Dunsire, presentation to the Glasgow Colleges Group, 17th December 2003, available at http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/pubs/dunsireg/catelmat.pps

Current state of play: Conspectus, CATRIONA, RCO, CAIRNS, SCONE, SEED, CC-Interop, HaIRST - but mainly SPEIR, Dennis Nicholson, IFLA 2003, Berlin, Germany, August 2003

Collaborative collecting in Scotland - the current state of play: Conspectus, RCO, CAIRNS, SCONE, CC-Interop, HaIRST, but mainly SPEIR, Dennis Nicholson, CONUL/ALCID Committee on Cooperative Collection Management, Dublin, Ireland, 29th May 2003

Cluster coordinates: scope and assumptions in the eFAIR context, Fabio Simeoni, eFAIR cluster meeting, Southampton, 21st March 2003, available at http://hairst.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/resources.htm

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