FAIR Synthesis: Developing New Tools

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There’s much off-the-shelf software available for developing repositories.  However, every repository is unique depending on its role, content, and users.  An important outcome of the FAIR programme is the wide range of tools that projects have developed to assist in building repositories.  Some enhance the basic functionality of off-the-shelf repository software like EPrints and DSpace, and some are tools to use behind the scenes, e.g. to import data.  Some have more generic uses, such as the survey toolkit.  Below are summaries of some of the tools developed by FAIR projects.

This section focuses on tools developed by FAIR projects.  The Hybrid Archives also prepared two reports about existing tools and technologies:

TAPIR

When Theses Alive! selected DSpace for their repository of ETDs, they found it lacked a facility to monitor and administer the submission process.  This led the project to develop TAPIR (Theses Alive Plug-in for Institutional Repositories), a DSpace add-on to enable supervised authoring of dissertations and theses, and general submission to the archive of e-prints and ETDs.  A description of its role and functionality is available at http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/dsp_home.shtml.  TAPIR is now widely used across institutions using DSpace and was downloaded 42 times as of December 2004.

 

TAPIR version 0.3 is compatible with DSpace 1.2, and an earlier version (0.2.1) is also available for use with DSpace 1.1.  TAPIR is being further developed beyond the lifetime of the project, and all future releases will be made available through the TAPIR SourceForge site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapir-eul/ where the 0.4 beta version is now currently available.  It is also planned to incorporate TAPIR within the main DSpace system in a future release.

 

The current version of TAPIR provides the ability within DSpace to operate a supervised authoring facility, allowing thesis and dissertation supervisors to observe the ongoing work by their student on their project, to comment, and to even make changes. This comes with an addition to the DSpace administration area to manage the supervising groups and their access policies to the student's work. Though TAPIR was developed specifically with ETDs in mind, it is envisaged that the software may also find other applications. In addition, two submission interfaces are now supported, one for EDTs and one for e-prints and other documents, with the option to choose between them. Each of these submission interfaces provides custom metadata collection and licensing options for submissions.  The publication below describes how TAPIR was developed, how it’s used at the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA), and explores sustainability issues for open source tools like TAPIR.

The following technical documentation for TAPIR is available:

RAE Management Interface

The TARDis project has found that in their institutional context (University of Southampton), the internal benefits of having an institutional repository can be as important as the external benefits of making the research visible and accessible to the community.  Having a central database of the institution’s publications means the institution can manage it effectively and use it in different ways.  The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) involves institutions in much time and effort to document the research activity of departments.  TARDis has developed a RAE Management interface for EPrints software which will allow them to easily extract the relevant data from the repository.  The project will produce a report on its use, and the tool will be released in 2005 for others to use.

 

Survey Toolkit

The PORTAL project undertook an extensive online survey of stakeholder requirements for institutional portals.  The survey was so successful and stimulated so much interest that the project developed it into a toolkit for others to use.  The survey toolkit was developed in association with the JISC-funded Iconex project and has been used in the final phase of the PORTAL project for evaluation as well as in the CREE project within the JISC Portals Programme.  It allows institutions to develop their own Macromedia Flash interactive online surveys when undertaking their own user requirements and/or evaluation activities. The survey toolkit is described on the PORTAL web site (http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/WP13.html) and can be found in the Generic Objects section of the Iconex Learning Objects Repository (http://www.iconex.hull.ac.uk ).

 

OAI Data Provider Test Software

The major outcome of the Harvesting the Fitzwilliam project has been the gathering of experience on how museum objects can be harvested using OAI.  This experience is now being used by Harvesting the Fitzwilliam to facilitate data provision to a number of other OAI harvesters.  As part of making data available for harvesting, it proved necessary and good practice to check that the data was ready to be harvested.  To do this the project has developed a PHP script that carries out this test, prior to releasing the data to service providers.  This is intended as an internal testing tool only, but has been of great value.  It can be downloaded for use at http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/projects/htf/resources.html .

 

Reference Manager Import Scripts

The DAEDALUS project has developed scripts for importing bibliographic data in Reference Manager format into EPrints.  This includes filtering so that only journal references are imported.  The scripts are available in the Glasgow DSpace repository, and the accompanying report explains how they work.

The PKP harvester software being tested by the project has as one of its features the ability to export into Reference Manager, allowing a complete dataflow in and out of this bibliographic management software package.

 

Personalised RSS Channel in uPortal

The PORTAL project has explored a wide range of issues relating to institutional portals, and the integration of national resources with institutional information and services.  This tool selects and displays content seen by the user, integrating subject information from national resources with course and departmental information held locally. It demonstrates that it’s possible to achieve meaningful levels of selection within externally provided resources (such as those from the RDN), rather than delivering a channel or access to a repository in its entirety.  This was achieved by creating a uPortal channel ‘rssFeed’, designed to retrieve RSS feeds from a number of sources and personalised by academic departments.  The appropriate RSS channel is displayed in a user’s portal layout. 

PLAF

HaIRST has created a standalone Perl Lightweight Application Framework (PLAF) to facilitate the development of services such as Strathprints.  This work originated in a project initiative to facilitate working with the OAI technologies. The Framework will be packaged for wider use during the remainder of the project and will be released later in 2005.

 

Web Services Interfaces

ePrints UK explored the potential of using of third-party web services to enhance the metadata it harvested from repositories. The idea was to pass the harvested metadata records to external web services and then use the enhanced metadata records as the basis of the ePrints UK service.   Three web services were used:   the name authority web service (OCLC),  automated subject classification web service (OCLC), and open citation web service (University of Southampton).   The project report below describes the design of these interfaces, and the technical report explains how it worked out in practice and the problems encountered.

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