RIRI Day Two: Richard Green on Institutional Repositories
At the moment, I’m witnessing Richard Green from University of Hull masterfully dissecting the notion of an Institutional Repository. Its a treat to have someone spell this stuff out step by step from such a grounded perspective. One wonderful element of his presentation was to simply leave some time for people to explore ePrints and DSpace repositories [1][2][3] (from the perspective of public end users). He made the point that people, myself included, often work with only one repository system (or no repository system) and neglect to simply explore the existing options.
In the midst of his presentation about the RepoMMan project, Richard posed an interesting pair of questions regarding the prospect of giving users a private “My Repository” space for managing their stuff. He asked us:
- What might a user want to get from “My Repository”?
- What might a user want to put into “My Repository”?
He allowed the room to ponder these questions for a while. I must admit that I was left doubting my knee-jerk responses and in turn thinking a bit further about what users really want from systems like this. Richard then reported that a survey of his users at University of Hull provided a resounding response. His users wanted: Storage (safe, backed up), Access (easy and from anywhere), Management (full version control), and Preservation (to know stuff is there when they want it, short and long term). I found this to be much more straight forward than the responses I expected.
Richard then gave us a tour of the RepoMMan interface. Some key characteristics of the systems are the fact that the web interface, which is implemented in Flex, mimics an FTP client (to provide familiarity) and the metadata editor uses Data Fountains to pre-populate objects with automatically generated metadata so that users can then review and revise existing metadata rather than starting from a blank form.
The presentation will continue this afternoon. By the end of the week, Richard’s full slide deck for the presentation will be up in the RIRI repository.
August 29th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Thanks for these great reports about RIRI. Sounds like it was useful and in-depth enough to get people “doing” rather than just thinking about how to utilize repository systems.