Here are the highlights from the upcoming Open Repositories conference, which I think will be of interest to many CNI-announce subscribers.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

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November 30, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Preview of the Open Repositories Conference 2007, January 23-26, 2007/San Antonio, Texas

Last January the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories gathered visionaries for the first time in Sydney < http://www.apsr.edu.au/Open_Repositories_2006/> to share information about how Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints repositories were changing the nature of scholarly and commercial information communities of practice. The upcoming Open Repositories Conference will bring user communities and others a step closer to understanding the pivotal role that repositories play in the emerging information landscape. Institutions such as universities, research laboratories, publishers, libraries, and commercial organizations are creating innovative repository-based systems that address the entire lifecycle of information-from supporting the creation and management of digital content, to enabling use, re-use, and interconnection of information, to ultimately ensuring long-term preservation and archiving. Open Repositories 2007 (OR07) will bring global stakeholders together again to discuss the challenges inherent in the conference tagline, "Achieving Interoperability in an Open World." What are the policy issues that are implied in an open world? What are the technical challenges in achieving interoperability across heterogenesous repositories and related services? How can advanced repository-based systems enable the collaborative processes around "e-science" and scholarly communication? What are the challenges in enabling users to discover and access information across distributed repositories? What does open access to content mean across cultures? These are just some of the questions that attendees will ponder during the three-day conference scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.

Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints User Group meetings will be held on Jan. 23 and 24, followed by combined conference plenary sessions on Jan. 25 and 26. The conference reception and poster session will take place on Jan. 24.

James Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia, and Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing, Microsoft, will discuss the opportunities and challenges in making human knowledge accessible and interoperable in an open world in keynote addresses on January 24 and January 26.

The Conference plenary program focuses on presentations in six categories that offer new ideas and solutions for online collaborative science and scholarship, along with insights into how to manage policy and decisions for the creation and preservation of distributed institutional knowledge .

MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AND POLICY

The ARROW Project at 3 years: Looking Backwards, Aiming Forwards. < http://arrow.edu.au/> Since 2003 Arrow has been funded by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training to identify and test solutions for best institutional repository practices. Andrew Treloar, Monash University, will offer an analysis of how their objectives have evolved, views on repository technology then and now, software development issues, and implementation decisions culled from three years of practice using Fedora.

How the Principles and Activities of Digital Curation Guide Repository Management and Operations < http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/> Leslie Johnson, University of Virginia Library, will share four overarching principles of digital curation that have been successful in making it easier to build trusted discovery and delivery services and tools for the use of digital objects. Principles for Selection, Principles for the Use of Standards, Principles for Trustworthiness, and Principles for Preservation and Sustainability are local principles that have provided a model for the creation of collection development policies, the identification of service goals for a repository and related policies and activities.

CURATOR: Its Developmental Strategy < http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/curator/index_e.html> How do you enable indexing of Japanese character strings for searching? This presentation describes practical and strategic approaches adopted by Japan's first institutional repository launched by a university library-Chiba University's Repository for Access to Outcome from Research (CURATOR).

PRESERVATION

Policy Frameworks for Institutional Repositories As repositories begin to federate and interoperate at a large scale, the inability to express local policies as part of the context of the digital collections becomes more problematic. MacKenzie Smith, MIT and Reagan Moore, SDSC, will report on work by the MIT Libraries and the University of California, San Diego Supercomputer Center on the PLEDGE project (PoLicy Enforcement in Data Grid Environments). The project is funded by the US National Archives and Records Administration.

Using OAI- PMH Resource Harvesting and MPEG- 21 DIDL for Digital Preservation < http://www.modoai.org> To successfully preserve a web site, its resources must be crawled and the structure and relationships among the resources must be maintained. Joan Smith and Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University, propose involving the web server in the preservation process through "mod_oai", an Apache module to harvest a web site packaged with its associated metadata thereby contributing to its long-term preservation.

CRiB: Preservation Services for Digital Repositories < http://crib.dsi.uminho.pt/> The active lifespan of digital materials is much longer than the lifetime of individual storage media, hardware and software components, as well as the formats in which the information is encoded. As hardware and software become obsolete, digital materials become prisoners of their own encodings. Miguel Ferreira, Ana Alice Baptista, and Jose Carlos Ramalho from the University of Minho, Portugal will present the CRiB recommendation service that is designed to help institutions determine optimal migration strategies within a range of choices to preserve authentic materials.

USER SERVICES AND WORKFLOW

Making Fedora Easier to Implement with Fez-A Free Open Source Content Model and Workflow Management Front-end to Fedora The University of Queensland, Australia has developed Fez, a world-leading user-interface and management system for Fedora-based institutional repositories, which bridges the gap between a repository and users. Christiaan Kortekaas, Andrew Bennett and Keith Webster will review this open source software that gives institutions the power to create a comprehensive repository solution without the hassle.

Real-time Duplicate and Plagiarism Detection While electronic access to documents provides unprecedented opportunity for plagiarism, it also provides an unprecedented opportunity to automate the detection of plagiarism. Simeon Warner, Cornell University, will describe the implementation and the underlying algorithm of a service to compare the full-text of each new submission against all existing submissions in real-time used in managing the arXiv.org repository. ArXiv contains over 390,000 articles, and will grow by more than 10% in the next year.

An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Repository Librarians: Their Experiences of Usability The usability of current repository software and its tools is largely unknown when it comes to understanding whether they are adequate and appropriate for the tasks performed by repository managers. Sally Jo Cunningham, Dave Nichols, Dana McKay and David Bainbridge from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, will share their observations based on their ethnographic study of local librarians who support the inclusion of new material in institutional repositories.

SEMANTIC WEB AND WEB 2.0

Realizing the Role of Digital Repositories in Educational Applications: Supporting Content and Context DLESE Teaching Boxes are customizable, digital replicas of the traditional collections that most educators create, store (in boxes), re-use and improve on during their years of teaching. Huda Khan and Keith Maull from DLESE: Digital Library for Earth System Education, will review development of the Teaching Box Builder application and discuss questions raised with respect to repository integration with real-time Web 2.0 technologies as well as how this application design provides support for educators' creation and adaptation of pedagogical content and context.

Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories--is each repository an island or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an extensive 'tool chain' for gathering and manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.

The BibApp-Enabling Rapid Repository Population The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries recently launched the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing (OSCP) and uses BibApp to consolidate campus directory information with citation data gathered by librarians, departments and research centers into a single online interface. Eric Larson will describe how BibApp alerts OSCP to content that may be suitable for fast "mashup" repository ingest. OSCP has prepared 1,200+ papers for ingest using BibApp.

INTEROPERABILITY

The OAI Object Re-Use and Exchange (ORE) Initiative There are numerous examples of the need to re-use objects across repositories in scholarly communication. Carl Lagoze, Cornell University and Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, will discuss the ORE (Object Re-Use and Exchange) Initiative that seeks to implement an interoperable fabric consisting of service interfaces shared across repositories, and some shared infrastructure. Repository federation efforts such as aDORe, CORDRA, the Chinese DSpace Federation, DARE, and Pathways (NSF IIS-0430906) suggest that such object re-use is achievable and will create the building blocks of a global scholarly communication federation in which each individual digital object will fuel a variety of applications.

Repository Deposit Service Description Rachel Heery, Julie Allinson, Jim Downing, Christopher Gutteridge and Martin Morrey, UKOLN, University of Bath, will update attendees on a three-year UK program that is developing repository infrastructure aimed at increasing open access to scholarly material, while improving management of assets in higher education institutions. This effort is designed to ensure that the emerging network of JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) Digital Repositories is well populated with content. They will present their work towards defining a lightweight Common Repository Deposit Service Description.

An Analysis of Digital Repository Scenarios, Use Cases and Workflows This presentation will set out the preliminary results of a study for a cross-section of the diverse repository developments ongoing in the United Kingdom. To date, over 80 scenarios and 20 use cases have been collected covering contexts such as: delineating the community dimensions of learning object repositories, depositing geospatial data, storing versions of content in a repository, developing metadata workflow in a laboratory repository holding research data, and adding digital rights information. Mahendra Mahey, Rachel Heery, Julie Allinson and Robert John Robertson UKOLN, University of Bath, will present the methodology developed to collect, compare and analyze scenarios, use cases and workflows for the identification of common functional internal components and interactions with external services in the information landscape.

e-SCIENCE AND e-SCHOLARSHIP

The Eprints Application Profile: A FRBR Approach to Modeling Repository Metadata Julie Allinson, Pete Johnston and Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath, present recent work on developing a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) for describing 'scholarly publications' (eprints). They will explain why the Dublin Core Abstract Model is well suited to creating descriptions based on entity-relational models such as the FRBR-based (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) Eprints data model. The ePrints DCAP highlights the relational nature of the model underpinning Dublin Core and illustrates that the Dublin Core Abstract Model can support the representation of complex data describing multiple entities and their relationships.

EsciDoc-a Scholarly Information and Communication Platform for the Max Planck Society < http://www.escidoc-project.de/homepage.html> Digital libraries have become tools for everyday work. But are they ready for e-Scholarship? Scholarship produces additional types of information that are not curated by traditional libraries such as primary data, simulations, informal results, and annotations. Matthias Razum, FIZ Karlsruhe, will discuss eSciDoc, a joint project of the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe that will create a next-generation platform for communication and publication in research organizations.

ChemXSeer: A Chemistry Web Portal for Scientific Literature and Datasets ChemXSeer portal is designed to be a hub for research in chemistry by facilitating search and access to both scientific literature and experimental datasets, while bridging these information sources in a unified framework. Levent Bolelli, Xiaonan Lu, Ying Liu, Anuj Jaiswal, Kun Bai, Isaac Councill, Prasenjit Mitra, James Z. Wang, Karl Mueller, James Kubicki, Barbara Garrison, Joel Bandstra and C. Lee Giles, Pennsylvania State University, will present an overview of ChemXSeer, a portal for academic researchers in environmental chemistry that integrates scientific literature with experimental, analytical and simulation result datasets. The hybrid repository of ChemXSeer will be comprised of information crawled from the web, manual submissions of scientific documents, and user submitted datasets as well as scientific documents and metadata provided by major publishers.

Advance registration for the conference is open until December 22, 2006. More information including an at-a-glance conference schedule and plenary, keynote and user group session descriptions is available at .

-- Carol Minton Morris Communications Director National Science Digital Library (NSDL) http://NSDL.org Cornell Information Science 301 College Ave. Ithaca, NY 14850 607 255-2702 clt6@cornell.edu

The National Science Foundation's online library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.