OARS: Open Access Repository System

Article about OARS published in ALISS Quarterly

The Forced Migration Online Team — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:04:18 +0000

The current issue of the journal of the Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the Social Sciences (ALISS) includes an article about the OARS project. The July 2008 issue (vol. 3, no. 4) of ALISS Quarterly focuses on digital repositories. The article by the FMO team broadly outlines the main objectives and activities of the OARS project, why we felt it important to replace the current repository system and the technical challenges and solutions adopted to achieve this implementation. The article is available in full text (PDF file).

Software development meeting 5

mike — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:27:53 +0000

On Wednesday 23rd July we had the fifth meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that the basic deliverables were:

Add language as a filter on advanced search
Show ‘Document Type’, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘Sourced From’ (formerly ‘Collection’) on search results page
Show thumbnail, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘File Size’ on document / journal ‘landing page’ (i.e. metadata detail page), and facilitate ingestion of thumbnail along with document / journal
Add css classes to web pages to facilitate page desgin

The functionality was delivered on Wednesday 23rd July. There are some outstanding issues to be resolved for this development cycle, and these will be resolved in the sixth and final cycle. Once the development and initial bug fixes are complete for the final cycle we will move the data (i.e. Fedora Repository) and the user/management interface to their live locations before embarking on final acceptance testing.

The priorities and deliverables for the final cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

Make it possible to re-ingest PDF, text, and thumbnail when editing metadata
Re-sort by relevance, title and date in search results, by clicking on a heading on this page
Enhance search engine with regard to foreign language text and search terms
Allow items to be “hidden” so that they don’t show up in User Interface searches

Software development meeting 4

mike — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:54:26 +0000

On Wednesday 2nd July we had the fourth meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that the basic deliverables were:

Ingest and index full text and all metadata from a new PDF document
Add metadata field search - Title, Author, Collection etc
Enable full index of all articles in journal issues for searching
Enable editing of all metadata items in Management Interface, and allow certain metadata items to have multiple entries

The functionality was delivered on Wednesday 2nd July. There are some outstanding issues to be resolved for this development cycle, and these will be resolved over the next cycles. This meeting was combined with user evaluation sessions devised to solicit feedback about the way in which the current repository interface is used and to refine the functionality required of the new interface.

There were 7 participants, ranging from novice to expert users of FMO. Each session enabled one participant to use the current interface and comment on its strengths and weaknesses. The feedback from these sessions was very interesting. As we supposed, some of the more esoteric functionality of the current system is not used/understood, and what seems to be required is pretty much what we are developing – a more open system, with greater searchability via search engines such as google, better access from subject portals, and a slightly simpler and more intuitive user interface. Several recommendations for improved functionality were expressed and will be factored into the ongoing development.

The next development cycle will be followed by a development meeting on Wednesday 23rd July. The priorities and deliverables for this next cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

Add language as a filter on advanced search
Show ‘Document Type’, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘Sourced From’ (formerly ‘Collection’) on search results page
Show thumbnail, ‘No. of pages’ and ‘File Size’ on document / journal ‘landing page’ (i.e. metadata detail page), and facilitate ingestion of thumbnail along with document / journal
Add css classes to web pages to facilitate page desgin

Software development meeting 3

mike — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:19:07 +0000

On Tuesday 17th June we had the third meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that the basic deliverables were:

Index full text and metadata of stored items for search engines
Improved functionality with regard to search results lists
New functionality to allow view and download of full text for a document
New functionality for inserting journal issues into the repository and indexing their full text

The functionality was delivered on Monday 16th June. There are some outstanding issues to be resolved for this development cycle, and these will be resolved over the next cycles. The next development cycle will be followed by a development meeting on Wednesday 2nd July. The priorities and deliverables for this next cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

Ingest and index full text and all metadata from a new PDF document
Add metadata field search - Title, Author, Collection etc
Enable full index of all articles in journal issues for searching
Enable editing of all metadata items in Management Interface, and allow certain metadata items to have multiple entries

Software development meeting 2

mike — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:03:27 +0000

On Monday 2nd June we had our second meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that the basic deliverables were:

Improved functionality around searching for documents, including use of search results lists
Improvements to the management interface regarding metadata add/edit
New functionality for inserting documents into the repository

The functionality was delivered on Friday 30th May and most was signed-off by the OARS team at the meeting. There are some outstanding issues to be resolved for the second development cycle, and this will be included in the next cycle of development, due to be completed on Monday 16th June. This will be followed by a development meeting on Tuesday 17th June. The priorities and deliverables for this next cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

Index full text and metadata of stored items for search engines
Improved functionality with regard to search results lists
New functionality to allow view and download of full text for a document
New functionality for inserting journal issues into the repository and indexing their full text

Software development meeting 1

mike — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:32:12 +0000

On Wednesday 14th May we had a meeting with our developers, which happens at the end of each development cycle (typically lasting 2 weeks). At the beginning of this cycle we agreed that basic functionality would be delivered around 2 scenarios covering the web-based user and management interfaces, and the underlying repository technology. These were:

Finding and printing a known document
Editing document metadata

The functionality was delivered on Tuesday 14th May and was signed-off by the OARS team at the meeting. The work done so far now provides a base for the next cycle of development, due to be completed on Friday 30th May, followed by a development meeting on Monday 2nd June. The priorities and deliverables for this next cycle were agreed, and briefly are:

Improved functionality around searching for documents, including use of search results lists
Improvements to the management interface regarding metadata add/edit
New functionality for inserting documents into the repository

OARS software development starts

mike — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:34:52 +0000

On Monday 28th April the software development part of the OARS project started. On Monday and Tuesday 28/29 April we had ‘Kick-off’ meetings with developers from our consultants (Aptivate). The two days were extremely productive, during which we discussed the schedule for for deliverables and testing, access to computing facilities and access to the repository at Oxford University Research Archive.

Basically increasing functionality will be delivered to the OARS Team on roughly a 2-weekly cycle over the next 12 weeks. The OARS team will test the delivery, advise on functionality issues and problems found, then set the priorities / deliverables for the following 2 weeks, and so on.

There will be an evaluation of the development process itself, with a view to highlighting the challenges we face and hopefully to provide lessons for future projects. This is a very important part of this phase of the project and will be managed by our evaluation consultant Jan Rae.

OARS project team consults with Higher Education community

sean — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:57:49 +0000

On the 31 March 2008, the OARS project team hosted a meeting bringing together representatives of institutions from its network of advisors from the higher education (HE) sector in the UK.

The Forced Migration Online (FMO) team established a network of advisors for the OARS project in November 2007. It is comprised of researchers and academics from higher education (HE) institutions, as well as some students. We asked network members to complete a brief questionnaire about their usage, opinions and expectations of FMO. This information is being used to inform the team in its work to make the enhancements to FMO through the OARS project. The results of this user survey will be made available in the coming weeks.

At the meeting held in March in Oxford, discussions centred around how participants (as well as their colleagues and students) currently use FMO, and what they find particularly useful and not-so useful. This led onto a discussion about how FMO might be improved to better facilitate colleagues in their work. Among other things, it was agreed that the Web Catalogue could probably be scrapped as an independent tool and its contents largely be reallocated elsewhere on FMO; a catalogue of academic and training courses on FMO would be a useful tool; and we should collaborate in attempting to develop a process whereby copyright is sought to include in the FMO repository all relevant Masters and doctoral theses emanating from HE institutions in the UK. It was also agreed that staff or students from these institutions might contribute to FMO’s collection of research guides and resource summaries.

A summary of these discussions will be circulated among network members before being made public on the OARS website. The meeting held in March was held in parallel with a meeting of the OARS Steering Committee, where technical issues of the OARS project development were discussed at length.

The Shock of the Old 7 - Web 2.0 and the Connected Future Conference

john — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:52:25 +0000

First attempt at liveblogging at the Shock of the Old 7 Conference. The venue is the Said Business School, University of Oxford (just a few minutes walk from the office). The conference is looking at the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education, quite a few of the presentations have focussed on JISC funded projects. Currently in a very informative and actually quite entertaining talk (and the final one of the day), Alan Bell the Records Manager and Information Compliance Officer at the University of Dundee is talking about ‘Web 2.0 and the risk to the ‘information resource‘. Overall, I think this conference has been very useful in thinking about how the OARS repository and the content stored within it will fit into the wider Internet and Web 2.0.

Development - update

mike — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:21:55 +0000

We are now finalising the repository development plans with our chosen developers Aptivate (http://www.aptivate.org), and work will commence in March. Aptivate will be working closely with our colleagues at the Oxford University Research Archive (http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/access/) who will host the Fedora infrastructure for our new repository.

In December 2007 we wrote to all university departments and centres in the UK that conduct research, teaching and/or dissemination activities in issues related to migration, conflict, development and human rights, and they were asked to complete a questionnaire as a way to kick-off this consultation process. Questionnaires have now been returned and are being analysed.