[Web4lib] combining dspace, etd-db, and digitool

[Eric Lease Morgan]

If you plan on attending ECDL 2006 (or even if you haven't made up  
your mind yet), consider signing up the half-day tutorial called  
"Creating a more full-featured institutional repository: Combining  
DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool". For more information, see the URL and  
details, below:

   http://www.ecdl2006.org/tutorial6.jsp

BTW, ECDL is a great conference. It a wonderful place to catch-up on  
and learn more about the most recent advancements in the development  
of digital libraries. 'Well worth the time.


   * Title - Creating a more full-featured institutional repository:  
Combining DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool.

   * Abstract - DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool are all well-respected  
systems designed to facilitate aspects of an institutional  
repository. Each have their own particular strengths and weaknesses,  
but none of them are perfect. By exploiting the OAI data repository  
features of each system the developer is able to amalgamate their  
content, automatically classify it, cache it centrally, and provide  
sets of enhanced services against the cache. Building on the  
strengths of each system developers are able to provide a more full- 
featured institutional repository system. The primary goal of this  
tutorial is to outline the benefits and drawbacks of such an  
implementation, demonstrate how it has been implemented at the  
University of Notre Dame, and discuss how it can be implemented with  
other software components. By the end of the tutorial participants  
will be able to: highlight the problems IR systems are expected to  
solve, be able to compare and contrast three IR systems, address meta- 
data issues regarding the organization of information in IR systems,  
state the advantages of amalgamating IR content into a centralized  
cache, discuss ways these same ideas can be implemented with a  
variety of software.

   * Duration - Half day

   * Experience level - Intermediate

   * Outline - The problems institutional repositories are trying to  
solve - What is an institutional repository, and what problems is it  
intended to solve? What qualities characterize successful  
institutional repository implementations? The group answers to these  
questions become the benchmarks for evaluating the success of  
repositories.

Functional overview of DSpace, ETD-db, and DigiTool - Each of these  
applications have strengths and weaknesses. This section will  
enumerate them and in the process compare and contrast the applications.

Developing an over-arching information architecture - In order to  
create a synergistic whole from the three repository applications it  
is necessary to apply aspects of information architecture to the  
systems - aspects of users, context, and content. This section will  
focus on the content issues and elaborate upon methods of logically  
organizing it using a faceted classification system.

Using OAI to harvest content and cache it centrally - At first, this  
seems like the easy part. Point your harvester at the repository and  
save the output locally. After a bit of examination, issues regarding  
homogeneity and variations in OAI compliance come into play and  
adjustments need to be made. This section describes some ways to  
address these issues.

Creating user-centered services against the cache - This is the fun  
part. Here we provide services against the cache. Searching (via  
SRU). Browsing. What's new? services. Syndicating content to campus  
portals. Syndicating content via RSS. Creating dynamically generated  
Web pages listing author publications. Calculating Google page rank.  
Each of these things will be described in more detail.

Discussion of other ways the same things could be implemented - The  
implementation of Notre Dame uses specific tools to accomplish its  
goal. By exploiting protocols, not specific applications, these tools  
could easily be changed out for other tools. This section discusses  
these issues and provides an opportunity for participants to  
brainstorm other ways these techniques could be employed in their  
institution.

   * Biographical sketch - Eric Lease Morgan is the Head of the  
Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the  
University Libraries of Notre Dame. He considers himself to be a  
librarian first and a computer user second. His professional goal is  
to discover new ways to use computers to provide better library  
service. Some of his more well-known investigations and  
implementations include MyLibrary and the Alex Catalogue of  
Electronic Texts. An advocate for open source software and open  
access publishing, Morgan has been freely distributing his software  
and publications for years before the terms "open source" and "open  
access" were coined. Morgan also hosts his own Internet domain,  
infomotions.com.


--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame