A trip down to Oxford awaits David and Iain at the end of May. They will be attending two meetings during the visit. The first is with representatives from Oxford University and the second may prove to be very exciting indeed.

It is with a company from Virginia named Visionary Technology in Library Solutions (VTLS) who are currently working with both Google and the University of Oxford libraries. VTLS are supplying the University of Oxford with software for the use of Fedora in a library context and in turn the Oxford library is being given a virtual makeover with the help of books digitised by Google. The partnership between Oxford and Google is of such considerable significance that Google now have offices based on the Oxford University campus.

The advent of World Book Day on March 1st of this year provided the perfect opportunity for VTLS, Oxford and Google to provide an example of the kind of work they have been carrying out. To celebrate the day the Bodleian Library displayed original letters as well as manuscripts and special illustrated editions of the classic children’s book ‘The Wind in the Willows’. However for those that couldn’t physically visit the manuscripts it was and is still possible to explore the classic story through Google Book Search where the first 1908 edition and other in-print versions have been digitised and are available to look at online.

This partnership also opens up significant possibilities for the work that the Spoken Word is involved in. Our user licence agreement with the BBC would mean that the manuscripts of work could be supplemented with rich audio and video resources. In the case of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ a user could read the manuscript and then watch or listen to various BBC adaptations ensuring that the following of the adventures of Mr Toad, Ratty and Mole become all the more vivid for future generations.

Photo Courtesy of: ConnieG

We are currently recruiting for a Digital Repository Developer. Please see the information below for more details and how to apply for this exciting position!

Digital Repository Developer
Spoken Word Services - Saltire Centre

SALARY SCALE: up to £25,070 per annum (currently under job evaluation review)

Spoken Word Services is based in the Library within the multi-award winning Saltire Centre. The team maintain and develop a repository of several hundred hours of digital audio and video resources for the educational community. These resources are sourced primarily, though not exclusively, from the BBC Television and Radio Archives.

The Digital Repository Developer will build on existing technical infrastructure, to develop a Fedora-based digital object repository and associated tools, and migrate content from the existing MySQL/PHP repository. The central task of the Developer will be to manage and develop the repository, containing digital images, text, audio, video, metadata and other content. The Developer will also be expected to adapt and develop a set of tools and services to support ingestion, search and discovery, digital object delivery and presentation, annotation and preservation.

Candidates should have an undergraduate degree or equivalent experience, and experience in the development of complex software systems, including work in Java. The successful candidate will be self-motivated, able to demonstrate a logical approach to problem solving and a keen, analytical mind. As the post operates as part of a team candidates must demonstrate good communication skills and the potential to work within a cross-disciplinary group.

To discuss this job informally please contact Iain Wallace on 0141 273 1901.

Please note that CVs will not be accepted for this post. ‘Glasgow Caledonian University is committed to being an equal opportunities employer’. Please note applicants are strongly encouraged to apply online - to do so visit www.caledonian.ac.uk/jobs/. However, if you do not have access to our website please call 0141 331 8864.

BBC News has published an article by Internet law professor Michael Geist which takes a look at a fundamental shift in the way research journals become available to the public.

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication. That requirement - called an open access principle - would leverage widespread internet connectivity with low-cost electronic publication to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe.

The article gives a fair introduction to Open Access and Institutional Repositories….such exposure to a large audience can only be a good thing! The University of Southampton and Brunel University School of Information Systems are mentioned as the only two UK universities to establish both a repository and a policy requesting that faculty submit electronic copies of all publications.

Read the full article here.

On Friday 13th April after five hours travelling by train David, Iain and Graeme of Spoken Word arrived in Hull for the first meeting of the REMAP project.

The REMAP project is based at the University of Hull and its’ aim is to ‘investigate the use of a digital repository to support the embedding of records management and digital preservation within the context of a UK Higher Education institution’.

REMAP is a follow on from the RepoMMan Project which stands for the Repository Metadata and Management project. Repoman aimed to develop a tool that would interact with a Fedora based repository system.

The project has been funded by JISC under the latest JISC capital programme. The capital programme is additional funding from JISC of £81 million over three years to enhance the network infrastructure (SuperJANET 5), to digitise key resources for the academic community, and to support the development of e-learning; e-infrastructure; virtual research environments; users and innovation; and repositories and preservation.

The REMAP project is being led by ESIG (e-Services Integration Group) at the University of Hull. ESIG are also a part of our recently started EDINA led VSM portal project.

Although tired form the long journey David, Iain and Graeme definitely found Hull to have been a rewarding experience.

Photo Courtesy of: Helen K.

David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

A conference attendee has set up this del.icio.us page with tags linking to content discussed and presented at the Open Repositories Conference in Texas. There is a particularly interesting tag leading to an article by Paul Miller, ‘The Technology Evangelist’, on library 2.0. The del.icio.us page can be found by clicking here.

The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories takes place in Southampton between the 1st - 4th April 2008. The Conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a long history of research into the technological aspects of open repositories. The conference will provide focused workshops and tutorials and will also use general conference sessions as a platform to debate and bring together all the issues raised over the four days.

As part of the SHERPA Plus project SHERPA is holding a series of half day roadshow events across the UK. In this half day session speakers from the SHERPA organisation will explore various key issues surrounding Open Access, institutional repositories, scholarly publication and authors’ rights.

As well as sharing experiences garnered from their various projects and extensive network of partner institutions, there will be an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in the SHERPA suite of supporting websites including OpenDOAR, SHERPA/RoMEO and JULIET. There will be an opportunity to engage in informed debate with the team members presents, as well as to share practical advice with other interested parties in attendance.

The full events programme and booking details are available at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/guidance/roadshows.html

The closest event to GCU will most likely be at my alma mater St Andrews University, date TBA

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

Full JISC Press Release

The second international conference on open repositories is being held as I type between the 23rd and 26th January in San Antonio, Texas. The conference aims to encourage discussion and promotion of it’s goal of achieving repository interoperability . The conference is sponsored by many global organisations including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard, which illustrates the importance and scale of the event.

The Spoken Word did have plans to attend the conference but unfortunately these plans were never realised. However, it is my intention to keep up to date with the developments at the conference, including discussion surrounding Fedora, by trawling through various blogs and message boards and to report them here, on the Spoken Word Blog.