my my where did the summer go

OK, ok, it's been a long long time since I updated. Did I say at the beginning that this was an experiment in seeing if I was capable of maintaining a blog? If I didn't I should have done.

But there's a good reason that I've not updated for a while. That is, that I've been working flat out on the Imperial College Digital Repository: Spir@l, and am pleased to finally announce in a quiet way that we are officially LIVE:

http://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/

On the outside it doesn't look too serious. A standard looking DSpace, I hear you say, with an Imperial College site template on it. And you'd be right. But only about the tip of the ice-berg.

Without wishing to blow my own trumpet (modesty is the third or fourth best thing about me), please do check out the article which I co-wrote with my good colleague Fereshteh Afshari:

http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/493

And you may also be interested in my presentation at the recent DSpace User Group Meeting in Rome 2007 (more on that later, maybe):

http://www.aepic.it/conf/viewabstract.php?id=200&cf=11

I could probably be persueded to write a little here about how it works; maybe you'll even get snippets from the monolithic technical documentation that I'm in the middle of writing.

Oh, and there's more news, but now I've got your attention again you have to wait for the next installment.

JISC Capital Circular 4/06 outcomes

Today has been an exciting day. Projects that I am potentially involved in which have so far been announced as funded under the last round of JISC bids from November last year are as follows:

SWORD - Repository Deposit API development work in association with Aberystwyth, Southampton, Hull, Cambridge, Birkbeck (University of London), National Library of Wales, and Intralect, as a DSpace advisor and developer

EThOSnet - A major e-theses project following on from the great work of the recently completed EThOS project. Imperial is pleased to be leading this project, with partners from the following institutions: Leicester, Warwick, the British Library, Nottingham, Hull, Glasgow, Birmingham, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Southampton, Cranfield, Robert Gordon University, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Loughborough, National Library of Wales, and Exeter. What a team, and what a great looking project. My role is yet to be formalised, but hopefully somewhere in the area of the software development ;)

The future for repositories at Imperial looks bright. Today we completed our first UAT for our upcoming IR service "Spir@l", and we are due, over the course of this year to go live with that service, our own internal e-theses management system, and now the outcomes of these two projects will no doubt play a role in shaping our repository environment, which I hope will rapidly become one to be pround of.