DSpace User Group 2007, Rome

Last week was the annual DSpace User Group Meeting, this year held in Rome, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

http://www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=11

These guys have an interest in DSpace for sharing knowledge throught the developing world, and kindly offered to run the user group this year. The FAO building is set at the east end of the incredible Circus Maximus, and just 5 minutes up the road from the Colosseum. And we could see all of this from the 8th floor terrace cafe where lunch and coffee was served every day.

The presentations for this event are mostly available online, at:

http://www.aepic.it/conf/program.php?cf=11

If there are presenters reading this whose papers are not yet online, please contact the conference organisers so they can make it available.

I felt that this year the balance between technical and non-technical presentations was struck particularly well. While there were streams of non-technical presentations, there were highly technical tracks for the developers among us to attend. Specifically worth a mention was Scott Phillips' Introduction to Manakin, which is something we will all need to get to grips with in the long run, and something which I knew woefully little about. After that session, though, I'm confident about getting stuck in.

The quality of the work going on with DSpace is definitely reaching a high degree of maturity, with increasingly many developments leveraging the latest features of DSpace in new and innovative ways. For me this suggests that our platform has approached a critical point where we must, as a community, find a way to make these developments easier to share and easier to adopt and easier to write.

So thanks from me to the organisers. It was great to see the usual suspects again, but equally great was it to put faces to names from the mailing lists and IRC. See you all next year!

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.

EThOSnet Kick-Off

On Tuesday of this week the EThOSnet Project Board met for the first time to kick off this significant new project. For background, this project is the successor to the EThOS project, which in turn grew out of the Scottish projects: Theses Alive at Edinburgh, DAEDALUS at Glasgow, and Electronic Theses at the Robert Gordon University.

The aim of EThOSnet is to take the work done under EThOS and bring it up to a point where UK institutions can actually start to become early adopters, to start to digitise the back-catalogue of print theses in the UK, investigate technology for the current and the future incarnations of the system, and to basically kick-start a genuinely viable service for deposit and dissemination of UK theses.

At this stage, the project does not have a Project Manager, which is causing minor hold-ups initially, but Project Director, and Director of Library Services Clare Jenkins of Imperial College Library has stepped in to hold things together until one is appointed (we are expecting to hear very soon). In the interim, the Project Board has also been put in place to check that all the 7 Work Packages have the things they need to get going.

Of these 7 workpackages, the first and last are concerned with project management and exit strategy, and the meat of the project will take place in packages 2 - 6. Details of these work packages are available in the project proposal, which will hopefully be available on the JISC website soon.

A quick summary, then, of some of the changes and more concrete decisions that we made during the meeting:

• We have set a pleasingly high target of 20,000 digitised theses and 3,000 born-digital theses by the end of the project. This will be sourced from the many institutions who have already expressed an interest in adopting the service, before the project is even going!


• The first port of call for the technology is to smooth the process of the existing software tools for repository users. I would hope to have something which works well for DSpace available quickly, and general enough to be part of the main distribution. EPrints is already fully compliant, and Fedora has representitives from the University of Hull looking after it.


• Communications will be done primarily through a soon-to-exist project wiki, and it is hoped that the existing E-Theses UK list will be used more heavily than it is already. Imperial College has agreed to host the existing ethos website, the wiki, and potentially the toolkit if necessary (currently hosted at RGU).


• Toolkit development will be ongoing, with work being done on it within a wiki, but with the option to move to some XML format for the final product

This is a very big project, and I can't possibly represent everything that came out of Tuesday's meeting here. In the near future expect to see links to the project wiki appear and more information to come out.

vive la revolucion

Today I'm happy to see a major hardward manufacturer teaming up with a major Linux distro, and doing so in a nice visible place like the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6610901.stm

I've been a Linux user for some years now, but when I first made the switch from the competition it was still a very difficult thing to do, even as a professional computer geek. Ubuntu seems pretty good, and hopefully it will help encourage non-expert users to have it installed before they even get their laptop home.

Ridiculously well integrated IDE and Application

This week I have been playing around a lot with Eclipse, which is an Integrated Development Environment platform, geared principally (but by no means exclusively) towards Java development. I've been an Eclipse user for some time, but principally for its ability to mediate nicely with my version control server (SubVersion), and the pleasantness of using the graphical editing tools. I was aware, though, of the huge potential it has for rapid application development, and finally got around to putting some time aside to investigate.

The product of my attempts have been documented here, on the DSpace wiki:

HOWTO Integrate DSpace with Eclipse and Tomcat

Along the way I found all sorts of goodies, like the Database Explorer tools, that allow me to execute SQL directly from files open in the editor onto my running database, and a variety of graphical and semi-graphical tools for editing my files. The full power of the source code analysis for a properly set-up project is staggering, as are the refactoring tools.

The real kicker, though, the feature that makes this effort all worthwhile is that I can now run DSpace (or any other web application) from within Eclipse. It looks after controlling Tomcat, and ties in the Tomcat debugger to Eclipse, so that (and this is the really cool bit) I can set points in my application source for execution to halt while I examine the state of the machine. So, I load a web page, which invokes code within which I have set "breakpoints", and Eclipse immediately takes over, opens up a debugging environment, and allows me to step through the code, line by line if I like, examining the in-memory objects all the way. Awesome. In the original sense of the word.

I've seen other people use similar functionality (for example in Visual Studio), so I'm glad I've replicated it in Eclipse. Of course, now I'll discover that everyone has been doing this for years, and I'm the last to catch on. But if I'm not the last to catch on, or at least to figure out how to get DSpace working in this environment (non-trivial) then I strongly encourage you to give this a go.

Google Summer of Code Go-Ahead

At the start of last week Google announced the students who had been funded under this year's Summer of Code project. DSpace is pleased to be able to say that it has 5 students being funded to do development for the platform over the next 3 to 4 months. The details of the projects are as follows:


DSpace Content Integrity Service
- Student: Jiahui Wang
- Mentor: Jim Rutherford
- Mentor Backup: Scott Phillips


Portable citations: moving citations between DSpace and bibliographic software managers
- Student: Jodi Schneider
- Mentor: Stuart Lewis
- Mentor Backups: Claudia Jurgen, Christophe Dupriez


DSpace Versioning
- Student: Robert Graham
- Mentor: Robert Tansley
- Mentor Backups: Mark Diggory + Scott Phillips


Statistics
- Student: Federico Paparoni
- Mentor: Richard Jones
- Mentor Backup: Stuart Lewis


Visualization Artifacts for Manakin/DSpace
- Student: Brian Eoff
- Mentor: Scott Phillips
- Mentor Backup: Mark Diggory

An overview of DSpace involvement is available here:

http://code.google.com/soc/dspace/about.html

We are currently involved in the preliminary discussions with the students over their work, and design and development will start in earnest during May. Watch this space for updates.

OAI-5 Presentations

Presentations from OAI-5 are now available online, as well as videos of some of the presentations:

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=5710