Open Repositories Day 1 – DSpace User Group Sessions

Below are summaries of a smattering of the DSpace User Group Sessions I saw today at Open Repositories.

If We Build It Will they Come? – Phillip Davis and Matthew Connolly

Examine usage of Dspace at Cornell and look at why or why not faculty were using it.

Upward trend of growth at Cornell. About 1000 items per year.

To get usage data, looked at server log files. Also used web crawler to look at numbers of items added.

Most collections are slightly populated in Cornell’s DSpace

Only a handful have more than 50-100 items.

What’s active

• Thesis and dissertations
• Senior seminars
• Presentations by Cornell Librarians
• Image collections
• Reports by Librarians at Cornell
• Videos being used by classes

Growth patterns of collections

• Great Plains

• Conference proceedings
• image collections
• archived newsletters

• Senior seminars
• cooperative extension publications

• Thesis and dissertations
• articles

Compared growth patterns of collections at Cornell to other schools with DSpace

Most school’s collections are in the Great Plains or Terraced Gardens model of growth.

What Faculty said?

• Access to literature is a non-issue for faculty
• Using alternatives to institutional repositories

• Have their own websites and like using them better
• Subject based repositories (prefered over IR if available)

• faculty move from school to school and want their stuff all in one place (why subject repositories appeal)

• culture does encourage use of IR
• no awareness of IR

Reasons for using/not using repositories

For

• Permanence
• Timeliness
• Registration of discoveries
• Policies of funding agency

Against

• Redundancy
• Learning curve
• Copyright
• Quality association
• Plagiarism and being scooped
• Reputation and accuracy
• Publishing “original” work

Publication forthcoming in March 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine – (http://hdl.handle.net/1813/5195)

DSpace: Manakin Themes and Applications – Alexsei Maslov

This interesting session discussed the architecture behind Manakin Themes. Manakin is a project of the Digital Initiatives group at Texas A&M, Manakin is an XML UI for DSpace that uses SAX & the Cocoon framework to enable communities and collections to establish a unique look and feel that is distinct from the default installation of DSpace.

Manakin themes are made up of three components: the sitemap, the XSL, and the CSS. The sitemap is the configuration portion of the theme. It references the components the theme needs. The XSL converts the DRI (Digital Repository Interface) schema formatted version of the page to HTML. Lastly, the CSS file styles the output for presentation.

The nice thing about the architecture of Manakin is that it does a nice job of separating presentation from content. It also takes this one step further and let’s you change the information being presented by changing the XSL. There is a simple tutorial on creating themes at the Manakin website as well as a Developer’s Guide which has more extensive information.

Honestly, I can’t do the presentation on Manakin themes justice. This is a very powerful add-on for DSpace and definitely worth checking out if you want to run a single DSpace instance for multiple institutions. I’m really interested in spending some more time looking at Manakin but right now I’ve got other higher priority projects on my plate.

A Manakin Case Study: Visually geospatial metadata & complexity – Adam Mikal and Scott Phillips

This presentation followed up on the presentation about Manakin themes. It discussed a project at Texas A&M which used Manakin to change the user interface for a collection of maps, texts and photographs from the Geologic Atlas of the United States. The problem with the current interface was that couldn’t effectively deal with the complexity of the items in the collection (the original interface is optimized for items with fewer bit streams), facilitate searching the geospatial metadata, nor display search results in context.
The goal of the project was to make the user interface more usable, particularly for browsing and leaverage unique properties of the collection (geospatial metadata). What this means is that the item view, collection view, and search interface needed to be changed.

The item view was changed to display a gallery style set of thumbnails, with lightbox style previews. In addition, the item view included a JPEG as well as the TIFF file. The collection view was altered to contain a map that places every item into geographic context. This is done using Yahoo maps API. Lastly the search was changed to allow searching of geographic location and the results were mapped to geographic context.

Check out the revised interface to the collection and compare it to the original interface. In my opinion, it is a tremendous of improvement and goes to show how an interface can be altered to leaverage the unique metadata within a given collection.