The Repositories Support Project (RSP) and SWORD both with UKOLN staff involvement won special prizes at the recent JISC Repositories and Preservation Meeting 
at the Aston Business School. Delegates were invited to vote for one project each in the Repositories and Preservation Programme that had been most innovative and had most impact. Voting took place either through a ballot box or via twitter. The results were announced during the evening dinner and there was general agreement among delegates that the two projects were deserving of recognition, though indeed all projects listed demonstrated elements of innovation and impact. More information about the meeting is available including links to presentations and videos on YouTube.
A report entitled Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World has been published by JISC. The 50-page report, produced by “an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies” provides a summary of student expectations and gives a series of recommendations on how the Higher Education community should react. Key findings, critical issues, conclusions and recommendations from the report are summarized on the JISC Web site together with the full report.
An accompanying article has been published in the Education Guardian of 12 May 2009 which includes an interview with Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus at UKOLN. Brian describes how many of the characteristics of Web 2.0, such as a culture of openness, reflect well-established approaches which are being taken in the sector. However he also warns of the dangers of seeking to exploit the marketing potential of social networking services, such as Facebook, in more formal teaching and learning activities.
The Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) Project , led by UKOLN, was named most innovative project at the recent JISC Repositories and Preservation conference at Aston Business School, as voted for by delegates from across the whole Programme. SWORD, whose partners include developers of the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and IntraLibrary repository software platforms, plus the University of York and CASIS at the University of Wales, has created a mechanism for repositories to deposit and receive deposits via a standard protocol, thus making it possible for different repositories and other applications to move content around more easily. SWORD has received much interest, and a growing community of active developers is building, including Microsoft whose SWORD plug-in can support deposits direct to a repository from within Microsoft Word. FeedForward, a close second for the award, is also SWORD-compliant. Work on SWORD continues within the UKOLN suite of activities.
UKOLN is currentlyadvertising for a Systems Developer to work on the Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project, part of the Shared Infrastructure Services strand of the JISC Information Environment Programme. Further details can be found on the UKOLN Web site. The closing date for applications is 22 May 2009.
Practitioners in the field of digital repositories familiar with the document Digital Repositories Roadmap: looking forward by Rachel Heery, UKOLN, University of Bath, and her former colleague Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, may be interested by an announcement by JISC of the publication of further work by Rachel Heery. The original Roadmap, published in April 2006, presented a vision for the role of digital repositories in 2010. Given the significant developments in policy, practice and technology relevant to digital repositories that have occurred since the original Roadmap, JISC funded Rachel Heery, Assistant Director and Team Leader for Research and Development at UKOLN until her retirement, to produce a review of the original Roadmap and to extend the vision until 2013. The new review, entitled Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: towards a vision for research and learning in 2013, makes a number of recommendations for consideration by the JISC Executive and goes on to identify milestones of relevance to the wider community that might act as a measure of progress towards the broader vision of enhanced scholarly communication. Full details are available on the new JISC Web site .
Adrian Stevenson of UKOLN and former UKOLN colleague Julie Allinson, University of York, will give a presentation entitled The Cutting Edge of SWORD at the forthcoming 4th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR 2009 ) at the Georgia Institute of Technology over 18-21 May. The presentation will look at how the original SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit)) Project and the current SWORD 2 Project have realised the vision of a standard deposit protocol. The presentation will also consider the future of SWORD and look at recent activity.
Bookings are now open for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2009 to be held at the University of Essex, Colchester Campus, from Tuesday 28 to Thursday 30 July 2009. The event provides an opportunity to attend plenary talks, workshop sessions and Barcamps related to institutional Web Management.
Michael Day and Alex Ball of UKOLN have contributed to a recent discussion of the role of open source software for institutional repositories as part of a special section on Institutional Repositories: The Great Debate published in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (Vol. 53, No. 4 , April/May 2009 ). Paul Jones of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supported the initial motion that Institutional repositories should be built on open source software, arguing passionately that any other choice would be “un-archival and unsustainable in the long run.” In their response, the UKOLN contributors recognised the value of the open source development paradigm, while arguing that the main focus of repositories should be fundamentally pragmatic and primarily focused on the stewardship of institutional content. The special issue includes three other discussion topics, with contributors including Stevan Harnad, Nancy McGovern and Soo Young Rieh.
The JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry Project gave a demonstration of the registry and a suite of associated software tools at the recent 2009 JISC Conference. Slides and screenshots from the presentation are available on the IEMSR Web site.
