Enrich at EuroCRIS meeting in St Andrews

Valerie McCutcheon, Operations Manager in Research & Enterprise, attended the EuroCRIS meeting (11-13 of November) in St Andrews. Valerie gave a short presentation on the University of Glasgow’s Research System and the Enrich project’s key deliverables.

Enlighten’s 1,001 Multi-disciplinary Tweets

EnlightenPapers has now reached 1,001 tweets for on Twitter, that is, 1,001 new records since we added the Twitter code on the 9th of June this year. These include, among others, research in Celtic, English, History, Classics, Life Sciences, Law and the Physical Sciences.

The 1,001st Tweet

Our 1,001st tweet is a self-deposited full text paper from the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow, “Applying formal methods to standard development: the open distributed processing experience” by Professor Richard Sinnott.

The 1,001st Tweet

Twitter Growth and Visualisations

Twitter has provided an interesting gauge for our growth which we hadn’t anticipated when we started using it, for both the cumulative count of new additions and the rise (and fall) of followers. Our followers, currently some 65 [but it has been up to 80+] seem to be fairly volatile, many joining as papers match their interests and then leaving as perhaps they realise the volume of outputs and the broader range of material is not what they want as part of their own Twitter feed.

Twitter visualisation apps like Visible Tweets also provide us with new opportunities to showcase latest additions, and while such apps could be dismissed as party tricks they provide a glimpse of the range of re-use and visualisation options open to us. Visible Tweets also supports Twitter’s range of operators so that views can be refined by date, sender, hashtag and more. For EnlightenPapers we can use the limit from:EnlightenPapers to display only our own tweets rather than any replies which feature us.

A paper displayed in Visible Tweets

Try EnlightenPapers in Visible Tweets – with rotation!

New Records, Bibliographic Services Staff and Training

Records, and freely available full text, have been added from a wide range of subjects over the summer months as we work with departments to add both their retrospective material and new publications.

Enlighten staff in our bibliographic services department have been very busy dealing with this increased influx of material, reviewing records, adding subject headings and checking copyright. They have also been involved in training sessions for departmental staff.

Since the beginning of 2009 we have run training sessions for staff in over 30 different departments about Enlighten, the University’s Publications Policy and the deposit process. These have been a mix of Powerpoint, hands-on work and coffee/tea; a formula which has proven to be a successful way to deliver the training and more importantly to start to build a “deposit community”.

Repository Growth – A Snapshot from ROAR

Using our entry in ROAR, we can track our growth since 2004 when the Enlighten [formerly the Glasgow ePrints Service] was launched as part of the JISC funded DAEDALUS project. We have had steady growth but this is now really starting to accelerate as the training and publications policy start to make themselves felt. We have already added some 2000+ records since the beginning of 2009 and more than half of those have been added in the last 3 months.

Growth of Enlighten since February 2004 from ROARMAP

A visit from the OCRIS Project to talk about Repositories and Library Management Systems

The JISC commissioned OCRIS Project is exploring a wide range of issues, including interoperability between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs).

Key aims

• Survey the extent to which repository content is in scope for institutional library OPACs, and the extent to which it is already recorded there
• Examine the interoperability of OPAC and repository software for the exchange of metadata and other information
• List the various services to institutional managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered respectively by OPACs and repositories.

As part of the project Kathleen Menzies (OCRIS Project Manager) and Duncan Birrell (OCRIS Project Assistant) came to visit us this week. The University of Glasgow along with Cambridge were invited to be case studies for the project.

All about OCRIS (and Glasgow)

Kathleen and Duncan had done their homework and Kathleen delivered an excellent presentation, loaded both with questions about repositories, LMSs and other systems in addition to a well researched view of the range of Glasgow’s repositories (including Enlighten, our Theses Service and even DSpace)  and catalogues. They met with our Head of Cataloguing, Library Systems Co-ordinator and the day to day manager of Enlighten.

It was fascinating for us to get an external perspective of our systems, our records and our perceived practices. The presentation led into a wide range of open ended questions which generated some very stimulating discussion and debate over two days.

These discussions ranged across topics as varied as the technical (standards, support, interoperability, innovation) and the practical (workflows, training, dealing with duplicates). We look forward to seeing their case study and the final project report.

The OCRIS Survey(s)

OCRIS have also sent out a number of surveys to the community and if you have received one of these we strongly urge you to complete it and to contribute to this very valuable study.

Future blog postings will highlight our work with our library management system (Millennium from III) and our repositories. We are testing our OpenURL resolver (WebBridge) with our repository test service and later this year we plan to implement the Encore harvester. The harvester will interfile repository records with more traditional catalogue records in our resource discovery platform Encore (QuickSearch Service).