EXPLORER EMBEDDING EXISTING & PROPRIETARY

LEARNING IN AN OPEN-SOURCE REPOSITORY TO EVOLVE NEW

RESOURCES

DORA DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY

RESEARCH ARCHIVE

• Dspace

• 2004 - Established

• 2007 - Fully operational service

• 2008 - Full time Repository Officer

• Contains 4,500 records (mostly metadata only)

ISSUES

• Low self depositing level

• Least number of submissions by Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities

• Limited integration with other DMU research processes and systems

EXPLORER

• EXPLORER strand one:

• Development and implementation of workflows and processes to enhance and embed DORA within the DMU research environment

• Focus groups and questionnaires

• Embed and Enrich projects

EXPLORER

• EXPLORER strand two:

• Adaptation and integration of tools to enlarge DORA and enable the deposit of a wider variety of outputs in line with REF2014.

• Kultur, AIR, MePrints and IRRA

SURVEY AND FOCUS GROUPS

• Conducted three focus groups

• Carried out an online survey

• 81 respondents (nearly twice as many as expected)

• Useful and imformative results

SURVEY RESULTS

• Most respondents knew about DORA• The majority of output types produced by researchers

were text based as expected• Non-text outputs types were very varied• Key services that would encourage usage would be

statistics and the reuse of data held in DORA• Most respondents would be happy to submit a full

text version• Suggested improvements including the look of

DORA, search processes and the ability to amend records

ACTIONS• Use the results of the survey and focus groups along with the

findings of the Enrich and Embed projects.

• Creation of an updated process map

• New single submission process

• Improved advocacy plan including training going beyond the project period

• Technical work has been reviewed in light of the survey results

TECHNICAL WORK• Key need identified: improved display of non-text items

• Kultur plug-in provides ideal functionality but cannot be directly imported into Dspace

• Currently using existing code from the Dspace community to enable Kultur like functionality within DORA.

• Video is now working – currently looking at other (simpler) media types

NEW UNIVERSITY WEBSITE

• DORA is to be integrated further with the new university website – a requirement confirmed by the survey results

• It is intended that DORA will feed outputs to new individual researcher profiles

• Currently looking at the functionality from the AIR, IRRA and Meprints projects which may be appropriate to facilitate this.

DORA AND THE REF

• Testing has shown the CERIF4REF plugin works with DORA.

• Need to review what is pulled out using this tool – this may require some inputs from IRRA.

• Further testing and modification of metadata may be required.

SUMMARY

• Survey was very successful and has provided much useful information

• Technical work has proved to be more complicated than expected but will provide useful functionality to all Dspace users on completion

• Integration work is underway with the development of new process and documentation

CONTACT

• Alan Cope (Repository Officer) acope@dmu.ac.uk

• Elizabeth Lunt (Project Manager) elunt@dmu.ac.uk

• www.dora.dmu.ac.uk• http://explorer.our.dmu.ac.uk/ project blog