RepoMMan

Digital repositories and personal resource management strategies(PRMS)

Warwick, 27 March 2006

Richard Green

Agenda

(Very) brief outline of RepoMMan

Researcher surveyoverview

interviews

on-line

Results

RepoMMan – an outline

To build a workflow enabled DR Based on Fedora and BPEL, standards compliant

Automated metadata as part of workflow

Surface in portal/VLE/VRE (Sakai)

Informed by user requirements analysis researchers

teachers and learners (to come)

administrators (to come)

The DR grand plan

Researcher survey - overview

How do researchers “do research”? the macro level (idea published paper)

the micro level (interaction with IT)

Established a set of guidelines for interviews and specific questions for on-line version

Researcher survey: interviews

Loose set of guidelines

Let them ramble

Refine answers in line with on-line questions

Fill in gaps

Discuss possibilities for using a repository

etc...

Full verbatim transcript

Researcher survey: on-line

Carefully thought-out questions

Carrot: iPod giveaway

Designed to be quick to complete

‘Card sort’ for complex question(s)

Free text where appropriate

Write to Access database, analysed in Excel

Summary report

Results

The on-line survey (229 responses) essentially confirmed the interview outcomes

Analysed by Hull/Other/All

Interesting insight into personal resource management

Results: interviews

Responses varied:carefully thought out, structured, PRMS; DR

only required for deposit

chaotic PRMS; DR would be useful for organisation from the start

and everything in between

Results: survey

Fleshed out the interview findings with numbersmajority share their works in progress

• with departmental colleagues (92.1%)

• contacts in other UK HE (53.3%)

• HE overseas (30.3%)

mainly by e-mail; majority use ‘track changes’

91.8% have version control of some sort

Results: survey

Work is kept on:

Overlap between first four; implies access from multiple places (DR could help); backup (again DR could help)

2/3 keep on more than one machine of which 50%+ on 3 or 4!

All Hull Other My home desktop computer 48.9% 44.1% 50.6% My office computer's hard drive 58.1% 61.0% 57.1% My laptop computer 48.0% 57.6% 44.7% A university network drive 54.1% 40.7% 58.8% On CD or DVD 28.4% 30.5% 27.6% On floppy disk 11.4% 15.3% 10.0% On a solid-state USB storage device* 28.4% 28.8% 28.2% On an external disk drive* 4.4% 3.4% 4.7% Other 10.0% 8.5% 10.6%

Results: survey

Wide range of file types in use (analysis by card sort) documents (98.3%) presentations (96.1%) images (85.6%) spreadsheet (85.2%) HTML (79%) text/xml (76.4%) statistics (65.9%) archives (62.4%) database (57.6%) audio (39.7%) diagrams/CAD (38.9%) video (38%)

Survey: results

90%+ actively take backups – and normally in more than one place

68.5% claim to structure their files

71.9% keep material in perpetuity

work-in-progress is to be found ‘all-over’; researched material tends to stay in the office

Summary

The idea of a DR is generally welcome

For some it would contribute to PRMS

Very wide range of file types to cope with

DR is potentially a flexible, accessible and safe store for unpublished as well as published material

Project website

www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman