Project scope and deliverables
This Project aims to establish Institutional Repository Services for the University of Manchester.
To achieve this we have identified five key deliverables:
- D1. Stakeholder engagement and awareness
- D2. An Institutional Repository Services Support Network
- D3. A set of repository technologies
- D4. A governance and sustainability plan
- D5. A functional institutional repository
D1. Stakeholder engagement and awareness
Without the knowledge and cooperation of the university's academic and support communities this Project will fail. As a consequence stakeholder engagement and awareness at all levels within the University is critical.
In basic terms, the University of Manchester Repository Services will offer members of the university a means of storing, managing and disseminating their scholarly works. For the purpose of this project a piece of scholarly work is content that is created by individuals affiliated with the university, has some intrinsic value and an indicator of quality.
Scholarly work may take many forms and the Project will focus on,
- Academic publications: articles (published articles in journals, magazines and newspapers; peer-reviewed, copyright approved post-print articles; pre-print materials related to published peer-reviewed articles), books, book sections (including conference proceedings and abstracts)
- Theses and dissertations: Doctoral theses, Masters theses and dissertations
- Grey literature: patents (published only), technical reports, software, project reports, internet publication, documentation and manuals, working and discussion papers, non peer-reviewed conference and workshop materials (posters and speech/lecture materials)
- Audio visual items: images, shows/exhibitions, performances, compositions, artefacts, talks
We recognise that the above list is not comprehensive. Priorities and practicalities will mean the Project is unlikely to accommodate all possible forms of scholarly work during its lifetime. It is expected that the repository could incorporate other forms of scholarly work, as necessary, with additional post-project development.
Repository Services will support the storage, management and dissemination of both metadata and full-text versions of scholarly work. For a journal article the article’s title, list of authors, date published, journal title, journal volume, journal issue, page numbers and abstract, are examples of metadata. Full-text content could be the peer-reviewed publication as finally appears in the journal (i.e. post-print) or content that was prepared prior to final acceptance of the article by the publisher (i.e. pre-print).
Where the publisher’s copyright or other issues prevent storage of a full-text version of the article in the repository, the metadata can include a web address to an online version that is available from the publisher’s or some other website. This web address is often implemented in the form of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which when selected invariably takes the reader directly to the full-text content of interest.
The Project will facilitate and encourage the assimilation of Repository Services into the life-cycle of authoring and disseminating scholarly works by the University’s academic constituency and/or their representatives; ensure Repository Services fit with real-life and everyday academic practices.
D2. An Institutional Repository Services Support Network
We anticipate that an essential component of this Project is establishing a Repository Services Support Network. This is a community of university staff involved with the management of scholarly works generated by themselves, by academic staff they support or by individuals affiliated with an organisation they work for. Individuals within the network would have clearly identifiable roles and responsibilities and, as such, receive recognition for managing the appropriate intellectual assets.
The Support network will facilitate the submission and management of scholarly works stored in the repository. Academic staff can submit a piece of scholarly work as part of their normal practice of authoring and disseminating their work (i.e. self-archiving). However, we expect many academics will require additional support. A member of administrative staff (e.g. a Research Business Manager, a Personal Assistant) may submit works on behalf of an academic that they directly support or the organisation that they work in (i.e. assisted-archiving). Furthermore, scholarly works may be managed by support staff located in central university functions on behalf of organisations within the university as per some service agreement. These support staff might be individuals of a dedicated repository support team. Working in a coherent and coordinated way these individuals would form the Support Network. The Project will work to agree, plan and establish this Support Network.
The Project will need to define the potential roles and responsibilities that individuals within the Repository Services Support Network may take on. These may involve a range of activities, including fully managing scholarly works on behalf of one or more individual academic staff; assisting self-archiving activities by providing certain key functions e.g. Digital Object Identifier lookup, copyright checks, file conversion; moderating the works submitted by others e.g. to ensure they are suitably catalogued; act as a curator for parts of the repository e.g. provide reports on usage; advertise and advocate the use of the repository e.g. induct new staff. Furthermore, the Project will need to ensure that individuals involved in the Support Network receive the appropriate training, credit and recognition for their contribution towards supporting academics and the organisations intellectual assets.
D3. A set of repository technologies
This will include the technical infrastructure and a set of tools that allow individuals to manage and disseminate scholarly works. These technologies will underpin the activities of the Repository Services Support Network (see deliverable D2) and allow the repository to interoperate with university and external systems.
For the Repository Services to be a success, it is essential that the management of content is done in a way that is familiar and comfortable to individuals, meets their expectations and fits with real-life and everyday academic practices. Furthermore, to be sustainable, these technologies will need to fit with existing University technical architecture.
We envisage that the management tools used by an individual will be distributed. In practice this means we locate the management tools as close to the individuals natural and preferred working environment as is possible. This could be some plug-in software that integrates with their web browser and gives the individual instant access to the repository directly from their computer’s desktop. Additionally, an individual may prefer to work in a well-developed Faculty Intranet. In this case we would work with the Faculty to embed the repository’s management interfaces inside that Intranet. An individual might prefer to work from multiple locations that cross organisational barriers. As such, they may choose to manage their scholarly work via a central point such as the Library website or University portal.
Repository technologies will enable the wide dissemination of scholarly works. For example, technologies will exist to automatically display content simultaneously on a personal website, a School website and/or the University’s main website. Furthermore, the repository will expose content to appropriate internal systems for administrative purposes.
To further disseminate scholarly works and support research council mandates, the repository will make approved content available to external systems, such as Google Scholar, Intute, OAIster and UK PubMedCentral.
Other institutional repositories tend to use one or a combination of three alternative open source technologies. These are ePrints, dSpace and Fedora Commons. Each of these products is used widely, has a significant support community and continues to be developed and enhanced. We expect to leverage the experiences and knowledge of these communities and believe one or a combination of these products will meet the Project’s requirements.
The Project will focus on ePrints, dSpace and/or Fedora Commons as suitable software solutions. Initial work will aim to configure and customise a pilot repository with basic functions (most likely an instance of ePrints).
We anticipate key functions offered by the Repository Services technology will replace those currently supported by Faculty publication databases. Faculties may wish to support added-value or specific functions that are not suitable for a university-wide repository to support. In these cases, the Project will work with Faculty IT teams to agree, plan and implement mechanisms whereby repository and publication databases exchange content, ensuring data integrity and the minimum disruption to end-users.
D4. A governance and sustainability plan
This will include a governance and support model, policies, processes, roles, responsibilities, training requirements and expected on-going financial costs.
We expect that the Institutional Repository Services will need some form of governance, management and/or coordination. For example, the Project will need to define how the set of repository technologies (deliverable D3) will be maintained and developed. Some aspects are likely to be self-governing e.g. self-archiving, while others may embed into existing university structures e.g. IT Services would manage the hardware infrastructure. The Project will develop structures, policies and processes towards sustaining the Institutional Repository Services and recommend the necessary support requirements.
D5. A functional institutional repository
The Project will implement and demonstrate working features of the Repository Services. It will prepopulate the repository with a significant mass of scholarly works created by individuals affiliated with the University of Manchester, including metadata only and full-text records.
The Project will ensure Repository Services meet the requirements and expectations of its users, is intuitive and easy-to-use and enhances the visibility of scholarly works created by individuals affiliated with the University. It will copy and/or move data from existing internal and external systems into the repository according to Project, individual and organisational requirements.