EPrints 2.0.1 Documentation - EPrints History


A Brief History of EPrints

The EPrints project was created by Professor Stephen Harnad.

April 2000
Rob Tansley begins work on EPrints

June 2000
EPrints beta-1 released

Cogprints archive created. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

September 2000
EPrints beta-2 released

November 2000
EPrints 1.0 released, contains OAI 0.2 support

Rob Tansley leaves the EPrints Project

Christopher Gutteridge joins the EPrints Project

January 2001
EPrints 1.1 released, contains OAI 1.0 support

Work begins on EPrints 2

June 2001
Mike Jewell joins EPrints, working primarily on installer software

August 2001
EPrints 2 Alpha-1 (Anchovy) released.

Jan 2002
EPrints 2 Alpha-2 (Pepperoni) released.

Feb 14 2002
EPrints 2.0 (Olive) released.

Apr 17 2002
EPrints 2.0.1 (Tuna) released.


What next?

Nothing is perfect. I wish it was but wishing don't make it so.

I anticipate releasing 2.0.1 to clean up any minor issues. It's not been tested under Solaris, so there may be a few minor tweaks required there.

Sometime later when I've actually caught up with my sleep and stuff I'll start work on version 2.1 which will add some features.

Which features are added next will depend on expedience and what feedback I get. If you really care, let me know at support@eprints.org

Features I'd like to see, in no real order. Some are more realistic than others:

BibTeX Interoperability
Methods for improting bibtex data into the system, and possibly exporting the metadata as bibtex. Possibly other metadata schemes such as RIS.

Subject Editors
Editors which only see (and can edit) items in a given subject or child thereof. Which should make admin on a larger system easier.

Alerts/Subscriptions
Email messaging once a day/week/month if there have been any additions to a predefined search. eg. User bob sets his search to items in the subject area ``Theoretical Physics'' and frequency = ``once a week''. Once a week bob is mailed list of citation and urls for any records which have been added to the archive in the past 7 days which match that search.

Editor Alerts
A combination of the previous two features mentioned. Emailing editors when there are items for them to approve.

Translations
Translations of the phrase file into other languages. Possibly also the citatinos, templates & default static pages.

MathML Handling
Possibly like the latex handling in 2.0. I don't know enough about MathML to decide how to go about this.

Export/Import system
There are already import & export functions but they are a bit rough and ready - I'd like them to be cleaner.

Probity
A mechanism for being able to prove (legally!) that a given record has been in the archive since the date it was added. See http://www.probity.org/ for more info.

Other Default Configurations
The current default is geared at an archive of research papers or pre-prints. It would be nice to have some different initial configurations for example for experimental data.

Fully Documenting the API
That's just really time consuming, but useful.

EPrints v1 Snarfer
This would be a script which would examine an eprints v1 system running on the same machine and build an eprints 2 archive - both configuration and import the data. It won't handle changes to the validation and rendering configuration, that's just too darn hard!

Mirroring
Being able to run the system from two machines eg. USA with a European mirror. One system would be the ``root'' and all editing and user based functions would be done there, but searching, browsing and downloading can be done from a mirror.

``Peer Review''
A more complex approach to the ``buffer'' which allows items to be assigned to reviewers who can add comments, or scores, or what-have-you, before the item is accepted or rejected.

Citation Scanning/Linking
Software to scan the full texts of documents looking for citations and attempt to link them to (a) other items in the archive and (b) use a third party system to link to external items.

People who read this eprint also read...
Something to chart patterns in what abstracts people view and what full texts they view and trying to guess other similar items. I know nothing about this kind of system, so advice is welcome.

How-To's
These may appear on eprints.org rather than part of the package. These will be trails through the (admittedly large) configuration for performing specific tasks like adding a new field.

Super Configurer
A configuration tool which can do really complex stuff like add and remove fields.

User Defined Data Sets
For complex data structures. For example if you want a list of ``incidents'' which have a date, time and description as an item. These will be indefinitely nest-able.

EPrints on a CD
A CD-ROM which can be run on a fresh (RedHat?) Linux install which turns it into an eprints box with apache and mysql correctly configured, etc.

Chat Forums
A slashdot style chat at the bottom of each abstract page. Possibly using a seperate system such as a PHP bulletin board.

Why do the milestones all have silly names?

We wanted to give each stage a name, it makes it easier to talk about. We didn't want a logical order as we are likely to invent sub-milestones between them. We just picked a set of words we liked, and we like pizza.

 EPrints 2.0.1 Documentation - EPrints History