By:
On:
In: Community

Following the EPrints Hack Day which was connected with the last EPrints Uk User Group Meeting, I have been thinking about the nature of community engagement. There is a history of hack days at which members of the technical community have contributed to EPrints, but there has been far less engagement from the larger non-technical side of the community. I wanted to try to change this with an event targeted at all members of the community. Community Contributions The Community Contributions Day was intended to provide a big tent under which all members of the community could pull together on a number of areas ofRead More →

By:
On:
In: Community

In September, the day before the UK User Group Meeting, John Salter and I organised a hack-day for the EPrints developer community. Slides available here. Not only was the EPrints code base moved forwards, but we also got most of the way to building a deployable development environment. Most importantly, it was an opportunity for networking and training for newer members of the community. We planned at the time to run another hack day a couple of months later. So, two months later, Rachel Proudfoot, Valerie McCutcheon and I are organising a Community Contributions day, which will cover a broader set of activities than justRead More →

By:
On:
In: Community

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, with a UKCoRR Members’ Day, the German Language User Group Meeting, an EPrints Hack Day and the EPrints UK User Group meeting all occurring in rapid succession. UKCoRR Members’ Day Hosted at the University of Glasgow, this event was a chance to hear talk on the policy issues that keep repository managers up at night. The quality of the presentations was very high, and I particularly enjoyed hearing Ben Johnson from HEFCE talk about Open Access. I caught up with a few of the repository community’s usual suspects, I presented about the direction EPrints is heading, both fromRead More →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized

EPrints is at ECDL co-running a preservation workshop with the Planets project. We’ve covered a lot of the theory of preservation, and have also done some practical exercises showing the forthcoming EPrints 3.2 features that assist with the preservation agenda. Firstly we had them playing with the new storage layer. This enables repositories to control the locations in which files are stored. We covered how to set storage policies, report on how many files were in each supported storage area (local, cloud, etc), and copy items between locations. The second set of exercises covered preservation file format risk assessment. EPrints 3.2 can keep track ofRead More →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized

Warm and humid Jeju island, the favoured honeymoon destination of South Koreans, is hosting Blogtalk 09. Palm trees, teddy bears, life-sized plastic dinosaurs and luxury hotels all within walking distance of the beach. The view of the sea from the conference venue is somewhat distracting. It’s hard to talk about social networking without hyperbole (the talks have been full of superlatives). It’s certainly important, and the possibilities for EPrints in this area have not yet been fully explored. The Sneep plugin, which enabled commenting on publication records, was very well received, but it is only scratching the surface of what’s possible. I’m here to getRead More →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized

A free day-long EPrints training course is being hosted by JISC’s Repository Support Project in Liverpool on April 22nd, and we’ve decided that as the last one was targeted at Library Staff, we’d tailor this one for the systems staff and developers. In the morning we will introduce some of the API, and show how to use the configuration files to modify the abstract page, set default values on newly created EPrints, change render methods on metadata fields, etc. The afternoon will cover API Scripting and Plugins. We’ll take a more in-depth look at the API. Exercises will cover using scripts to manage the recordsRead More →