lib-ir: IRG Meeting April 11, 2005: Minutes

[Carol Hixson <chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

Below are my notes from the IRG meeting on Monday
the 11th. Please send corrections or additions to
the list-- Carol
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Institutional Repository Group Meeting
April 11, 2005

Updates:

Corey reported that DSpace 1.2.2 is out in beta2. It consists
mostly of bug fixes, including Corey's contribution to fixing the
indexing problem. It also includes a submission form that is
customizable on a collection by collection basis. Corey plans to
upgrade IRtest with this release and test it out.

Corey reported on discussions that he and Carol have been
having regarding usage statistics for Scholars' Bank. He brought
along some examples of the kinds of statistics we're able to get.
Some information is available by using Webalizer to analyze the site;
other statistics are available from the server logs. There is some
interesting information available but the challenge is in making this
available to the public without a lot of extra effort. The University
of Rochester has usage information available on its DSpace
site but Corey's investigation of how they accomplished that
revealed that they had done a lot of customization of the source
code. He's going to continue to explore some alternatives.

Barbara reported that the next All Reference meeting on April
28 will focus on a discussion of scholarly communication
in general and Scholars' Bank in particular. Carol will be attending
that meeting to take part in the discussion.

Corey reported on the fact that the SSL certificate for Scholars' Bank
is expiring and he and Travis will be installing the new certificate.

Corey noted that Cyril Oberlander and Sherry Buchanan from PSU
did a presentation at OLA where they used Scholars' Bank as
one of a few examples they provide for institutional repositories.

Advisory Board:

The group discussed whether now was the time to pursue getting
an advisory board from the campus for Scholars' Bank. There
was discussion about the purpose of such a group, as well as
some possible group members. Faculty, campus communications
people, and graduate students were seen as appropriate groups to
have represented. Defining the mission statement for the group
will be key. General consensus was that we wanted to have such
a group to lend the archive greater legitimacy in the minds of the
campus and to use them as a sounding board for new policies, to
review new pages or supporting documentation, and to help
review the usability of the archive. It was felt that they would only
need to meet 1-3 times a year and could provide feedback to
specific questions at other times via email. Carol will draft a
mission statement for an advisory group so that IRG can review
it and decide on the best way to proceed.

Graduate student collection:

Carol reported that she had been contacted by a graduate student
about getting set up in Scholars' Bank and wanted the group's
reaction. After some discussion, it was decided that such a collection
was appropriate, with the following parameters:

1) the collection would be for all graduate students; there would
not be individual pages set up under an individual's name (different
from what we will do for faculty)
2) students must submit their own material; MDLS will not submit
graduate student work
3) submissions will be reviewed by Carol to make sure that they
are appropriate to the archive
4) graduate students could continue to submit work to Scholars'
Bank after leaving the UO, as long as the content was appropriate

It was decided that we needed to outline for graduate students what
type of content was appropriate. It was suggested that we look at
the computing center's site on Acceptable Use of Computing Resources
as a starting point:
http://cc.uoregon.edu/policy/acceptable_use.html

Carol will work on developing some guidelines for IRG to review.

ETDs:

Carol reported on work that she has been doing, gathering information
from other DSpace sites about their ability to collect ETDs in their
DSpace archives. She has collected a fair number and received
some useful suggestions on how to overcome campus fears
and objections. She will be compiling these and begin preparing
for further discussions with the Grad School.

Site overhaul:

Carol reported that Deb feels strongly about retaining the library's
banner throughout Scholars' Bank. Corey noted his preference for
moving the supporting web pages to the Scholars' Bank directory
and off of libweb. The group agreed this was desirable. Carol
and Corey will work on making this transition as time permits. It
will require updating quite a few links.