RSP DSpace training events

Chris Yates, an RSP staff member based at Aber, is organising some DSpace training days in Birmingham. The first of these is aimed at repository managers and will take place on June 2nd. There are still some places left, so if you'd like to get some practical and hands on experience with DSpace in a tailored and targeted workshop, please do register as soon as you can!

Programme:
2. Introduction to DSpace
- What it is.
- Basic architectural overview.
3. Configuration & Customisation (By the repository administrator)
- Communities & Collections
- Workflows & Metadata Implementation
- Licenses
- User Management
4. Running DSpace as an Administrator
- Submitting Items
- Harvesting
- Persistent Identifiers (The handle)
5. Other Configuration & Customisation that you may require (By the technical staff)
- Multilingualism
- RSS Feeds/Emails/Notifications/Subscriptions.
- Submission Interfaces
- Populating other resources using the repository.
- Alternative deposit mechanisms (SWORD etc).
6. Statistics
- DSpace Stats
- Google Analytics

Chris and the team at Aber are very experienced with DSpace and great at explaining technical issues to a non-technical audience, as well as techies. Previous DSpace sessions have been a resounding success and this one should be no different.

Register for DSpace Repository Administrators Training Day

(I hear the venue is pretty good too)

DCC Call for Papers/Posters/Demos

The next annual DCC conference will be held in Edinburgh in December. The call for papers, posters and demos was issued recently on the DCC website. This is a great opportunity to showcase your work and I'd encourage any project whose activities fall within the broad themes of the project to submit a contribution. The submission deadline (full papers) is July 25th.

The conference will be a great opportunity to learn more about what's happening in terms of state-of-the-art in repository curation and sustainability, amongst other things, so I hope we'll see some of you there regardless of whether you're a speaker/exhibitor or not!

New external events

Thanks to David Flanders for flagging up a few more forthcoming events that I have just added to the events listing in the nav bar.

1. The CRIG/DRY workshop. CRIG (Common Repositories Interfaces Group) are running a DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Workshop and Barcamp in Bath on June 6th. This event will focus on remote services which repository adminstrators can exploit to improve the quality of the metadata held in their systems,bringing local experts (the people running institutional systems) who understand their users' needs, together with the domain experts (the people who can offer services based on expertise). It offers be a day of learning, sharing, demonstrating, and perhaps even some coding. See the DigiRep wiki for more information.

2. The brand new Fringe festival, Edinburgh Repository Fringe, will take place over the summer. The website has the following information:

"The Repository Fringe is being run on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe model - anyone is allowed to come along and put on a show! In our case "a show" is likely to be a discussion about an emerging issue, or a group attempt to come to some concensus about solving a problem, or a co-ordinated demonstration of some new ideas.

The event will be held in the Playfair Library in Edinburgh. The building consists of a main hall (pictured left) with lots of breakout spaces to facilitate lots of concurrent discussions and working groups. In preparation for the fringe, delegates will post their proposals for discussions and activities to the Wiki, discuss them through the Mailing List and network through the Crowdvine site"

Training materials on the RSP website

Materials from past RSP training events are available from the past events pages on the RSP website. These are very handy if you missed a particular training session, or just want to take a look and see what all the fuss is about.

Events have focussed on or featured sessions exploring, for example, shared services for repositories, metadata, preservation & curation, and legal issues such as copyright and IPR. More events are in planning and will be flagged up here when details become available.

Determining costs of archiving data in IRs

A new report from JISC investigates the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data and developed guidance for HEFCE and institutions on these issues.

The report, 'Keeping Research Data Safe', provides an essential methodological foundation on research data costs and will assist HEIs and funding bodies wishing to establish strategies and TRAC costings for longterm data management and archiving. The study provides a framework and guidance for determining costs consisting of:

• A list of key cost variables and potential units of record;
• An activity model divided into pre-archive, archive, and support services;
• A resources template including major cost categories in TRAC, divided into the major phases from the activity model and by duration of activity.

The report focus is on research data, though it is likely that some aspects of the guidance will also be relevant to repositories containing other materials. If you read the report and have any ideas about this, please do post them here!

RSP 2008 Summer School

Applications are now being taken for a place on the 2008 RSP Summer School, to be held in the delightful venue of Thornton Manor in the Wirral.

The RSP Summer School is an intensive three day residential course which aims to deliver a comprehensive programme to address the practical challenges and solutions to effective repository development. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in wide-ranging discussions about repositories and gain hands-on experience with a range of interactive seminars, practical workshops, lectures and panel sessions delivered by a range of expert practitioners.

This year's programme highlights include:

• Metadata & Interoperability
• Preservation
• Advocacy
• Legal issues
• Repository statistics

Further information is available from the RSP website. A limited number of places are available, but don't delay in applying - the deadline for applications is Monday May 26th.

The SUETr training programme

The SUETr training programme is currently under development. Notification of events and training opportunities will be posted here as and when the information becomes available. We expect the training programme will be developed by early June, and training opportunities to commence shortly afterwards.

These training opportunities will be developed and available primarily to staff currently working on SUE projects. A number of other initiatives provide training that is accessible to a wider audience, including the Repositories Support Project, a major JISC initiative to support the development and growth of the UK repositories network.

SUETr - a brief introduction

The SUETR project is developing a training programme for JISC funded 'Start up and Enhancement' (so-called SUE) projects. These projects are exploring a wide range of issues around the provision of repositories to support research, learning and teaching, and other activities. SUETR is developing and providing information about training that will help these projects and repositories to be successful and sustainable into the future.

This blog will be used to disseminate information about SUETR training opportunities and related project information, to SUE projects and anyone else who wants to read about them. We will also post information about new reports or developments in repositories that may impact on a given aspects of a repository's sustainability or success.

At some point, hopefully soon, I will figure out how to add an RSS feed...