It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.
Purpose: To explain the nature of the 'e-Science' revolution in 21 st century scientific research and its consequences for the library community. Design/methodology/approach: The concepts of e-Science are illustrated by a discussion of the CombeChem, eBank and SmartTea projects. The issue of open access is then discussed with reference to arXiv, PubMed Central and EPrints. The challenges these trends present to the library community are discussed in the context of the TARDis project and the University of Southampton Research Repository. Findings: Increasingly academics will need to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams distributed across several sites in order to address the next generation of scientific problems. In addition, new highthroughput devices, high resolution surveys and sensor networks will result in an increase in scientific data collected by several orders of magnitude. To analyze, federate and mine this data will require collaboration between scientists and computer scientists; to organize, curate and preserve this data will require collaboration between scientists and librarians. A vital part of the developing research infrastructure will be digital repositories containing both publications and data. Originality/value: The paper provides a synthesis of e-Science concepts, the question of open access to the results of scientific research, and a changing attitude towards academic publishing and communication. The paper offers a new perspective on coming demands on the library and is of special interest to librarians with strategic tasks. Keywords: Digital libraries, Digital storage Paper type: Research paper IntroductionAs Thomas Friedman (2005) eloquently explains in his book 'The World is Flat', the convergence of communication and computing technologies is changing the world of both business and leisure. It would be naïve to think that the academic research community will be immune from these changes. The methodology of research in many fields is changing and we are on the threshold of a new era of data-driven science. In the last few decades computational science has emerged as a new methodology for scientific research on an equal footing with the traditional experimental and theoretical methodologies. Simulation is now used as a standard weapon in the armoury of the scientist to explore domains otherwise inaccessible to the traditional research methodologies -such as the evolution of the early universe, the design of new materials, the exploration of climatology over geological timescales and, of course, the weather forecasts we now take for granted. Its use in industry is becoming even more widespread with computational fluid dynamics and finite
Purpose -To provide an overview of how open access repositories have grown to take a premier place in the e-Research knowledge cycle and offer Southampton's route from project to sustainable institutional repository. Design/methodology/approach -The evolution of institutional repositories and open access is outlined raising questions of multiplicity of repository choice for the researcher. A case study of the University of Southampton Research Repository (e-Prints Soton) route to sustainability is explored with a description of a new project that will contribute to e-Research by linking text and data. Findings -A model for IR sustainability. Originality/value -The TARDis Project was one of the first IRs to achieve central university funding in the UK. Combined with increased visibility and citation, the Research Assessment Exercise route has become the 'hook' on which a number of IRs are basing their business models.
To date many institutional repository (IR) software suppliers have pushed the IR as a digital preservation solution. We argue that the digital preservation of objects in IRs may better be achieved through the use of light-weight, add-on services. We present such a service – PRONOM-ROAR – that generates file format profiles for IRs. This demonstrates the potential of using third- party services to provide preservation expertise to IR managers by making use of existing machine interfaces to IRs.
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